Review: How Can We Outlive Our Way of Life?
Posted by Robert Rapier on October 2, 2007 - 10:00am
"Have the guts to consider the silent consequences when standing in front of the next snake-oil humanitarian." -Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Black Swan
I believe our generation faces a sobering choice: Take serious steps to reduce our fossil fuel usage now - and this will undoubtedly entail some amount of hardship - or leave it to our children to face a great deal of hardship. I firmly believe this is our choice, and we must look to solutions that move us in that direction. I also believe that if most people understood that we are pushing a very serious problem onto our children - instead of assuming scientists and engineers will solve the problem - then we would collectively pursue a solution with far greater urgency.
Berkeley Professor Tad Patzek, who has written many articles that are critical of our present attempts to replace fossil fuels with biofuels, has just published a new article in which he also discusses solutions:
How Can We Outlive Our Way of Life? (PDF download)
Many of you know Tad Patzek as the co-author of a number of papers with David Pimentel. If you are pro corn-ethanol, then you have probably been conditioned to discount everything Professor Patzek writes. But even if you disagree with his corn ethanol position, there is still a lot to take away from this paper. Patzek's conclusion on cellulosic ethanol is the same as my own: The status of cellulosic ethanol has been exaggerated and over-hyped, and the solution that we really ought to be pursuing is electric. The abstract of the paper reads:
In this paper I outline the rational, science-based arguments that question current wisdom of replacing fossil plant fuels (coal, oil and natural gas) with fresh plant agrofuels. This 1:1 replacement is absolutely impossible for more than a few years, because of the ways the planet Earth works and maintains life. After these few years, the denuded Earth will be a different planet, hostile to human life. I argue that with the current set of objective constraints a continuous stable solution to human life cannot exist in the near-future, unless we all rapidly implement much more limited ways of using the Earth’s resources, while reducing the global populations of cars, trucks, livestock and, eventually, also humans. To avoid economic and ecological disasters, I recommend to decrease all automotive fuel use in Europe by up to 6 percent per year in 8 years, while switching to the increasingly rechargeable hybrid and all-electric cars, progressively driven by photovoltaic cells. The actual schedule of the rate of decrease should also depend on the exigencies of greenhouse gas abatement. The photovoltaic cell-battery-electric motor system is some 100 times more efficient than major agrofuel systems.
The paper is highly technical, which will turn off many people. But what I enjoy - and I believe is one of my strengths - is to distill technical information and present it so that it is more readily digestible for the layperson. My hope is that this essay succeeds in doing that.
The paper was presented at the 20th Round Table on Sustainable Development of Biofuels in Paris, and therefore contains a lot of Europe-specific discussion and recommendations. The paper covers a lot of ground. Petroleum depletion is discussed, and the business-as-usual scenario is discarded as simply not possible. Cellulosic ethanol is covered, with a close examination of the energy efficiency of Iogen's plant in Ottawa. This result is then compared to the energy efficiency claims of the six proposed demonstration plants in the U.S. The last section compares the potential of photovoltaic cells to biofuels for mitigating our depleting fossil fuel reserves.
Summarizing the Paper
Introduction
In the introduction, Professor Patzek states that world production of conventional petroleum peaked in 2006, and will decline exponentially within a decade. He suggests that heroic measures such as infill drilling, horizontal wells, and enhanced oil recovery methods can stem the decline initially, but this will lead to a steeper decline rate later on. He extrapolates the current per capita use of petroleum with the growth of population in the U.S., and concludes "that the US and the rest of the world soon will be on a head-on collision course." He also states that the U.S. currently uses 33 times as much energy in transportation fuels
than is required to feed the population.
Background
In this section, Professor Patzek outlines five constraints that impact humanity's survival, followed by possible solutions given these constraints. The constraints include exponential population growth, overuse of the earth's resources, and our current political structure in which "more is better." He presents two solutions to our current situation: 1). Go extinct; or 2). Fundamentally and abruptly change. The status quo is not an option, as Patzek believes it will lead to solution (1). I understand that many doubt that (2) is possible, which is why they believe we are doomed. Personally, I believe the most likely solution is a combination of the two. People will go extinct as food and energy become unaffordable (this is happening even now), but there will be pockets of fundamental and abrupt change. Fast recognition and adaptation - both on a personal and governmental level - are going to be very important.
Patzek examines the impact of fossil fuel usage on population growth, and concludes that of the present world population, "4.5 billion people owe their existence to the Haber-Bosch ammonia process and the fossil fuel-driven, fundamentally unstable 'green revolution,' as well as to vaccines and antibiotics."
He comments that too many in society consider themselves more knowledgeable about energy matters than they really are, and this is why we aren't urgently confronting the problem. As his 2nd conclusion of the paper, he writes:
Business as usual will lead to a complete and practically immediate crash of the technically advanced societies and, perhaps, all humanity. This outcome will not be much different from a collapse of an overgrown colony of bacteria on a petri dish when its sugar food runs out and waste products build up.
He concludes this section by pointing out that we have been conditioned to think that technology is almost magic and will solve our problems. He quoted a biofuels expert who suggested "Biotechnology is not subject to the same laws of chemistry and physics as other technologies. In biology anything is possible, and the sky is the limit!”
Efficiency of Cellulosic Ethanol Refineries
This section was extremely interesting to me. Real energy efficiencies of cellulosic ethanol plants (which presently exist only on paper or in demonstration scale) are hard to come by. Those 4:1 or 8:1 energy returns that you often see claimed are hypothetical; nobody in the cellulosic ethanol business has demonstrated anything like this. Professor Patzek attempts to shed some light on this subject. In his words:
I start from a “reverse-engineering” calculation of energy efficiency of cellulosic ethanol production in an existing Iogen pilot plant, Ottawa, Canada. I then discuss the inflated energy efficiency claims of five out-of-six recipients of $385 millions of DOE grants to develop cellulosic ethanol refineries.
Using published information, Professor Patzek calculated the efficiency of the Iogen plant. He defined the efficiency (albeit by an equation that could have been more clear) as the BTUs of ethanol produced, divided by the theoretical maximum. His calculated efficiency of the process was 20%; input 1 BTU into the process and return 0.2 BTUs, for a net of -0.8 BTUs. This calculation is in the same form as Dr. Wang's gasoline efficiency calculations - the initial BTUs of the feedstock are counted as an input into the process, and then the processing energy is counted against it. In simple terms, if you take 1 kilogram of wheat straw, add in the distillation energy and take credit for the heating value of the lignin, you have the denominator of the equation. The numerator is the heating value of the ethanol that was produced from that kilogram of wheat straw. If you started with 1 BTU of straw, and produced 1 BTU of ethanol, the efficiency is then governed purely by the distillation energy (essentially the amount of external energy required to drive the process).
Of particular note, the equation did take a credit for the lignin, which is always the assumption that cellulosic ethanol proponents use to obtain inflated energy returns. However, the most significant piece of the calculation for me - and one that Patzek did not call attention to - is that if you look at only the distillation energy (the 2nd term in the denominator of Eqn 1), it is 55% greater than the ethanol that is yielded from the distillation. That means that production of 1 BTU of cellulosic ethanol requires a distillation step that consumes 1.55 BTUs.
The reason for this is one I have stated numerous times. As Patzek writes "there is ca. 4% of alcohol in a batch of industrial wheat-straw beer, in contrast to 12 to 16% of ethanol in corn-ethanol refinery beers."
I do note that if you take full credit for the heating value of the lignin, it just barely satisifies the distillation requirement. If you run through the math, the lignin BTU credit gives an energy balance of 1.05, which is worse than the 1.3 of corn ethanol plus by-product credits. But remember, the lignin in the process is not dry. It is very wet. Drying co-products in a corn ethanol plant requires a substantial input of energy. If lignin is to be used in a cellulosic ethanol plant, it will have to be dried.
Furthermore, even if the lignin is dry, no other energy inputs into the process have been considered (so this is not a complete energy balance calculation). In other words, if those inputs were all free (of course trucking the biomass back and forth will require significant energy inputs), and the lignin was dry, you would get 1.05 BTUs of cellulosic ethanol out for a lignin input of 1 BTU. Even presuming that Iogen has made major advances recently, it is not surprising why they have been slow to build a commercial facility; they know the score. Patzek concludes:
The Iogen plant in Ottawa, Canada, has operated well below name plate capacity for three years. Iogen should retain their trade secrets, but in exchange for the significant subsidies from the US and Canadian taxpayers they should tell us what the annual production of alcohols was, how much straw was used, and what the fossil fuel and electricity inputs were. The ethanol yield coefficient in kg of ethanol per kg straw dmb is key to public assessments of the new technology. Similar remarks pertain to the Novozymes projects heavily subsidized by the Danes. Until an existing pilot plant provides real, independently verified data on yield coefficients, mash ethanol concentrations, etc., all proposed cellulosic ethanol refinery designs are speculation.
Patzek then addresses the six proposed cellulosic ethanol plants that were awarded $385 million USD by the US Department of Energy. For reference, he gives the energy efficiency of Sasol's coal-to-liquids (CTL) process as 42%, the efficiency of an average oil refinery as 88% (and I can verify that this number is spot on), and that of an optimized corn ethanol refinery as 37%.
Figure 1. Inflated Energy Efficiency Claims of Announced Cellulosic Ventures
Figure 1, from Patzek's paper, compares the claimed efficiencies of the various cellulosic ventures. Of the six proposed plants, only Abengoa, reporting 25% estimated energy efficiency, was close to Patzek's reverse-engineered efficiency for Iogen. The other five all claimed energy efficiencies in the 40-60% range. The most optimistic was Vinod Khosla's former Kergy (now Range Fuels) venture. See the last section of Cellulosic Ethanol vs. Biomass Gasification for some discussion on Kergy. This process is actually a gasification process, and as such won't have the same sorts of issues that Patzek documented for Iogen. But I don't think in an apples-to-apples comparison they can beat a CTL process on efficiency, because it is much easier to handle coal than biomass (not that I endorse CTL). They are also going to have one problem that the others don't, and that is the production of significant amounts of various mixed alcohols.
There are theoretical reasons why cellulose is unlikely to produce an ethanol concentration in the range of corn ethanol. Patzek writes that at "about 0.2 to 0.25 kg of straw/L, the mash is barely pumpable", and states that this straw concentration will result in a fermentation beer of 4.4% ethanol at a maximum. Yet five of the proposed plants are claiming energy efficiencies that are as great or greater than those of corn ethanol plants.
Where Will the Agrofuel Biomass Come From?
In this section, Patzek tackles an issue that I have also addressed: Where could we get that much biomass to begin with? Patzek asks and answers: "Where, how much, and for how long will the Earth produce the extra biomass to quench our unending thirst to drive 1 billion cars and trucks? The answer to this question is immediate and unequivocal: Nowhere, close to nothing, and for a very short time indeed."
In the interest of brevity, I won't go into the details of this section. It is a discussion of Net Primary Productivity and Net Ecosystem Productivity, as well as the USDA/DOE billion ton vision - Biomass as feedstock for a bioenergy and bioproducts industry: The technical feasibility of a billion-ton annual supply (PDF download). The short of it is that Patzek argues that the biomass is simply not available, and attempting to grow and process enough biomass to continue the business-as-usual model "would be a continental-scale ecologic and economic disaster of biblical proportions."
Photovoltaic Cells vs. Agrofuels
The analysis of Iogen's energy balance and this final section were for me the gems of this paper. In this section, Patzek looks at a square meter of land, and compares the energy potential of various biofuels, solar power, and wind power. He also shows the amount of energy if this square meter was an oil field producing oil for 30 years, but that limits the discussion to a very small fraction of the earth's surface. Also, as Patzek wrote, "this resource is finite and irreplaceable and after 30 years there is no producible oil left in it." So, I am not going to focus on the oil comparison in this section.
For his comparisons, Patzek looked at photovoltaic cells, wind turbines, corn ethanol, sugarcane ethanol, corn stover ethanol, and Acacia and Eucalyptus for FT-diesel, ethanol, or electricity. He uses the actual demonstrated solar capture efficiency of these processes. Figure 2 shows how the various sources stacked up:
Figure 2. Professor Patzek's Comparison of Various Renewable Options
As shown in the figure, based on Professor Patzek's methodology solar PV is the only option considered that has a legitimate chance to offset a fair portion of our current oil production. Wind came in a distant second. Of the biomass applications, Acacia for electricity ranked the highest. It is significant to note that the top three options all involved production of electricity.
Interestingly, while the solar capture of sugarcane ethanol ranked lower than those three options, Patzek comes to the same conclusion that I did in my essay Brazilian Ethanol is Sustainable. He writes:
Because of the unique ability of satisfying the huge CExC [RR: Defined as cumulative exergy consumption] in cane crushing, fermentation, and ethanol distillation (0.41 W/m2), as well as fresh bagasse + “trash” drying (0.27 W/m2), with the chemical exergy of bagasse and the attached “trash,” sugarcane is the only industrial energy plant that may be called “sustainable.”
Patzek also performs a calculation designed to show how much area is needed to drive a hypothetical car 15,000 miles per year on some of the energy options. He concludes that "for each 1 m2 of medium-quality oil fields one needs 620 m2 of corn fields to replace gasoline with corn ethanol and pay for the free energy costs of the ethanol production. Similarly, one can drive our example cars for one year from ~30 m2 of oil fields, 90 m2 of photovoltaic cells, 1100 m2 of wind turbines, and ~18000 m2 of corn fields."
However, one key item not addressed in this essay - and for me the key to making this vision work - is improving energy storage technology. Patzek presumes continued improvement of battery technology. In fact, he writes "With time the batteries will get better, and electric motors will take over powering the vehicles." Is that a reasonable assumption? I don't know. I would have liked to have seen this explored in a bit more detail. One hopes that this isn't a situation in which Patzek is presuming "those guys will figure it out."
Professor Patzek's Conclusions
I will let Professor Patzek's conclusions speak for themselves. Here are some excerpts:
In this paper I have painted a radical vision of a world in which fossil fuels and agrofuels will be used increasingly less in transportation vehicles. Gradually, these fuels will be replaced by electricity stored in the vehicle batteries. With time the batteries will get better, and electric motors will take over powering the vehicles. The sources of electricity for the batteries will be increasingly solar photovoltaic cells and wind turbines. The vagaries of cloudy skies and irregular winds will be alleviated to a large degree by the surplus batteries being recharged and shared locally, with no transmission lines out of a neighborhood or city.
I have shown that even mediocre solar cells that cost 1/3 of their life-time electricity production to be manufactured are at least 100 times more efficient than the current major agrofuel systems. When deployed these cells will not burn forests; kill living things on land, in the air, and in the oceans; erode soil; contaminate water; and emit astronomic quantities of greenhouse gases.
Finally, no future transportation system will allow complete “freedom of personal transportation” for everyone. I suggest that good public transportation systems will free many, if not most people from personal transportation.
My Conclusions
I am not sure whether Professor Patzek believes that biofuels have no place at all among our future energy options. In my opinion, there is a place for them, albeit in niche applications and not as a major energy source. I think we will continue to have a need for some long-range transportation options (e.g., shipping, airline transportation) that would be difficult to electrify. But for the most part, the future has to be electric. The sooner we shift focus from biofuels to electric transportation, the better.
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An interesting new battery development (new to me anyway):
http://www.nextenergynews.com/news1/next-energy-news-betavoltaic-10.1.html
The article is light on details, so if anyone knows anything more, please speak up.
WOW, if true that is AMAZING? If it works I can't see any reason why you couldn't stack them in a electric car?
Fuhgeddaboudit.
People have been fantasizing about beta-ray batteries of various sorts for decades, with minimal practical effect. I would even speculate that there might be a 1950s or 1960s Popular Science article on the subject. Tritium is used in small lights for remote airfields and for gunsights, but that's about it. It is, however, theoretically possible to make a tritium battery, which is more than can be said for the various perpetual motion scams.
But no jurisdiction is going to allow any ordinary consumer to own enough tritium to power a laptop for 30 years irrespective of how it's packaged. Even tiny lights containing a minute speck are illegal in many localities, as 'frivolous use' of radioactive material. In addition, you have to consider the destructive effect of even low energy beta radiation on semiconductor junctions, and the woeful inefficiency of a semiconductor junction in harvesting the collisional energy. In addition to that, you have to consider that there are no tritium mines - the stuff is in short supply and made using neutrons from nuclear reactors.
So there may be limited military uses, but anybody who thinks this will be in laptops on store shelves in two or three years is full of baloney. Indeed, as the notion of finite fossil fuel supplies takes wider hold throughout this wicked world, we shall suffocate under ever larger piles of baloney. One way of sorting this out, oftentimes, is to go through the motions of trying to buy engineering samples. For example, A123 will happily sell sample nanophosphate lithium batteries. They're real. But you can't order sample beta batteries, Steorn devices, or zero point energy sources. There's a reason for that.
Oh, and did I ever mention that too many reporters went into their field because it can be one of the most effortless ways to slide through college? So whenever you see a report of pie in the sky, take it with a grain of salt - or, better yet, the whole salt shaker. It might conceivably be true, but what are the odds? Especially when it's an anonymous web report with no one taking responsibility in a byline.
As the man says ... Fuhgeddaboudit!
There is around 3.6kg of naturally occuring tritium in the world, spread evenly around the world!
Manmade tritium? ... around 30kg ...cost? ... ~ $200,000,000 per kilo!
See
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2806
Xeroid.
It says that tritium is a BYPRODUCT, not a requirement for the battery.
The battery has been known for over ten years. patent - http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1994sprt.nasa..373S
It provides micro/milliwatts of power.
A far cry from even a silver BB.
Light, nothing, it's got some BS in the details:
"Although betavoltaic batteries sound Nuclear they’re not, they’re neither use fission/fusion or chemical processes to produce energy and so (do not produce any radioactive or hazardous waste)."
First, the poor copyediting/writing to capitalize "Nuclear" and using "they're neither use" instead of "they neither use" show this isn't a top-shelf story or close to it.
Second, beta decay is one of the three main types of radioactive decay, so the author isn't quite correct. As for whether the process produces radioactive decay or not, I have no idea what radioactive waste it may or may not produce without knowing what parent radioactive element is being used to produce the beta particles.
Without having a lot more, a lot more, information, I would NOT use such a battery in a device such as a laptop computer that is in close contact with me.
Nice examples of what 1 square metre can give you.
However, what if it were 1 square metre of tidal range estuary, what would the energy possible be there? The potential energy of a 2-3 metre tidal range wouldn't be insignificant.
Equally, what about 1 square metre of wave prone shore?
Both have the major advantage that they aren't currently used as cropland.
Along the same line, after reading about the Air New Zealand trial running of a Boing 747 on biofuel
http://www.inthenews.co.uk/news/autocodes/countries/new-zealand/boeing-747-fly-on-bio-fuel-$1141111.htm
I did some rough calculations based on a fuel consumption rate of 3378 gal/hour and an optimistic production rate of 150 gallons of jet fuel per acre of soybeans. A single round trip flight from LA to New Zealand and back would use more than a square mile of soybeans. Maybe better, we could ALL start eating a lot more French fries.
http://politics.reddit.com/info/2vpry/comments
Our contributors appreciate your help if you are so inclined...
"I believe our generation faces a sobering choice: Take serious steps to reduce our fossil fuel usage now - and this will undoubtedly entail some amount of hardship - or leave it to our children to face a great deal of hardship."
How can you live with yourself you shill for the oil industry you.
Good post. NPR just had a segment on how the PV industry in Japan finally moved off subsidies and is making a profit after 30 some years. Its still not making money hand over fist as they have a problem when they tell a consumer that it will take 20 years to pay off the investment. Houses in Japan are often depreciating assets.
Of course that 20 years assumes that energy prices track inflation and that has NOT been the case in the last 5 years.
Robert, batteries are "good enough", in PHEV's. Even lead-acid will do just fine in a PHEV: they're cheaper than gasoline when gas hits $.175/gallon. A PHEV-40 will displace 75-99% of fossil fuel usage, depending on usage pattern. That's enough for the moment, and of course battery capacity will grow as batteries get cheaper.
Professor Patzek's analysis of wind is a bit superficial. It's important to remember that a wind turbine may need 60 acres to prevent "shadowing" (interference between turbines), but the turbines don't "consume" that 60 acres. For instance, on a farm a turbine may "consume" about 1/4 acre for access roads and the turbine itself, leaving 99.5% of the land for farming. The same thing applies off-shore. The important thing is total resource (72TW average), E-ROI (40+), and cost (4-8 cents/kwh), all of which are perfectly good. So, wind is perfectly viable. Further, wind is competitive even now with natural gas, and wind can ramp up more quickly. Solar will be cost-competitive, and scale up, but it isn't quite there yet.
Robert,
I agree with Nick that the wind value in the figure looks suspicious. The comparison should be between solar panels and plants alone since wind is sideways solar and can't be compared in the same way. Also, solar can use in places that are not going to be used for farming so the figure has a problem there as well. If we insist that solar is mainly going to be on rooftops so that the denominator is essentially zero, there is no comparison by this method. This trend to use surface area really comes from the issues with plants, but we see it coming out in nuclear industry FUD where hydro is attacked for the surface area of the resevoir without accounting for the enhansed use of land downstream owing to irrigation and flood control. We should be careful with these surface area comparisions. The comparision of the efficiency of using quantum conversion of sunlight to electricity vrs. photosyntetic carbon storage and thermal conversion is somewhat helpful but elsewhere it can be deceptive.
Chris
I agree.
I think the bottom line here is that limits to available acreage are very important for plant-based fuels, and unimportant to everything else (oil, solar, wind, nuclear, etc).
Yes. It's a silly comparison, and I think even the author knows it.
The central constraint for oil production and especially photovoltaics are capital investment costs.
For PV, acres are irrelevant, we have plenty of low-value land with sunshine.
Panels and transmission lines are central.
Wind is especially good for electric cars because a lot of car recharging can be done over a period of hours either while parked at home or parked at work. The wind just has to blow part of the time for the recharging to work.
Oh c'mon. At least give Cellulosic Biofuels a chance! Some many people like Patzek want to shoot it down before it's even given a chance in real life scenarios. No one here can argue that bioengineering knowledge has grown beyond our wildest dreams in the past 10 years. Scientist are just now applying that knowledge to cellusosic biofuels (I say biofuels becuase it makes more sense to makes cellulosic butanol rather than ethanol) or even designer biofuels which are being worked on by companies such as LS9. The wired article has a pretty good overview of some of the people working on this stuff, and i'm sure most of them are as smart if not smarter than mr. patzek.
http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/15-10/ff_plant
I think Robert has spent a lot of time researching cellulosic and has been a strong supporter of it. That he seems to have moved from that position is telling, and most commendable.
This is very close to the argument that "someone will think of something".
On the question of electricity, Robert, I too would like to know if Patzek's faith in battery technology is the same trap as many fall into of thinking technology will save the day.
With PV, we also need to know how much PV material can be manufactured and deployed. Heinberg recently talked about rare metals in PV panels. All harnessing of energy takes resources. We need to ensure that any solutions, even in a powered down society, are fully thought through so as not to create false hopes or inappropriate investments.
Concentrated thermal electrical generation. Use the sun to heat water to steam. Power a turbine which turns a generator which produces electricity. Exactly the same as a coal fired power plant except the thermal energy is provided by the Sun instead of FF. We can deploy as many of these as we have land for.
Tim
You do realize there are some upper boundaries involved, right? Regardless of your hopes and dreams for bioengineering, the amount of solar energy which can be converted into burnable fuel has an upper boundary. Admittedly, the amount of CO2 available in an algal recycling system from coal burning means that the upper boundary of available atmospheric CO2 can be avoided, though to be honest, burning coal is just too dirty even if you can recycle the CO2 (the algal products are also recycled in as closed a loop as possible - no reason to burn more gigatons of coal, is there?).
George Monbiot (a reliable enough source) has a rough (but testable) ratio that the energy currently being generated with fossil fuel in a year represents 400 hundreds of sunlight from the past. Even giving an error margin which reduces that estimated amount to 10 years, instead of 400, you still need to come with a way to cut currently fossil fueled energy consumption by some 90%.
I think we will be changing how we live, regardless of your anti-doom perspective. And quite honestly, walking and bicycling where you live, for example, actually experiencing the world we share, is a good thing, with the correct infrastructure and community perspective - shame that so much of the U.S. will have to be rebuilt/abandoned to accomodate that fact, and that so many people will struggle against actually walking a half mile, or living in a way that makes a car fairly unnecessary.
Ironically, there was a time when New York City was considered the highest point of civilization, a livable city with immense riches, from Central Park to its subways to its schools, museums, and libraries, to its entertainment. And yet, with the rise of suburbia, NYC began its 'decline.' New York City still consumes considerably less energy, and its citizens are much less likely to value a car, than the American average.
I don't think there is any reason to be that nostalgic about suburbia or trying to keep the cars running - changing how we live is not exactly doom.
Expat: Not sure that NYC is in "decline". Apartments purchased for $200000 in the 70s are currently valued in excess of $40 mill.
Decline is a tricky term, and I knew it wouldn't be perfect - what was meant is that in terms of being at the zenith, NYC's reputation and attraction was much broader in 1930 than 1980 (possibly its public nadir), and still above today.
We live in a world surrounded by other visions than someone coming off the farm and rising to the top in the Big City. Most seem to involve materialism and anxiety - materialism as a measure of worth, and anxiety that 'they' will come and take it away.
"George Monbiot (a reliable enough source) has a rough (but testable) ratio that the energy currently being generated with fossil fuel in a year represents 400 hundreds of sunlight from the past. Even giving an error margin which reduces that estimated amount to 10 years, instead of 400, you still need to come with a way to cut currently fossil fueled energy consumption by some 90%."
This isn't quite clear, but it seems to be a comparison between the number of years required to generate FF, and current FF consumption.
This doesn't make sense. FF's were generated by a process that was perhaps .00000001% efficient, starting with the plants that Patzek is criticizing as a source of power. Current solar insolation is 25,000 times greater than FF consumption - solar (PV or CSP) would capture that just fine.
There's plenty of solar power available.
Solar power is nice but saying that there is plenty available is a meaningless statement. Calculate your total energy use and then figure out how much land you would need to buy to cover with solar panels to generate that energy at 10% efficiency. And then consider how the price of land would change if everybody else was also buying land for that purpose.
"Calculate your total energy use and then figure out how much land you would need to buy to cover with solar panels to generate that energy at 10% efficiency. "
450GW average consumption. At 10% efficiency you get 20 watts per sq meter, on average (24 hours, 365 days, average US). That gives 22.5 billion sq meters, or about 8,000 sq miles.
"then consider how the price of land would change if everybody else was also buying land for that purpose."
First, there's a lot more than 8,000 sq miles of very cheap southwestern desert in the US.
2nd, rooftops alone (residential & industrial/commercial) would suffice. Not essential to buy any land at all. Of course, CSP will probably be attractive, so we'll probably use some land in CA and FL - not enough to bid up land prices, though.
I think your 450GW number is only our (USA) current electricity consumption. Since we are considering replacing fossil fuels with electricity we should take a value closer to 3TW. That takes us to 50,000 square miles. And to take into account energy use in the winter is higher when solar energy is lower, and to account for transmission losses from the southwest to the northeast, lets multiply this by three-- 150,000 square miles. That is California right there. I agree that it is physically possible but efficiency would be a lot cheaper.
"Since we are considering replacing fossil fuels with electricity we should take a value closer to 3TW. "
Electricity is 3x more useful, so we need a value of about 1.2TW. For instance, a PHEV will use .25-.45 kwh per mile, where the average light vehicle currently uses about 1.5 KWH equivalent.
"to take into account energy use in the winter is higher when solar energy is lower"
It would be silly to rely 100% on solar. Wind is higher in winter, and it can be supplemented by nuclear, and biomass for electrical generation (which is much, much more efficient than biomass for liquid fuels).
"transmission losses from the southwest to the northeast,"
No one is suggesting powering the whole country from the SW. Most solar will be on rooftops. Finally, HVDC losses are only about 7% for 1,000 miles.
I don't expect solar to be more than roughly 1/3 of our total power.
"efficiency would be a lot cheaper"
Sure. We have a lot of mileage (pun intended) possible from efficiency.
A solar roof covering about 600 sq costs roughly $10,000 say, for a ballpark figure. At those costs, covering 10,000 sq miles with such panels would cost roughly $4.6 trillion. That would generate around 1.3TW.
Building 650 2GW nuclear power plants would cost around $3.9 trillion (assuming a fairly high cost of $6 billion per plant).
The solar panels would ideally last 20 years (probably less, being on roofs and such), and would only work well in some parts of the country, and not at night, not well in winter, etc.
The nuke plants would last around 60 years.
Just some numbers for comparison.
The sun is forever. The uranium is not, you'll end up harvesting down granite mountains to get a few kilos of it.
Just a reminder for comparison.
Don't forget that there is about 40 trillion tons of Uranium in the crust of which about 1 trillion tons is recoverable at reasonably high EROEI. You need 200 tons / reactor / year. And three times as much Thorium.
If you're going to argue that uranium is not forever, then I'm going to point out that neither sand nor the sun are forever either. One step at a time - uranium can last us a long time.
Costs don't really compare unless we talk about TOTAL costs, including environmental ones. When we do that. FF 's are all losers.
And as for nuke- why bother? we have far better alternatives.
Solar thermal beats PV in true overall costs by a long shot. Combine solar thermal with pumped hydro storage and HVDC and you have a winner over all the others, bar none.
I am too lazy to document all this. Just look at the latest issue of Engineering and Science (Caltech mag.), "Powering the Planet" by Nathan Lewis, http://nsl.caltech.edu. He has done most of the hard work (except he still thinks PV is going to win because he is a chemist and likes to work on PV--and I am a heat engineer and like to work on heat engines). But we both agree that solar is copious, the hardware is there, and we gotta go for it- NOW.
PS.Dammit! I wish people would quit spending so much time and talent beating the hell out of dead horses (ethanol of any stripe) and instead talk about winners like solar thermal.-HVDC- pumped hydro.
Spain spent $35 million euros for a solar thermal installation that generates 11MW, and the planned buildout is to spend $1.6 billion (USD) for 300MW capacity by 2013. Figure it out - it's abysmal compared to nuclear. And as for environmental costs, nuclear, particularly western nuclear, has an excellent record.
"$1.6 billion (USD) for 300MW capacity "
That's about 3x the cost/MW of the much larger Ausra installations just announced.
What do you think of Ausra?
Where are you getting the 3x cost estimate from? Ausra's website had no cost info I could see, but from here I see:
$3 billion/GW compares to the $3 billion/GW for nuclear I quoted. I would still find this in favor of nuclear based on 60 years vs 30, and vs the amount of materials used - the solar tower will all those mirrors is probably using more materials and is more likely to suffer from receding horizons. And still the issue of daytime vs nighttime and northern climate vs southern.
Don't get me wrong, I like these solar towers, I really do. I'd like to see them get built and succeed. But you can't beat nuclear in terms of cost and the environment.
"Don't get me wrong, I like these solar towers, I really do. I'd like to see them get built and succeed. But you can't beat nuclear in terms of cost and the environment."
These comparisons are almost impossible...but what the heck, I'll toss out some counter-considerations: Solar has a much lower capacity factor, but much lower operating costs. I suspect the initial design life for both is roughly the same: none of the existing plants being re-licensed for 30+ years were originally planned to last 60 years. The solar materials (concrete, steel, glass, etc) are much lower grade than much of the nuclear facility materials. Solar can be built much more quickly than nuclear - maybe that's not fair, given that much of the delay is regulatory, but it's the reality.
Why not just do both nuclear and wind/solar? Well, one reason I like wind/solar is that it's easily transplanted to very poor countries, and if the US proves that they are "baseload", other countries (like Egypt, and other future "Iran"'s) might go that way. Nuclear will never be faster or cheaper than coal (without internalizing external costs like CO2, etc), but if we push wind/solar enough they might get there, and we might just get a solution to 3rd world CO2 emissions, not to mention energy poverty and proliferation.
I like the low-techness of the solar thermal technologies, and you're right about the problems with nuclear being regulatory - not fair, but reality. Hopefully, some honest assessment can change that reality a bit.
The solar materials may be lower grade, but it gives me pause when I see estimates that suggest a 500MW solar tower will take up 1 square mile. That seems like an awful lot of concrete and glass. I'm currently a big believer in the "Receeding Horizons" phenomenon and I see it primarily affecting material and energy intensive technologies, which it seems solar and wind are. It takes a lot of turbines, a lot of mirrors to generate the power of one 1.6-2.0GW nuclear power plant. That nuclear power plant is not nearly so material or energy intensive in its construction. The high costs come from the high technology, the exacting specifications, high wages for the builders, and of course, safety features.
Everyone always says with high demand, the cost for things like solar and wind will come down, but the argument could easily go in reverse - with high demand, the cost for all those materials could skyrocket.
"it gives me pause when I see estimates that suggest a 500MW solar tower will take up 1 square mile. That seems like an awful lot of concrete and glass. "
First, it may have a lot of surface area, but it's mighty thin. 2nd, there are a lot of gaps to prevent shading.
The current spike in prices is due to Chinese, etc demand and capex lag, not high energy prices. Eventually those prices will come down.
except he still thinks PV is going to win because he is a chemist and likes to work on PV--and I am a heat engineer and like to work on heat engines
And when there are shipping mass produced stirling engines, then you have a chance to win.
Thus far - that is not the reality.
"$4.6 trillion. That would generate around 1.3TW"
So, you're assuming roughly $4/watt.
Now, you're thinking of a utility-size application, which wouldn't be done with PV. Instead, you'd use CSP, at $2/watt. Wind, too, is about $2/watt.
You mentioned that it would be done on roofs, so I got a rooftop quote. In any case, using your optimistic solar pv cost vs my pessimistic nuclear cost still comes out ahead for nuclear when you consider the other various factors mentioned - such as the fact that you'll get the nuclear power for 60 years vs only 20 for the solar panels.
The nuclear plants will also be better in terms of EROI and amount of materials used, which will matter a great deal when the rising costs from receding horizons kicks in.
"You mentioned that it would be done on roofs, so I got a rooftop quote. "
Ah. Well, you see, PV doesn't compete with nuclear.
That may sound odd, but think about it: PV is installed by retail customers on their roofs, and there is a real tension between utilities, who are trying to limit PV (unsuccessfully), and their customers who are pushing it hard. PV competes with retail, peak pricing, and once it's below that point nothing will stop it. Utilities may be able to limit the extent of net-metering, but the kind of installations we're seeing on commercial buildings, that don't depend on net-metering, are unstoppable. It won't matter what kind of supply the utility is installing, unless it allows the utility to drastically lower the retail, marginal cost of kwh's.
Utilities will do CSP, and it appears that CSP costs are falling quickly, based on the recent Ausra announcements. So, CSP is the form of solar you have to compare to nuclear.
Comparisons here are difficult, and require a lot of adjustments. CSP plants will have an unlimited life, with maintenance. Operating costs will be much lower than nuclear. Nuclear engineering and fuel are now largely imports, and solar and wind have export potential, where nuclear has little. E-ROI for solar and wind are comfortably above 20 and 40, and above that differences in E-ROI don't really matter.
Nevertheless, we probably will need and use a wide variety of sources, and I expect nuclear to grow.
I like this write up. I was wondering why Berkshire Hathaway was going in for transmission in Texas since Buffet has said recently that he doesn't go for small potatoes anymore. But, nuclear power can't scale since TMI showed that the reactors are already too large for their containment. Solar thermal 24/7 dispatchable power coming in cheaper than nuclear at the maximum scale for nuclear means that transmission from New Mexico to Georgia makes sense at the tens of GW scale, and Texas is right in the middle. I don't think the NRC has to complain anymore about not having the staff to handle applications for new reactors. They can concentrate on shutting the old ones down.
Chris
It's certainly worth noting the tentative and contingent nature of almost all nuclear applications.
speek - Where are you getting these numbers? As far as I can tell, they're all wrong.
Cost: In California, the only solar market I really know, the base cost of installing a small, retrofit residential solar system is about $11K/kW, or $34/sq. ft. After rebate, those numbers are $7.6/kW, or $23/sq. ft. So your hypothetical 600 sq ft system would cost $20K before rebate, and $14K after. Although if you were talking about a large commercial PV plant, you might be able to get down to your hypothetical cost of around $16/sq. ft. (Caveat: my numbers are about a year out of date, but the current costs won't be terribly different.)
Lifespan: Most PV manufacturers offer a standard 25-year warranty on their modules, which is defined as producing at least 80% of their rated output after 25 years. This is a requirement for the California solar incentives.
Research has shown that the performance of standard polycrystalline PV modules degrades at the rate of about 0.5% a year, on average. So even after 100 years, the modules will still be producing some power!
What the lifetime of thin-film is, we don't know....it hasn't been around long enough.
Total Cost of Operation: Nuke plants require continued inputs of uranium and water, constant attendance by highly trained personnel, etc. etc. Once a solar plant is up, you're done. So the initial built cost isn't the right basis for comparison; the total cost of operation and decomissioning is, and solar wins that too.
As far as decommissioning goes, I wouldn't know how to do the calculation, but I would venture a guess that at the end of a PV module's life, it's a whole lot easier, cheaper, and less energy intensive to decommission and recycle a PV plant than it is a nuclear plant. Plus all of a PV plant's components can be recycled, unlike a nuke plant, where much of it is permanently unusable for anything else.
And as far as cost goes, bear in mind that the cost of building nuke plants is going up, along with the cost of steel, concrete, uranium, etc., whereas the cost of building PV is going down, as efficiencies of scale are realized.
Long term, PV wins over nuclear hands-down.
--C
Energy consultant, writer, blogger www.getreallist.com
If my numbers were "all wrong", feel free to correct them. Your correction on PV numbers seems irrelevant. I took optimistic numbers for solar and pessimistic number for nuclear. Feel free to do the same from your side of the argument!
As for 20 year lifespan, that was for roofing solar pv's. I can't get a non-solar roof to last that long. Nick is probably right that we should be comparing nukes to thermal solar towers, which I did upthread some.
Regarding total cost of operations, nuclear plants have historically cost around $100 million per GW from a study that was done back in the late 90's. It is a high maintenance cost, but one can't say solar has no maintenance cost. It may be low, but actual numbers are always nice. Too bad there isn't much industry experience to reflect upon.
This hardly makes sense given that PV panels are more material intensive than nuclear power plants. If the costs of such basic material as steel and concrete are going up, then the cost PV's will go up too. And since they use more materials, those costs will affect them more than the nuke plant.
Long-term, who can tell? I wouldn't make such claims.
Uh...did you even read my post??
I used real-life numbers from actual experience. Why is my correction "irrelevant?"
The lifespan I'm quoting IS for roof-mounted solar PV! I can't imagine what bearing a "non-solar roof" might have on this discussion at all.
Nick made some worthwhile points, but it's not really that simple IMO. For example, geothermal energy is a more appropriate baseload generation to compare with nuclear, and solar is best compared with natural-gas fired peaker plants.
So it's probably about 2x that now...
Total maintenance: spray them off with a hose twice a year, and replace the inverter (~5% of total system cost) about every 10 years. Negligible however you slice it.
I have no idea where you're getting any of that. Care to provide a reference demonstrating your assertion that pV Is more material intensive?
As for cost, the actual history of PV costs is that they are going down--as far as I know there is no dispute about that, and numbers are easily gotten just about anywhere.
Your logic sounds right, but it's wrong. The costs of steel and concrete are going up primarily because of a major building boom in China. The costs of PV are going down because they're using less material every year, and increasing efficiencies of scale (which isn't something you can really do with basic building materials at this point). The biggest cost is in refining silicon to a high level of purity, and that's coming down as they use less silicon and find better ways to refine it with less waste.
--C
Energy consultant, writer, blogger www.getreallist.com
As little as I want to get in the middle of this excreting contest, ChrisN did give some very pessimistic numbers on California rooftop solar. Or maybe just a year out of date like he said.
I don't know what a nuclear reactor costs because I never bought one. I suppose it depends a lot on the regulatory environment and how much time you have to spend in a courtroom. Concrete and even construction workers are extremely cheap compared to lawyers and interest costs during legal delays.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
I still don't get why you're calling my numbers "pessimistic"...all I did is quote ACTUAL numbers from an ACTUAL solar system I designed for a real residential retrofit customer here in California in 2006. There's no attitude in them at all!
But again, the costs for utility-scale commercial systems are always lower, and the costs for CSP (which is only viable as a utility-scale system) are lower than that of PV.
BTW a new article just posted today to Gristmill (No news is good news) regarding the recent Solar Power Conference had some similar information to what I've already posted here:
Cost of 500 sq. ft. of standard PV: $35-40,000
And: "One can be 99% sure that silicon PV will last 30-50 years -- it's been clearly demonstrated. Thin films may only last 10 years -- nobody knows its longevity, since it is relatively new to the market."
--C
Energy consultant, writer, blogger www.getreallist.com
I'm only going to address one part of your post because the rest seems to be about trivial quibbles. We're playing armchair world-saving here, can't be concerned with whether the rooftop pv cost $10,000 or $14,000, especially when I'm intentionally giving the opposing side the benefit of the doubt while simultaneously providing pessimistic numbers for the point I'm arguing for! How often do you see that?
However, you say:
Let's consider 10,000 square miles of PV's vs 500 nuclear power plants in terms of material usage. And consider the nuke plants are mostly concrete, and the PV's are, well, PV's.
I like your point about continuing to use PV for a century. I calculated somewhere that this comes to 66 years of like-new equivilent. Now suppose a get a 42 lb 250 Watt panel from my local BP Solar factory so that it needs to be shipped 100 miles to get on my roof and 100 miles back to be recycled then assumung 5 hours equivilent peak sunshine per day on average my panel produces 3.6 kWh/lb/mile. Now, if we take Michael Dittmar's estimate that a GW reactor needs 6 gm/sec of uranium then assuming the uranium is mined in Australia and enriched in France (we'll count the weight of shielding getting the enriched fuel from France to my local reactor) then I get only 1.4 kWh/lb/mile so solar seems to beat nuclear power on the way is stresses transportation infrastructure. Haven't looked at the masses of the nuclear power plant or the panel fabrication plant but I've got a good guess which way this will go since a 500 MW fabrication plant creates way more than a nuclear power plant capacity in its lifetime and it is not as big. Doesn't need as much security either.
Chris
Make the base line load nuclear power and solar power peakers for daytime and summer excursions. Why argue for one or the other? Let's build as many of both as fast as we can and shut down all the coal fired plants. Then we can argue where to go from there. Neither utility sized solar plants nor the current generation of nuclear have a lot of hard, from experience, numbers behind them. And both will depend on how much government interference/subsidy you get.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
Well, to my mind, nuclear power has a huge opportunity cost associated with the heavy subsidies involved. If we waste money on nuclear power then we are delaying our response to global warming. Both the solar and wind insustries are moving quickly towards a no subsidies model and susbsidies for wind are beginning to be a problem because of their uncertain nature. Farm siting and design depends on knowing the availability of the small production subsidy but this is on-again-off-again so it hinders planning. With the subsidy you might push out to a more remote but better resource and without it you might stick closer to existing transmission. A clear subsidy trajectory of say fifteen years would be very helpful.
On the other hand, the Price-Anderson subsidy distorts the market terribly and the nuclear industry has not said that it would not be needed for new plants so their intent seems to be to hold on to it for 80 more years. This means that superior technology, either completely safe nuclear plants or renewables that don't have associated safety issues are excluded from the market, and we lose the opportunity to get off coal more quickly since the price reductions associated with the economies of scale available to the renewables but not to nuclear power are delayed. So, retaining nuclear power subsidies means that market forces will displace it a little later, but not after the federally guaranteed construction loans are paid off. Thus, not only do we delay cutting emissions but we build a boondoggle with subsidized new nuclear power.
Chris
It's about 1/2 of 1% of land for all electricity. Land is not an issue.
http://www.nrel.gov/csp/pdfs/32160.pdf
For solar heat plants the requirement is 1 square mile for 175 MW
http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2007/s2047734.htm
The typo musses up your meaning. Presumably you write 400 years of sunlight. My recollection of the quote wasn't years to years but days to years. Does anyone remember? Help! I think it was 400 years of sunlight we burn in a day.
cfm in Gray, ME
Your right about a typo - and it seems as if the original comment can no longer be edited. This lack of edit function has happened before - possible the number of threaded comments plays a role?
Edits are locked out when a comment has been commented on.
expat wrote:
That Monbiot article gets misrepresented all the time, as in this case. What Monbiot said was that each year we consumed 400 years' worth of stored energy in the form of fossil fuel - i.e., that it took 400 years to produce that amount of oil/coal/natural gas. He never claimed that we annually consume energy to the tune of 400 years' worth of total sunlight.
I'm no conucopian - either we are going to make dramatic changes, or dramatic changes will be forced upon us - but the limiting factor in human society won't be sunlight.
IMO, the best use for biofuels will be on farms, i.e., farmers' coops grow and process their own biodisel. Rudolph Disesel designed his engine to run on vegetable oil.
The key question for us, IMO, is how do we use our remaining fossil fuel resources? Do we try to keep the fantasy of infinite expansion going, or do we do, as Alan Drake pointed out, what the Swiss did in the Second World War--Electrification Of Transportation (EOT)?
If we did it in 1908, why can't we do it in 2008?
Streetcars 100 Years Ago
http://www.familyoldphotos.com/tx/2c/chadbourne_street_trolley_san_anthem
From "American Anthem,"
"What shall be our legacy, what will our children say"
Good going Robert,
and now an idea from the funny farm ... double track the continent and run the whole business on solar power. When the sun shines the trains go, when the sun goes down the crew gets a good night rest or a fiesta. It would mean the end of Yanqui get up and go and one might have to employ those more interested in manana but maybe that has been the big problem with the world anyway too busy rushing to tomorrow rather than enjoying the day.
Yes to Alan Drake`s electric rail as long as it is run more on fresh than on canned heat.
The real economy is planetary and we move outside of that at our peril. (actually there I think we are down the spout anyway, but am hoping for your 'best wishes' anyway Alan).
For the most part, it wasn't until fairly late in the passenger rail era that people would or could travel overnight. Most often, you would go however far you could go in a day, and then stay in the "Station Hotel" overnight. A journey across the continent might take a week or more of one-day hops like that.
One "item of dispute" that I have with what I call "diesel Amtrak" supporters is sleeper & (to a lesser extent) diner cars.
Using either high density (88 seats from memory) or low density (66 seats, more legroom) pax rail cars are more efficient than airliners, even with low loading %.
OTOH sleepers (24 pax) and diners (0 pax) are not as efficient as their stationary on-grid alternatives (hotels & restaurants).
Today it takes less energy to fly cross country, eat in a restaurant & sleep in a hotel than to take Amtrak cross-country in a sleeper w/diner. Electrification will close that gap, but 14.5 hours of travel and 9.5 hours of stops/day may be the economy way to travel long distances in the future. And with an average speed of, say 86 mph (CSX proposed DC to Miami), that is about 3 days from NYC to LA.
At the B&O museum in Baltimore, they had a painting titled "20 minutes to eat" as passengers rushed off a train towards a dining establishment.
Best Hopes,
Alan
I like trains, but I have some doubts about their efficiency for passenger travel. For both intermediate and long distances, both in the US and in Europe, taking the train is usually significantly more expensive (vs. planes). The higher cost must at least partially reflect higher operating costs (roughly proportional to energy). That trains can run on electricity is clearly an advantage, but from a purely energetic perspective, including the energy requirements of building and maintaining the tracks I doubt their superiority.
Expectations may be largely to blame. We expect to be packed tightly into planes and tolerate it because the trip is short. On trains we expect diners, sleepers, wide seats,...
Probably the cheapest, and lowest energy consumption mode is a hybrid (or PHEV) fully packed with passengers. IIRC, planes get about 50 MPG, so a Prius (at 45MPG) with 5 passengers is 4.5x as good.
The advantage of trains of relatively easy electrification. We have plenty of electricity, and it can come from renewables, so that's an enormous advantage.
Once we get into serious oil shortages, roads in winter, will not be plowed, salted, paved, and will be much more expensive to maintain then railway systems.
That is why we need to get over our auto, bus desires now, and do some future railroad preparations.
DocScience
I wonder about that too. The costs of repaving roads will escalate, and they will ultimately go back to gravel roads in some areas.
I wonder about thinks like bike paths too. If we cannot afford to maintain them, then will bicycle commuting be a viable alternative?
Bike paths will not be worn down and broken up by heavy vehicles, they will just weather away (and have grass grow over). They are narrower and require less underpavement.
Some concrete Roman roads stayed usable for 1,500 years. Cobblestone bike paths can last forever.
Best Hopes for usable bike paths,
Alan
Technically cobblestone would last forever, but you couldn't ride very fast on it. For the purposes of commuting any distance, you need a decent surface so you can get it up to a decent speed.
You could, but it is very difficult - just ask anyone who has competed in the Paris-Roubaix race.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris-Roubaix
I've driven over a Roman-built stone BRIDGE in Provence that's over 2000 years old, and still in daily use.
--C
Energy consultant, writer, blogger www.getreallist.com
"Once we get into serious oil shortages, roads in winter, will not be plowed, salted, paved, and will be much more expensive to maintain then railway systems. "
Plowing and salting can be done with electric vehicles. Paving can be concrete (asphalt & concrete lifecycle costs are essentially the same (+- 5%), according to tradegroups for both industries). I see no advantage for rail maintenance from declining oil.
Snow plows cannot be electrified. TOO much energy required too quickly.
Rail maintenance should be much easier than road maintenance post-Peak Oil. Most rail maintenance is labor with minimal materials (gravel mainly, some concrete ties).
Alan
"Snow plows cannot be electrified. TOO much energy required too quickly."
hmmm. Do you mean peak KW? I don't see the problem: it's perfectly easy to get the equivalent of 400HP (or more) from an electric motor (and batteries), and low-speed torque would be much better than with an ICE. Heck, electric motors can be scaled to whatever size needed. Li-ion batteries in the size we'd be looking at could supply that much power (300 KW ), easily. As far as carrying enough batteries: these are trucks, so our design parameters are pretty wide; they're fleet vehicles, making battery charging or replacement feasible; and they don't have to have a very long range, for suburban roads.
What am I missing?
"Rail maintenance should be much easier than road maintenance post-Peak Oil. "
How would PPO make concrete road maintenance harder (assuming electrified vehicles)?
Also, highway snow removal operations generally do not require a plow to push a wall of snow in front of them if done right. Beat times & de-icing application rates can be geared towards incremental removal rather than thinking about pushing an entire snowfall in a single pass.
I'd guess higher peak power demand would occur in urban areas where this approach becomes more complicated.
Or remote Suburban/Exurban roads. Like the cul-de-sacs in front of McMansions (ever really looked at just how MANY sq ft of asphalt there is there for a half dozen homes ?)
TOD type build-up areas should require about <1% to 4% of the street clearing/capita required by suburbs.
Alan
Road maintenance is almost always done today with asphalt, which can be upgraded to diesel fuel.
Even Interstate highways are overlaid with asphalt on top of their original concrete construction.
Alan
Electrify the streets and put a bigass electric motor in the snow plow. What's the problem? Let's reinvent the trolley system for urban environments and people can save their battery for offgridding.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
Yes I'm completely sick of hearing how we can make, billion watt wind mills, electric aircraft carriers and space shuttles, cover California with solar panels connected to a grid which supplies the world etc. etc etc. blah, blah, blah.
I bet they all have bunkers somewhere stuffed with food for years. They think they are so smart.
I bet they have a windmill and a few solar panels and think they are safe from any calamity and so they feel justified in preaching absolute BS to us all.
The reality is, what is possible to build and what can happen is so far removed from what will happen, that it would be laughable if it wasn't so serious.
I say to all the electric jackasses to get off and come back when the first commercial electric combine harvester, crop duster, bull dozer or fertilizer plant is constructed. Oh yeah and make sure that they are completely manufactured using "renewable" electric power.
Or in the very least when they tell us what can be built, how about explaining, who, where and when it will be made and why it WILL happen.
Normally, on trains matters - I'd not question your claim.
But "Can not"? Electric motors can be made to do the job. Perhaps none are being used now due to the problem of getting large amount of current you'd need to move the mass of snow. What with the energy density of oil....why engineer for current you only need a few times?
Actually, traction applications seem pretty good for even lead-acid batteries. I expect this could move a little snow. I expect the hold up is charge times. But, since plows return for salt loads, having a battery swap at the salt dome ought to fix that.
Chris
Although I have little personal experience with snow removal, it obviously requires shifting many tons/minute up and over by blowing or shoving. Assuming relatively low efficiency for this mass transfer, I think this "battery swap" concept would require a separate crew constantly shuttling a huge inventory of batteries (under less than ideal conditions) out to remote suburbs. And many battery types could not stand the quick drawdown required.
I have this image of a crew trying to exchange 500 lb battery packs on the side of an icy hill in blowing snow, with random bits of ice & snow potentially shorting out or blocking the exchange. And then doing it again in an hour or so.
Using #1 diesel seems the preferred solution.
Clearing train tracks is a well known and developed technology with specialized equipment.
Alan
Salt domes are covered because you want to keep the rain off the salt. The backhoe I linked to runs six hours on a charge and earth is much heavier than snow. I don't think you'd deliver batteries to trucks, the trucks would go to the batteries. You might be right about a crew though. There are options for fast charging so you'd want to look at how that works out. To me, the interesting thing is that for transportation, you want to boost the power-to-weight ratio as much as you can, but for traction applications there is an added consideration that you want lot's of weight. The backhoe went for a gel battery but not Li ion. That helps to keep it from tipping if it catches on a root or from slipping when it is pushing.
Hope you have a really great time in Houston.
Chris
One quibble. A backhoe moves just a few tons of dirt/hour. A snow plow/blower moves many thousands of tons of snow/hour (heavily dependent on how much fell). #1 diesel still looks good.
Alan
The tax delta on ROW is a large part of the cost difference (if any). I am paying $46 to go from New Orleans to Houston for ASPO conference. Cheapest Southwest flight was $76 (and that was before recent fare increase).
I last checked "diesel Amtrak" (minus NorthEast Corridor) fuel mileage about 3 years ago (pre-K). With 55% load factor (45% seats empty) and "all types", they had 86 pax-miles/gallon.
Modern track should last about a half century with heavy use (but not SUPER heavy use like Powder River Basin coal hauling). Labor for maintenance.
Rail has a fairly steep economy of scale. Run more, cheaper/unit.
Best Hopes,
Alan
Hi,
" it wasn't until fairly late in the passenger rail era that people would or could travel overnight."
Define Late. The first sleepers were built in 1839. Dining cars also date to that period. Pullman began building sleepers in 1867.
It was just more expensive. That why Middletown NY was famous for it's lunch room on the NYO&W.
Charles
Then let's re-define "people" as that 80+% of the traveling public that couldn't afford the more expensive accomodations.
The fact remains that the vast majority of passenger rail traffic consisted of daytime-only hops. Remember, too, that we didn't have Amtrak back then, we had a network of railroads run by dozens, if not hundreds, of companies. One could only go so far with one company, then one would reach the end of the line and have to transfer to another line -- which often wouldn't be leaving the station until the next morning. One could take a long haul route from, say, Chicago to Seattle, and undoubtedly there were Pullmans for the well-to-do; one could not travel straight through from NYC to Seattle, and in fact one still cannot. The majority of the population before WWII lived in small towns or on farms, not cities. It would typically take at least two or three train changes to get from Podunkville to anyplace farther than a state or two away. A trip more than a few hundred miles would indeed often require an overnight stay in a station hotel. (Or an overnight stay on a bench at the station!)
Maybe it's time to resurrect the idea of the WWII Victory Garden only this time we could grow biofuel plants in our own suburban yards. That represents a lot of acreage in the USA. That would put Kunstler to shame wouldn't it?
I considered it, but came to the conclusion that I would have to dedicate about 500 sf of garden space just to produce 1 gal of sunflower oil. That represents most of my "acreage", and wouldn't put anyone but myself to shame.
Because we are already well into primary resource depletion, primary energy depletion, topsoil depletion, water shortages, overpopulation, all still being carried by infrastructure dependence on petroleum.
It is not too late to implement Alan Drake's EOT plan, but it will entail hard decisions we are not making, nor do we appear willing to make. With energy and resources strained by a population of 6.6 billion growing by 200K per day, on a highly interdependent global economy, funneling energy toward infrastructure replacement and redevelopment will take energy and resources away from everything else. Less energy and resources will be available for maintaining quality of life and lifestyle, less available for other energy initiatives, possibly less enough that the population declines.
And think about that last part for a moment. Even a controlled population decline means either the birthrate declines or the death rate increases. This means either telling people, "you can't have as many children as you want, no matter where you live," or "we cannot help these sick or starving people, and must let them die".
And also because "we" didn't "do it" in 1908. A section of the world's population accomplished this based on the motivation and infrastructure available at the time. Globally, we have neither the motivation nor infrastructure to accomplish EOT at this late date with strained resources, without making some very hard choices.
...funneling energy toward infrastructure replacement and redevelopment will take energy and resources away from everything else. Less energy and resources will be available for maintaining quality of life and lifestyle, less available for other energy initiatives...
We cannot "crash everything" (as in build ALL options simultaneously ASAP). Unfortunately we CAN "crash everything" as in our environment and society.
My greatest fear is a massive effort to build CTL (coal-to-liquids) as a PO response.
I compare mountain-top removal, strip mining in general, spoil piles and Global Warming to the French trams that I posted on the Oct. 2 Drumbeat and sigh.
Will be run towards beauty and life or destruction and death in our panic ?
Best Hopes,
Alan
O R
No, we cannot engage on a "crash" program on all available options. But if we pick one available option, like EOT, at this late date, under already increasingly strained global resources, then at least one of the following is guaranteed to happen:
1. Other alternative energy options do not get the resources they need for research and development. We cannot have crash programs in ethanol, nuclear, wind farms, CSP, and EOT all at the same time -- there isn't the available energy or resources to accomplish all of those and maintain energy and resource investment in everything else we're currently doing. If we wanted a crash program in nuclear and EOT, even more energy and resources are not available to the rest of the system. Nuclear, wind farms, and EOT, still more energy and resources not available to the rest of the system.
2. Way of life or lifestyle, however you want to phrase it, will decline for a large section of the population -- huge sections of the economy responsible for supplying a given lifestyle will implode and fold. Apple: sorry you can't make iPods anymore; Microsoft: sorry, but you must stick with Windows 2000 and Windows XP, no other operating systems are to be developed, sold, or supported; auto industry: sorry but all cars sold must get at least 45 MPG starting next year; homeowners: sorry but you will only be apportioned 2 kilowatt hours per day per person; consumers: sorry but you cannot spend more than $500 on any item other than transportation, housing, and necessities, and big-screen TVs don't count.
3. Quality of life will decline for large sections of the population, possibly to the point of death, as is happening in Zimbabwe and Iraq currently -- there aren't enough energy and resources to "do the job right" or "fix the problem", and people suffer and die because of it. Regardless of whether or not either of the situations in Zimbabwe or Iraq were "caused" by peak oil or energy depletion, energy and resource depletion are preventing any functional addressing of the situation which would "solve" the problem to alleviate suffering and misery or stave off death, because we are spending those energy and resources elsewhere.
At this late date, we must make hard choices to implement any solution or any basket of solutions.
Committing to a given set of solutions is the first hard part, which we have not yet done.
Committing to the consequences of our solution-set is the second hard part, about which we aren't yet even thinking.
Alan, that was a powerful post. It strikes me as powerful enough to be the cornerstone of advocacy for your plan. As in, that would be the first thing to greet people on a website about the electrified rail build-out plan.
"funneling energy toward infrastructure replacement and redevelopment will take energy and resources away from everything else. "
True, but some of the things we use energy for now are very marginal, low value things.
The best example is single occupancy commuting. We could reduce gasoline usage by 25% in 6 months with mandatory car-pooling. It would be less convenient, but everybody would get to work.
Trying to shove the sun through a corn cob is silly. Most organism live within a solar budget. So can we.
Here is a video of an electric pod system that has delivered 110 million injury free passenger miles. Solar collectors integrated into lighter networks can create energy neutral mobility:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPOXfMKE50M
'I also believe that if most people understood that we are pushing a very serious problem onto our children....'
At least in American terms, you are joking, right? American society has been doing nothing but pushing problems onto their children ever since the baby boom entered childbearing age - in part, ironically, because the baby boom's parents seemed determined to push any problems away from their children. And ever since, the baby boom has been happy to let anyone else deal with the problems, as long as they don't.
The people in positions of political and economic power in America have no problem pushing problems onto anyone beneath them, much less caring about children. Just look at how debt has become integral to America's economic functioning, for example, and especially at how laws against usury and bankruptcy have been 'reformed' so as to ensure that there are minimal barriers to creating a class of what may become permanently indebted Americans - why just stop at a company town and company store when you can have the whole thing?
And since there is no reason to rant about America and children (especially suburban children), let's just say those most wedded to fossil fuel powered transportation are the ones most convinced that only a suburban lifestyle keeps their children safe from all the danger in the world.
An absurd and doomed perspective.
As is the idea that the current American and (and to a lesser extent - much lesser extent) European economies can be sustained with minimal tweaking. This is one of the less noted distinctions when calling people 'doomers' - I pretty much think our plastic wrapped, fossil fueled consumer societies are doomed.
Which would be a general improvement, in my eyes.
Expat,
Regarding,"The people in positions of political and economic power in America have no problem pushing problems onto anyone beneath them, much less caring about children."
It is shameful how correct your statement is,,and even more shamefull that current voting generations in America do not have the courage, insight or wherewithal to demand fiscal and policy discipline.
It seems even the notion of sacrifice for the betterment of future generations has become a humorous anachronism of the 1950's.
We are those future generations, did your idea that sacrifice for future generations is a good thing bear acceptable fruit?
I would prefer to leave the problems for the future generations, It will give the a chance to show how creative and resourceful they can be since they haven't shown much sofar.
As a high school teacher, I am around young people all the time, both present students and former students. I am not as pessimistic about the young as you seem to be. I am going to a film tonight about permaculture, and the kids who are putting it on are in their 20's. Two of them run organic farms with CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) programs. Some of these same kids just got through staging a DIY festival where they practiced barter, staged workshops on parenting, gardening, etc., and established community connections that might be called “off the grid.”
That is, they are not waiting on government or “adults” to save them. They are proactive. The local biofuels co-op is run by young people as well.
Point being, your broad brushstrokes can’t cover all the young!
bosuncookie
Welcome to The Oil Drum! Thank you for your service to our society! Its really great that you take an interest in what your students are doing, and to hear that they are doing positive things with their lives, they sound like a good bunch of young people
But, most people are wonderful but they act according to other people's expectations of them. If I treat them with dignity and respect I get a much better response than when I put them down . Its important for me to remember that, I live in a mixed neigborhood in the city of Galveston, Texas, which is a tourist town 50 miles southeast of Houston. I'm 4 blocks from the ocean, and we have young people coming to visit and play down here all the time. I enjoy watching them because of their energy, and visiting with them. Bob Ebersole
Thanks for the welcome. I've been lurking for a number of months, just trying to learn. Which--by the way--is the same reason I went to the permaculture film. It just happened to be organized by the younger set, and I went to the presentation to gain insight about the practice. From what I read on this site, we're gonna need it!
I believe our generation faces a sobering choice: Take serious steps to reduce our fossil fuel usage now - and this will undoubtedly entail some amount of hardship - or leave it to our children to face a great deal of hardship.
That decision has already been made.
Robert,
Thanks once again for finding and publishing this paper in a form simple enough for a liberal arts major to understand. I question some of the assumptions about oil and gas production, though.
As our frind Westexas has pointed out, the production history of Texas and of the United States is enough further along the Hubbert process that it can almost be viewed as a method of spot checking Hubbert's methodology. The comparison ain't so hot for King Hubbert, though IMHO, which will get him arguing with me.
In the US we have produced approximately 272 billion barrels of oil since oil was produced for fuel in about 1860 (lamp kerosene)source: US Dept of Energy paper 10 Basin-Oriented Strategies for CO2 enhanced recovery, big PDF. Historicially, over 1/3rd of the produced oil was discovered in reservoirs before the invention of modern geophysics. The basic tools, seismic refraction and electric well logs weren't common until after WWII. Well logs were invented by the Schlumberger family in the mid 1930's, and seismic was cutting-edge until the late 1940's. It took modern computers to make seismic really effective, to be able to survey well bottomhole locations as the well was drilling, and provide real-time monitoring of downhole pressures during production and all the improvements to the total recovery percentages of the original oil in place(OOIP).
According to the DOE and also the University of Texas Bureau of Economic Geology this early recovery from primary drive was only about 10% of the OOIP. So if these guys are right, the original endowment of oil in the US was 2.7 trillion barrels of oil, but we have recovered 272 Billion barrels, leaving stranded oil in the US at about 2.4 trillion barrels in conventional oil in old oil fields.
The depths are shallow. The oil industry was only able to consistently drill below 10,000 feet after about 1970, and we discovered virtually all the US onshore oil production by 1970. Most of the field's weren't even waterflooded, as waterflood was not and economic proposition before the first OPEC embargo lifted the price of crude.
But production recovery has made huge strides. The eengineers think they are getting 50% of the OOIP off new fields and extensions discovered today, and may be able to get as much as 65% of the OOIP before production collapses. Think about this a minute, if a province the size of the US were discovered today, the ultimate recovery would be about 1.35 trillion barrels of oil, while we only recovered 272 Billion barrels, so we have a target of 1 trillion barrels of oil which can be produced in the US in the future, and even more worldwide.
This isn't cheap oil. We lost that opportunity when the early pressures were dissipated with wasteful production practices. But at $80/bbl its darn sure worth doing.
Its ridiculous to think we will be able to produce this oil at the same rates as the oil we produced with primary production, but with the right production techniques we should be able to get 2 or 3 million barrels a day lifted and sold. So we have a real problem, "its not the size of the tank, its the size of the tap" (Steve Andrews, ASPO-USA). We can concievably get production from all sources up to about 40% of the US useage where we run into a brick wall.
The only solution is massive conservation, combined with rapid change to sustainable energy-solar, wind and water. Its time to refurbish our railroads and turn them electric, and to make the car companies change to electric and electric hybrids and extend mileage radically. And, we have to do something about climate change, too. And fast, if we're not already too late.
Our Fearless Decider, President George W. Bush (sarcanol alert) wants to blame the non-OECD countries for the massively accelerating climate change due to their using coal and flaring natural gas in production. That's easy to do if you are rich, but half the world is very poor, and 1 person in 6 lives in a hut without electricity or clean water and without any hope for themselves or their children. How can you care about CO2 emmissions when you live on less than $2.00/day per capita? Its obvious that if we want to save the world, we have to help them leap-frog fossil fuels to sustainable fuels and do it for all of our sakes without reguard for immediate profits. That's also the answer to terrorism-suicide bombers are depressed, hopeless people, not the sons and daughters with education and a future. And its the answer to population, too. Educated people with women who are empowered don't have another baby for a free field hand until the kid is 20.
So there is an answer. But its not unrestrained cartels destroying the earth for the immediate profits of the owning class, we are going to have to act from our best impulses, which shouldn't include greed. It really isn't good.
Let's start at home, we need Alan Drake's Electrification of Rail immediately!
Bob Ebersole
I disagree and agree.
First, I believe that total US crude oil production is closer to about 200 Gb.
In regard to secondary and tertiary recovery techniques, most of the big fields, especially in Texas, have had extensive enhanced techniques used, plus 3D seismic and horizontal drilling--all the high tech goodies that the industry has come up with, and there have virtually no restrictions on drilling locations in Texas.
Result? Texas crude oil production has dropped at about 4% per year since 1972.
I think that we need to differentiate between making money and making a real difference. The real boom in the energy business has not yet started. IMO, it's going to get really, really crazy, as we see a desperate across the board push to bring on new and old supplies of energy.
Subject to fuel, personnel and equipment limitations, we can and will make money finding new fields and doing a better job of recovering oil from older fields, but will it make a material difference? IMO, the answer is no. IMO, the best we can do is to slow the rate of long term decline. If the oil industry has not been able to reverse the Texas and North Sea production declines, where would they be able to reverse a long term decline?
I didn't see where Bob said production could be increased from current levels. What I read was that production could be held, long term, at around 2-3 mbpd, with oil at or above $80/bbl. So far as I can tell, you could both be entirely correct.
WT,
Isn't it fair to say that prices have been at the current level for only about 3 years? It seemed to me that Bob was not talking about cheap oil, but oil that becomes feasible at current prices. Doesn't that make a difference?
"Doesn't that make a difference?"
No.
The problem that we had in the Seventies was offsetting the declines from the old large oil fields like East Texas.
The problem that the Saudis have today is offsetting the declines from the old large fields like North Ghawar.
Peak Oil is the story of the rise and fall of the large fields.
Post-peak, we can and do find smaller fields and we can increase the recovery factors in older fields. But consider Texas (peaked in 1972) and the North Sea (peaked in 1999). Both regions were developed by private companies, using the best available technology. Texas has declined at about 4%/year, the North Sea at about 4.5%/year.
The critical point that I am trying to get across is that you should not let the energy industry's enthusiasm for the possibilities that $100 plus oil offers, insofar as new/old projects are concerned, blind you to the mathematical inevitability of Peak Oil/Peak Exports.
I'm not asking if dramatically higher oil prices can prevent global peaking, I'm asking how much effect they'll have in the US.
You and Bob agree that that it will have SOME effect. We know that the Texas decline happened during a period of price controls in the 70's, and low prices ever since (until lately).
So, could you hazard a guess as to the effect of high prices on trends in US oil production? .1% reduction in the decline rate? 1%? Stabilization for some years?
Nick,
Both WT and I are saying that its not the size of the tank, its the size of the tap. I'm not sure at what level oil will stablize, perhaps it will even be higher than today. I think I'm more optimisic than he, but his scientific and mathematical skills overwhelm mine. All that's easily proven. Sure, higher prices will make some oil economic that was'nt economic before.
The problem isn't having enough places to drill or fields to reenter because of low prices, the problem is that the average production of wells in Texas is down to slightly over 6 barrels a day, according to the production statistics on the Railroad Commission of Texas website. We have just plain used up all the good places to develop new fields in America. I can show you a couple if you come to Houston in couple of weeks, but they're scarce in the US.
And working over wells that come in at 50 bbls/day, but decline to 5 barrels a day in five years is only adding a few more barrels for a few more years. You'll have to take my word for this, but a low producing well in an old field is always a lot more trouble to produce than a new one in a new field. They're like old cars that way.Look at the trouble BP is having on the North Slope with pipeline corrosion problems. Higher prices might give them money to fix the flow lines, but its not going to affect the lower oil/higher water cut that's the cause of the problem.
Westexas thinks the slope is going to be more cliff-like when the world hits a 65% total delpetion. I think its going to be more gentle. He derives his slopes from
manipulating the figures of M. King Hubbard, which are elegant, mines more of a bottom up inspired Scientific Wild-Ass Guess.
Where we are in total agreement is that it just plain crazy not to change to electric everything as quickly as possible. We have 6.5 billion living people on our planet, and is going to be 9 billion by 2030. And, they all want a home with electricity and a car, and it looks like we're at peak production.
Westexas likes pretty curves on either an oil province or a pretty girl, I like 'em better on just the girls. I also think they're both going to be fatter in 35 years,
Bob Ebersole
WT,
I'm pretty good at romantic poetry and philosophy, but my math and science were disgustingly week.
The name of the paper I got a bunch of this stuff from was"Ten Basin Oriented Assessments Examine Strategies for Increasing Possible Oil Production" published a couple of years ago and available at
http://www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/oilgas/publications/eorco2
Hope that gets you there.
The report has more than a few problems. I looked at the section "East and Central Texas", which for some reason combines the Gulf Coast, East Texas and Anadarko Basins in such a manner that its obvious that the guys who wrote the report know zip about Texas oil production. As WT can testify, the Anadarko Basin is Paleozoic, East Texas proper is Cretateous and the Gulf Coast is Eocene,Miocene and if you count the oil spills in the Port of Houston as a resource, Plio-Pliestocene and Holocene. The main thing all these areas have in common is they aren't in the Permian Basin. They even included two fields as tertiary production candidates that are impossible to produce because of surface conflicts. The Humble Field which is north of 1960 and just a little NW of the airport is one-it sets alongside Lake Houston and you can't drill wells that threaten water quality for that lake, it provides at least 1/4th the water for the City of Houston, try getting a permit there. The other field like that is South Houston which was an old Standard of Indiana field at the College Avenue exit off I-45 South and can't be produced because of the urbanisation. Do you want to pay for a water disposal truck stuck in rush hour traffic as you haul your water to the disposal well at Conroe Field? I thought not.
But my conclusions are just about the same as yours, WT. Its going to make a substantial difference as we change away from fossil fuel, but we sure can't count on being able to produce more than two or three million barrels a day long term in the US in conventional oil. And its also going to help our path to change, but we're still going to have to conserve and change as quickly as possible.
We can count on that oil. It's crazy to pretend all oil is going away permanently, because we'll be producing it for another 50 years at least. That's not quite as crazy as pretending that the US is going to produce twice as much oil in 2030 by tertiary methods as it produced by conventional methods which is the claim of the National Petroleum Council, but its crazy none the less. The truth lies between the extremes. I thought the doomer orgy yesterday was disgusting and just fed people's fears without steering them to the real things we can all do to help. No joke, Alan's plan is necessary, and I know we are in 100% agreement on that. No joke, CAFE standards that make the US give up its addiction to internal combustion engines for hybrid and electric cars is the only way to save our society.And, no joke we are all going to have to work.
The 10% figure came from a paper from Galloway and Fisher "Potential for additional oil recovery in Texas" and published by the University of Texas Bureau of Economic Geology about 1980. I lost my copy in one divorce or another, but I'm sure its available, they even xerox old reports like that for a nominal fee. I'll see if I can get us one before ASPO in Houston.I'm really looking forward to hearing you and Khebab on the Export Land theory. It was amazing watching the look of shock on the CNBC reporters face's this morning as they began to grasp its meaning. I think peak oil slapped them with a 2X4 upside the head before 9AM Eastern Standard Time.
Grey Zone, that's as good as you are going to get out of me for back-up. Why the hostile tone? I've never done anything to you to deserve it, anymore than the rest of the people I've seen you lash out at. If you ask a civil question about my reasoning I'll do the best I can to give a civil and complete answer, with which you are perfectly welcome to agree or disagree. But, I'm not going to get in an arguement with you, its not worth the trouble Bob Ebersole
Bob, do you think it's possible, or likely, for US production to increase from current levels?
WT,
One other you mentioned that needs to be adressed. You stated " most of the big fields, especially in Texas, have had etensive enhansive techniqus used, plus 3D seismic and horizontal drilling-all the high tech goodies that the industry has come up with and there are virtually no restrictions on drilling locations in Texas". Thats true in the Permian Basin, but not so true on the Gulf Coast.
Its a result of exploration history. The electric well log was invented in 1935, and only became common after WW II. Before that, geologists used drillers logs, or written records of the formations encountered rather that identification of the formations by their electrical charicteristics. The same with seismic, it only was developed in the 1930's and the gravity meter in the 1920's. Before then prospects were identified by surface indications and shows in water wells-gas bubbling, a sheen of oil on the local creek or "sour dirt", dirt that smells a little sulfurous.
The Gulf Coast was developed more thoroughly, earlier than any other part of the state because it had water transport to sell the oil. Tankers could dock at Baytown where the Humble Company set up the refinerie, or at Port Arthur where the Texas Company (Texaco) and the J.M. Guffey Company (Gulf, now part of Chevron-Texaco) could ship their petrochemicals by sea and crude up to New York.B The fields were developed earlier, mishandled and sold to stripper operators on a quicker schedule than fields discovered later. By the time of the first OPEC Embargo, the majors only retained a few fields on the Gulf Coast, places like Thompsons, Conroe, Webster aka Friendswood, Hastings, Mannville (all Humble Fields). They moved off shore and in to gas exploration, or to West Texas to the Permian Basin or other parts of the world.
The major project generators in the oil patch have always been Geologists, Geophysicists and Landmen. Engineers keep us actually making money, and the Accountants keep us honest, at least sometimes. Prospect generation is a learned skill, and geologists and geophysicists were taught this skill at big oil companies. Landmen, since we rely on the science of closeology and the law of capture, mostly acquire the skill when we learn to read production reports.
I got to the oil patch in the late 1970's, although I was raised around it and knew many operators most of my life. In about 1975 the Alcorn brothers fracked as stripper well near the Giddings air field and it came on at 350 bbls a day of light, sweet crude and the boom was on. I was out there almost immediately and working on it through the early 1980's, and so was every other Gulf Coast Lease Broker, just like the Barnett Shale has soaked up all the landmen in north-east Texas. All the Gulf Coast prospects got put on the back burner. Also, almost all of the Gulf Coast oil has been discovered at shallow depths. The deepest practical exploration before 1965 and the domestic downturn that we were hired after was about 10,000 ft. The majors had begun their move overseas and the discovery of Ghawar with huge supply behind the pipes both domesticially and overseas meant the big guys no longer could make money at shallow fields onshore. They sold as strippers wells in all fields that they didn't control 100%.
Then we had the first Arab Oil Embargo, and Nixon, together with the Congress imposed price controls on US field followed by the Windfall Profits Tax. The practical effect was that the big oil companies concentrated on looking for natural gas, and looking in Wildcat areas where the W.P.T. didn't apply. There was a lull in shallow salt dome development on the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast that has only now begun to change at all, but very few professionals remember how to generate prospects on these areas. The stuff that was profitable at $1.60 oil has been depleted, but not replaced. The trends that should be profitable below 5,000 ft have never been explored, and the geologists, geophysicists and engineers that should have learned how to work these incredibly complex structures for oil know how to work on Miocene leases offshore for gas, but don't know anything about onshore reservoirs with small surface areas but fantastic production- a million barrels an acre in places. Its a real opportunity down here, and even in some shallow sands in fields in the Fort Worth Basin. But on the Gulf Coast of Texas there are probably 200 shallow salt dome fields that could use another look. The deeper fields have been picked over pretty much, but places like Brookshire Dome in Austin Couunty, or High Island in Galveston County are seeing new activity, I've seen the rigs. Bob Ebersole
Point #1 - Source for your 272 GB, please? Give me the URL, please, not a text description that does not even appear to be accurate.
Point #2 - your assumption of 2.4 TB OOIP is not supported by any source which I can find anywhere. So again, I ask for your source, please, as I find this number incredible (as in not believable).
Point #3 - if your numbers are fundamentally wrong, your conclusion is invalid. Of course, you've already dismissed anyone who sees a darker future than you as "engaged in fantasy". I am now waiting for you to start calling Robert names.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
bad day?
Rail electrification: We do not need local rail because we can use PHEV cars. But we do need rail electrification for longer distance travel.
Transit Orientated Development uses significantly less energy, and TOD needs Urban Rail. About 30% of Americans want to move to TOD, a large energy savings (less than 2% do today).
PHEV still use gasoline (or diesel) and Suburbia takes lots of FF to support (garbage pickup, policing, postal & UPS delivery, snow removal, plumbers, street lighting, repairing streets & sewers, grocery stocking, heating and cooling large surface areas w/o common walls).
Best Hopes for a Flight from Suburbia,
Alan
Alan, I think rail is a much safer, easier way to travel, and it will provide some energy savings, but I've got to note my usual objections to a suggestion that peak oil will greatly reduce the attractions of suburbia for most people.
"About 30% of Americans want to move to TOD, a large energy savings (less than 2% do today)."
Yes, but they're not ready to pay the much higher living costs associated with dense urban living.
"PHEV still use gasoline (or diesel) "
Only as much as you want to use. A PHEV-40 would allow electricity to power all local movement.
" Suburbia takes lots of FF to support "
Not necessarily. "garbage pickup, policing, postal & UPS delivery, snow removal, plumbers...repairing streets & sewers, grocery stocking" can all be done with PHEV/EV's, and there isn't a dramatic difference in VMT for some of these: police VMT is higher per capita in dense cities. "street lighting" is electric.
"heating and cooling large surface areas w/o common walls)." can be done with heat pumps, and much more easily in suburbs. In fact, dense urban areas are going to be at a disadvantage, as they will HAVE to use FF's for heating, and won't be able to take much advantage of PV (when it becomes cheaper than utility power, as it will eventually).
Suburban residents will have transitional costs to electrify, but those costs are much lower than moving to and building in dense urban areas.
Again, I like rail, especially for commuting and travel between city centers, but I think dark predictions for suburbia are just unrealistic.
Sadly, I think some CTL is likely, though I think PHEV's will be the primary response, as I don't see any government assistance to CTL as likely, and it may even be held back by carbon limits of some sort (after January 21st, 2009, of course).
Yes, but they're not ready to pay the much higher living costs associated with dense urban living
I disagree with this analysis. Cities are overtaxed to support the Suburbs, but this is an unfair subsidy not inherent to "dense" Urban Living.
Given the capital cost for high rise buildings, this MIGHT overwhelm the other savings in very dense areas. But in slightly lower density areas
http://images.nycsubway.org/i62000/img_62964.jpg
the costs should be close to a wash. Housing costs more because it is more desirable and scarce (supply & demand) and not for innate reasons. Flood the market with "T" and the scarcity premium for TOD will shrink dramatically.
I am certain that it costs less to live in the Lower Garden District of New Orleans than in Metairie or across the lake in Covington even today.
BTW: EVs cannot do snow removal (FAR too energy dense work for batteries !), PHEVs make little sense for a typical Suburban Police Patrol schedule and EVs make none. 90% of TOD cops can be biking or walking.
CHG (Central Heating & Generation) units are common in the EU and wells can be drilled VERY deep to extract heat (or dump heat in the summer) for a large # of residences/offices/retail. CHG only works in fairly dense Urban areas.
Heat Pumps give a limited advantage (say 3 to 1) over other means of heat (say Natural Gas). If the heating requirements for an isolated McMansion is ten times that of a well insulated condo (reasonable), then the advantage of a ground source heat pumps disappears. And the Condo Association may join a CHG plant nearby.
I doubt that we can convince one another.
Best Hopes,
Alan
"Cities are overtaxed to support the Suburbs, but this is an unfair subsidy not inherent to "dense" Urban Living."
How are cities taxed to support the Suburbs, and if so, by how much (roughly)?
" in slightly lower density areas the costs should be close to a wash."
Where in France is that image from? The tram does look nice...
"Housing costs more because it is more desirable and scarce (supply & demand) and not for innate reasons."
Here is an important point of contention: density causes land prices to rise, and makes housing much more expensive to buy. It doesn't matter why, it only matters that it's true, and that makes moving from low-density suburbs to high-density cities very, very expensive.
"Flood the market with "T" and the scarcity premium for TOD will shrink dramatically."
Only if you build out into the far suburbs! Adding "T" to a dense city won't reduce housing prices.
"I am certain that it costs less to live in the Lower Garden District of New Orleans than in Metairie or across the lake in Covington even today. "
Is the Lower Garden District of New Orleans really high density? The city of NO overall is very low density, on the order of most suburbs elsewhere, even after subtracting the park.
"EVs cannot do snow removal " - see my other note.
"PHEVs make little sense for a typical Suburban Police Patrol schedule "
How do you mean? The average suburb isn't all that big, and the traffic isn't all that fast, and the average PO probably doesn't drive more than 80 miles in a shift. More importantly, they don't drive any more than city cops.
"CHG (Central Heating & Generation) units are common in the EU and wells can be drilled VERY deep to extract heat (or dump heat in the summer) for a large # of residences/offices/retail. CHG only works in fairly dense Urban areas."
Hmmm. District heating? Typically that's still FF based, so that doesn't fix the problem. Further, you're talking about a lot of extra investment, to retrofit urban housing for these. That doesn't sound any easier than heat pumps for the suburbs. hmmm. Is it really practical to drill geo-exchange heat pump systems in dense urban areas? I've been told by people in the UK that it isn't.
"Heat Pumps give a limited advantage (say 3 to 1) over other means of heat (say Natural Gas). "
Ah, but the point is that heat pumps are electric, and overall cost less than FF based systems even today.
"If the heating requirements for an isolated McMansion is ten times that of a well insulated condo (reasonable), "
But it won't be 10x per square foot. And if it's electric, it no longer matters.
"I doubt that we can convince one another."
I'm open to new info. In fact, I'd love to be convinced: we agree that rail is a safer & nicer way to travel, and that TOD is a nicer way to live. But, I'm afraid that you're allowing that perception to affect your analysis of whether energy considerations will force people towards rail & TOD in any major way.
I keep coming back to a basic thing: ask any realtor in any major city (NYC, Chicago, LA, Boston, etc) what your money will buy, and they'll tell you that for, say, $200k, you can get something tiny downtown, something modest in near suburbs, and something large in far suburbs. Wouldn't you agree? Why would anybody downsize to the city, if they want to live in the suburbs? Why not just downsize to whatever your budget allows, if you have to, and get 2-3x as much space in the suburbs?
Best hopes for both rail/TOD & other forms of electric transportation,
Nick
This requires more time than I have ATM (several irons in fire, including presentation in Houston for ASPO). But let me make a few points.
Tram is in Grenoble, pop about 250,000 (from memory), near the center of town. The best photo tour of French Trams (and rest of world) is at:
http://world.nycsubway.org/eu/fr/
They are missing photos from several French lines.
http://world.nycsubway.org/
I expect some suburbs to decline to "giveaway prices".
You appear to think that housing decisions are made on logical grounds, I do not. Ask any real estate agent about "hot" areas of town.
What logical person would chose avocado colored appliances and burnt orange shag carpeting ? Yet half of Americans did for a couple of years.
Americans travel in herds. That is why they deserted perfectly functional inner cities. And once vacant homes appear in large #s and stay empty, schools decline and taxes rise, demographics change, the same will happen to many, but not all suburbs.
That is why even homes at "give away" prices will stay empty. Yesterday I was told that gangs are appearing in some LA suburbs.
The Lower Garden District is considered the prime template that New Urbanism strives for (other areas also affect the vision, but #1 is the Lower Garden District). I have heard density quoted but I do not remember it. Zip code in 70130 if anyone has data for that.
Air source heat pumps can be almost as efficient as ground loop (depending on area, ground water temps, etc.) And they can fit "anywhere". And electricity is 30+ years away from being FF free (I hope that soon).
There is a trade off between living space & commuting costs /time. As I have said, suburbs close to a commuter rail station should do well IMHO. Many of the new Urban Rail lines will be on rings around major cities, serving inner suburbs and adding a transfer and extra time to get to work, etc.
More if I have time,
Alan
"You appear to think that housing decisions are made on logical grounds, I do not. Ask any real estate agent about "hot" areas of town."
Alan, am I wrong that you're making an economic argument - that energy costs will force people into dense cities?
It's cheap to move to the suburbs, and expensive to move to a dense city. Again, for, say, $200k, you can get something tiny downtown, something modest in near suburbs, and something large in far suburbs. Wouldn't you agree?
New Orleans is the density of an average suburb. That leads me to believe that what you're really advocating is redesigned, TOD suburbs. Does that make sense? Perhaps we can make progress on what we're talking about here...
details: "Yesterday I was told that gangs are appearing in some LA suburbs." Sure. Poor suburbs can be found everywhere, but that doesn't mean that suburbs overall are declining (and certainly not being abandoned - poor is not the same as empty).
" electricity is 30+ years away from being FF free "
Sure, but it's still cheap and plentiful, so people won't be coerced by the dynamics of electricity to do something they wouldn't otherwise. If you want to make an extra effort to orient it towards wind (i.e., by using more at night, or in some areas ordering it through your utility), that's possible.
"Air source heat pumps can be almost as efficient as ground loop (depending on area, ground water temps, etc.)"
AFAIK, air source heat pumps are generally not designed to operate below zero F. I hope that changes, but it doesn't qualify for the existing tech that you generally advocate.
"And they can fit "anywhere". "
I don't know - I can't see how you'd retrofit any kind of mid or highrise building to air source heat pumps. I suppose you could use window units, and break through all the exterior walls(?!?!?)
This relates back to the Jesse Abusel study of renewables and nuclear power.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-07/ip-rew071907.php
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,291071,00.html
A 2-3 GW twin reactor uses land of about 2 square kilometers to 4 square kilometers. They don't need all that land but that is what they are using.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millstone_Nuclear_Power_Plant
so nuclear plants are 4 to 15 times better on the W/m**2
Insitu leaching for mining uranium does not take up that much land. It definitely disturbs less land the oilsands or coal.
http://advancednano.blogspot.com/2007/08/two-chinese-coal-miners-lived-1...
Worst case fallback for transportation, public transportation, segways and motorscooters. Keep fuel (oil or biofuels) use for heavy trucks etc...
60 million electric scooters and bikes in China at the end of 2007. 60-80mph electric cars are coming for the sub-$30,000 market with ranges up to 125 miles on a charge.
http://advancednano.blogspot.com/2007/08/clean-vehicles-in-india-and-chi...
Killacycle 145mph electric motorbike
http://www.motorcyclenews.com/MCN/News/newsresults/mcn/2007/May/may-1-to...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_motorcycles_and_scooters
electric cars
Mostly low speed due to federal laws. (some might go to 35-45mph if not for the regulations.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_Automotive
A fully highway-capable vehicle called the JAVLON XS500 is planned for end of 2008. Estimated base price is $29,800 and would be capable of speeds of 80 mph (129 km/h) and would have a range of 125+ mi (201 km) using advanced lithium-ion batteries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:BEV_manufacturers
============
http://advancednano.blogspot.com
RE: The 'received wisdom' assertion that increased food supply 'causes' increased population.
If it were true that an increase in food supply leads to or is a major cause of an increase in population, to my way of thinking, one would have to examine the birth rates and fertility rates to see the effects of this.
Since around 1950 when the so-called 'green revolution' began, the data seems to indicate a steady drop in birth rates and fertility rates all across the planet.
(Birthrate is live births/1000 population)
(TFR is avg. number children per woman of child-bearing age)
We are probably all familiar with the graphs showing the exponential upward curve of population growth in which the inflexion point is variously placed at the beginning of agriculture (ca 10,000 years BPE) or the beginning of the industrial age (ca 300 years BPE) or somewhere between. (like this one from dieoff.org)
While it makes intuitive sense that there are connections between agricultural and industrial productivity and human population growth, it isn't clear that it is a simple causal relationship. In the case of the recent half-century, it is even less clear that the direction of causation is food->population. From the data it looks more like the other way around, i.e. increase in population has lead to increase in food production (the 'green revolution'). The increase in population since ca. 1950 in simple mathematical terms is a 'shadow' effect of the large proportion of the female population being of child-bearing age, rather than an increase in birth rates or TFR.
I don't know if it makes any more sense to say increase in food supply leads to lower birthrates either. Especially if you look at a graph of available food per capita. (for some reason Asia was not in this data set)
By eyeball, I can't see any discernable correlation with the other graphs either positive or negative, with the possible exception that Sub-Sarahan Africa food-per-capita seems to trend downward which makes it a positive correlate with the dropping fertility and birthrates while the others, except Europe have an apparent negative correlation between food-per-capita and birth rate/TFR.
What's the point of my post? Basically to try and get away from the notion of people = yeast in a petri dish and watch them grow the more you feed them.
Google 'food population growth' and there is plenty of varied discussion and data available that counters the simplistic causal approach.
I'll guarantee you one thing though, ET, if you treat people as yeast in a Petri dish and feed them less then some of them are going to die. And the causation there is very clear - less food = less people. Now given that the world has consumed more grain in 7 of the last 8 years than we have harvested and that we have as a consequence driven grain reserves down from 600 million tons to about 300 million tons, just how much longer do we think we can keep fooling ourselves? Maybe 7 or 8 more years, huh?
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
The big question is "Will we let billions starve, or will we shutter our ethanol stills and get rid of our livestock first?"
There is enough food to feed the current population, probably even enough food to feed twice the current population, if people are mostly grain fed and all food goes to direct human consumption (no livestock fed human food, no biofuels from food crops or land than can be used for food crops or rangeland).
I'm a pessimist, so I think that high society will let billions of the lesser off starve before giving up their steaks and cars.
Remember that ELM model for oil?
Now put that into human population with fix resource
(in this case FOOD)...
You have increase birth-rate and life-expectancy coupled
with a decrease in farming output b/c of shortage of energy supply.
Do a plot like ELM -- something has to give...
We are going to have a collapse of world population.
Either we prepare now and plan for a soft landing or
we're heading toward a cliff and a lot of people will get
pushed off.
The birth-rate (births per woman) is not increasing, mortality is decreasing. The birthrate is above replacement rate so the population is increasing but the number of births per woman is not increasing.
Worldwide, most women are ready and eager to lower their births per woman/family! They need support and resources. Global free access to birth control is one of the most effective/cheap ways to decrease the demand side of the equation and soften our landing.
What is lacking is clear thinking and political will. The vast majority of women in the US have used or do use birth control, why don't all insurance companies cover it? More insurance companies cover viagra than the pill. Vasectomies are rarely covered and are a huge hassle to get. Not because the procedure is particularly difficult or expensive, but because our healthcare system (and our society) is pro-childbirth regardless of whether that pregnancy is wanted.
The last seven years have been a disaster for needy women around the world. The renewal of the global gag rule has hugely hindered the progress we made in the Clinton years to lower birth-rate in targeted areas. Abstinence-only education is increasing risky behavior and teen pregnancies in the US, the country with one of the highest consumption per capita in the world.
Any solution to peak oil, global warming and poverty will depend on wide or universal access to contraception.
I strongly agree with most of what you say, but I have a quibbles.
"The birthrate is above replacement rate"
Yes, but not in the majority of the world. A few poor/uneducated areas like Africa and the M.E. raise the average. Plus, fertility rates appear to still be falling.
"Abstinence-only education is increasing ...teen pregnancies"
Yes, but only over what it would have been without this bad intervention. Teen pregancy in the US continues to fall.
"Any solution to peak oil, global warming and poverty will depend on wide or universal access to contraception."
Yes, but better health, income, education and freedom for women in Africa, S. America, M.E., etc are also essential.
Since the world average birthrate is above replacement, doesn't that still increase population and thus demand? It is the low birth rate of Europe that gives me hope that people do really want fewer births. These areas that drive up the average are exactly those most hurt by the global gag rule. The west does not exist in a vacuum, we have to bring down the global average to preserve ourselves.
I would say that any unwanted pregnancy is in itself a bad thing. The fact that three people are being screwed over now instead of ten in the 1900s (not to scale) does not change the fact that the number should be zero, and abstinence only "education" is increasing that number is a social negative regardless of the absolute rates involved. However, I appreciate that you're trying to insert some optimism into this discussion and I agree we've come a long way.
While I completely agree that education, income and freedom need to be improved all over the world, contraception is key to all of these things. It is a wonderful feedback loop. Girls don't need to drop out of school because of pregnancies=> girls get higher educations=>they have more economic opportunity=>they don't have to drop out of a job because of an unexpected pregnancy=>they earn more money and have more political and individual freedom, time and resources to change the system and culture because of their economic security=they have fewer children that they can afford to educate to an even higher level=>back to start.
It's like being in the reserves; it's very difficult to plan for your future/get engaged in long term projects and make long-term commitments when you can be called up at any time.
Any solution to peak oil, global warming and poverty will depend on wide or universal access to contraception.
I generally agree.
Again, I would quibble about contraception being THE key to population control, rather than one of several essentials: many, many women can't or don't use contraception, regardless of availability, because of education, income and freedom. Further, give women education & income & freedom, and availability of contraception will follow as night follows the day, so focusing on contraception is misleading.
Also, population control will help with peak oil and global warming, but it's not the most important thing, nor is it essential: moving to electric transportation & HVAC together with non-CO2/renewable sources of electricity is the key, and they need to be done in the next 10-20 years, a timeframe in which interventions into population growth won't make much difference.
Now poverty, that's something else: contraception & population control are certainly key there.
I heard that during the potato famine in Ireland that food was being Exported to England while people were starving.
I think that is correct.
No, you are not a pessimist, just a realist - sadly. Pessimists think that EVERYBODY will starve.
Do your homework, the majority of the increase in our population is not from higher birth rates it is from much lower death rates. More food = less malnutrition and fewer famines = more people living longer.
Cheers,
Jerry
Sorry Jerry, didn't mean to step on your point. I agree, although I may have rambled too much to get that idea across.
Any solution to peak oil, global warming and poverty will depend on wide or universal access to contraception.
Death rates are dropping but birth rates are dropping faster. The point is still that it doesn't make sense to attribute gross population gain to the green revolution.
I agree completely ET. We should attack the demand side of this problem as much as possible. Anything we can do to soften the transition and lengthen the long decline is advisable. Will this keep people in the dark for longer? Possibly, but the frantic environment of sudden change is hardly conducive to reasoned or logical debate/action.
We are looking at this issue and trying to raise awareness about the coming resource crunch in part it must be to prepare for the transition ahead. Part of mitigating the pain of the transition is to realize our power. We are not yeast. We have the technology to choose our family size, we should be doing everything possible to take advantage of this as a culture and as individuals.
For most of human history, limited food resulted in increased mortality (and thus net fertility) rather than decreased pregnancies. The human body is capable of being impregnated and even carrying a child to term under very harsh circumstances, just not with very healthy results for mother or child.
The troubles before us are enormous, overwhelming and approaching fast. Still, anything we can do, either individually or collectively (as communities, citizens, political parties, investors, companies, charitable contributers. . . .) should be pursued with speed and efficiency, not discounted or derided as "swimming against the tide," or "refusing to face reality."
I don't think we should frame this discussion as a two-choice debate. It's not "Take serious steps to reduce our fossil fuel usage now - and this will undoubtedly entail some amount of hardship - or leave it to our children to face a great deal of hardship." it should be "what can we do to increase our children's chances of survival and how can we make our lives more meaningfull at the same time?"
Research has shown that being part of a "greater cause" outside yourself or your family is a great antidote to depression. I think this forum has found the greatest cause we can contribute to today.
Any solution to peak oil, global warming and poverty will depend on wide or universal access to contraception.
Something smells funny about what you are assuming. I'm not sure what but I'm not comfortable with the way you rapidly reduce the argument to an examination of birth rates and fertility rates.
In a less-than-full planet, sure, population->food works; that is a good observation. In a full planet, seems to me we hit the food limit shortly before we hit the population limit. This is the transition we have been making globally since Apollo and "Silent Spring". No limits to (over)full planet. The population and food ratio is not linear or even continuous. [I don't remember my college math well enough to name the function; it's parametric with bounds on the parameters.]
Nor is it as simple as "food". The genome wants something more general - "more life support". Fat? Doritos?
cfm in Gray, ME
One point I'm trying to make is actually to *not* reduce the argument to simple parameters of food and population. I'm just using birthrates and fertility rates to illustrate the lack of a simple relationship.
I realize that the notion of more people causes more food is both simplistic as well as contrarian.
Mostly, I delve into these data because time after time I run across ignorant assumptions about how human demographics work and I find it is both more interesting and more complicated than most people realize. I'm less sure than ever about the causalities in the demographic transition that is happening, but it seems fairly certain that humanity is engaged in a long term trend of smaller families. Whether this is too little too late is another question. Many think it is and I suspect it is as well (too little too late).
My seat-of-the-pants reason why birthrates and fertility rates are dropping in all countries and cultures is simply that humans are reacting to overcrowdedness. The modern information age can act as an enabler in making even less populated places seem more crowded in a virtual sense, since people are inundated with pictures of masses of humanity on the planet.
Best hopes for smaller families.
"I am not sure whether Professor Patzek believes that biofuels have no place at all among our future energy options."
I was at GWU a few weeks ago and Patzek was on a panel with Pimentel and they were asked this question in terms of scale. His answer was that small scale use is reasonable but as a large scale solution, that's where biofuels really fall down.
There is more to it than just making the biofuel
Ethanol’s Boom Stalling as Glut Depresses Price
http://www.wilmingtonstar.com/article/20070930/ZNYT01/709300468/1002/Bus...
Maybe I'm missing something, but the "square meter" comparison appears to be highly misleading because no mention is made of the intermittence of solar. Am I wrong about that? You can pump oil 24 hr/day, but it seems to me you should divide that solar number by half to get average energy in a 24 hr day.
The other elephant in the room is embodied energy, we can't paper over those three little words "manufacture solar panels". The fossil fueled infrastructure required to produce polysilicon panels is vast and not easily replaced by alternatives.
Ask yourself one simple question: what is the working life of the PV panels? 20 years? 30 years? Then what? Can you manufacture their replacement with solar electricity alone? Probably not. My understanding is the embodied energy of a solar panel is returned over the life of the panel, but not significantly exceeded, which makes them little more than fancy batteries for storing the fossil fuel energy expended in their manufacture. See the work of Howard T. Odum for an excellent analysis of embodied energy ("emergy").
And let's not forget Leibig's law, the viability of solar panels is only as great as the most scarce element used in their manufacture, which may or may not be fossil fuel.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not an Ethanol nut, the use of bio-fuels as an alternative on which to run our insanely wasteful lifestyles has got to be the cruelest joke on the planet, but I do think we need to be honest in our assessment of the alternatives.
Cheers,
Jerry
The alternatives maybe going to sleep at night and cultivationg solar crops during the day.
"Remember folks , this is not the end of the world as we know it ... it is just the beginning"
I believe your understanding would be wrong. Here are some links:
http://tomkonrad.wordpress.com/category/eroei/
8x Payback for Solar PV
40X payback for concentrated solar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photovoltaics
And also remember advances in solar panels are being made on regular basis these days so numbers can only get better.
Hey everybody, I'm new here, but I just wanted to say a couple things. First, that Killacycle is SWEET. Secondly, while we're on the subject of solar panels and technological advances, you've all heard of these, right? A much better use of fossil fuel energy than driving one's fat ass to the store IMHO. And lastly, if you're a hardcore alternative type, you may enjoy my website. The book is free!
Too much sitting on the sharp rock of oil consumption and screaming about this and that won't work whilst not doing the very things which will stop the pain. Or we can just go down fighting.
Electric/solar/wind infrastructure IMHO is one antidote. No it's not going to be Utopian and (likely) nothing will yield the cheap and easy consumption lifestyle currently practiced. Thank god. Simple things that work (however humbly) will likely be all we'll have time and money for..
I'm finding that simply riding a bike to go places that I would have normally used a car for to be a potent elixir for TEOLAWKI depression. I feel it's important to begin doing something.
BTW welcome to TOD.
Unlike con jobs like biofuels, solar is one of the genuine tools we have to meet the energy crisis head on. The problem becomes rate of solar roll out versus rate of decline in fossil fuels. If the roll out process cannot keep up with the fossil fuel decline then we have problems. The exact extent of the problems would depend upon the discrepancy between those two values. And when I say roll out, that does not mean just placing a solar panel and plugging it in. That includes revamping the rest of our infrastructure to center around solar energy as opposed to fossil fuel based energy. Many many people underestimate the size of our infrastructure that is dependent upon fossil fuels. Rates are the key problem - extraction rates, decline rates, roll out rates of new technologies - all those and more will intertwine and unless we can stay ahead of the problem rates, humanity has serious issues facing it. We need to replace transportation, heating/cooling, and many other uses of energy with new and different forms and so far that does not appear to be occurring on a scale that can keep up even with the projected 4.5% declines that Euan Mearns and others are discussing. And of course it gets worse if the decline rate is higher.
This is why I believe that the (not)free market response is a joke. This is a crisis for humanity and we need to treat it like a crisis. But no, instead we have people blithely assuming that life can go on exactly as before with no changes whatsoever if we plug in a few damned solar panels. That's foolishness of an extraordinary scale. Our entire culture needs to change and it needs to change starting right now. It's not enough to develop the technology. It must also be rolled out and society must adapt to it in time to avert deeper problems from surfacing.
The technologies to which you point are part of the solution but only part. They are the very beginnings of a solution but technology alone is not going to solve this. We have to change and so far this is not much evidence of a willingness to do that. And worse, if we wait too long, we may not get the chance to change and instead face a social situation far worse and that also precludes us from adopting the very solution that might save us.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
"we have people blithely assuming that life can go on exactly as before with no changes whatsoever if we plug in a few damned solar panels"
You shouldn't assume that people are arguing for the status quo, just because they argue that solutions are possible.
I think we're in for a painful transition. Just how painful depends on how quickly we move on the problems. Unfortunately, progress on national public policy seems to be stalled until January 21st, 2009. Fortunately, a lot of people aren't waiting for that...
Did I say theantidoomer was arguing for the status quo? No, I clearly said we have people arguing for the status quo. That is part of the problem that has to be solved, not just the technology but the infrastructure and the sociology of it all as well or it won't happen.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
Galbraith, "Culture of Contentment", 1992 describes the economics and the sociology and the obstacles to "happening". The PTBs [powers that be] like things the way they are and will work to keep them so. Otherwise the PTBs wouldn't be PTBs. Content.
Short of a breakthrough technology that is better in every way - less inputs, more outputs - we already have the techology that we will need and have to use. Sociology, technology, infrastructure - culture - they are all of a piece.
Unless we have learned something since horse-and-buggy that will allow us sustainably to implement a better something than horse-and-buggy, we will have to go back to horse-and-buggy, ox-cart or wheel-barrow. Have we as a culture learned something so that for X energy we will be able to sustain a better life than we did for X energy on the "way up"?
Where we have progressed because energy has become cheaper, I suspect not. More likely we will struggle to regain lost knowledge and tech.
cfm in Gray, ME
"Short of a breakthrough technology that is better in every way - less inputs, more outputs - we already have the techology that we will need and have to use. "
Kind've. Keep in mind that we don't need something better than FF's, just something almost as good. PHEV/EV's have always been viable, just not competitive with really cheap FF's. They're cheaper than FF's when gasoline is over $1.75, and will do everything we need for transportation, just fine.
"we have people blithely assuming that life can go on exactly as before with no changes whatsoever if we plug in a few damned solar panels. "
As a general thing, it's been my observation that people arguing for solar panels aren't arguing for the status quo.
Electrification of all transport and HVAC isn't the status quo.
You are completely missing my point, Nick, despite me having explained it once already. My quibble is not with theantidoomer pointing to electrification. My quibble is with the vast majority of society who would tell theantidoomer to kiss off if he tried to push that idea on them. The vast bulk of society is not interested in electrification of transportation yet. And if they wait too long we may be too far down the backside of Hubbert's Peak to effectively respond. In fact, this is what I think is happening right now as I am one of those that believes July 2006 was the all liquids peak and May 2005 was the C&C peak.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
"My quibble is with the vast majority of society who would tell theantidoomer to kiss off if he tried to push that idea on them."
Ah. I understand. Now, I think that people may be more ready than you think.
Please note that 53% of respondents to the poll summarized below were familiar with PHEV's, and of those more than half were interested in buying them. That's not bad:
"In the AutoTECHCASTSM study, 27% of U.S. vehicle owners said they were likely (13%), very likely (8%) or extremely likely (6%) to make a PHEV their next vehicle.
When told there would be a $3,200 price premium, the consideration rate dropped to a total of 16%.
Males and females were equally likely to include the technology in their next vehicle, while entry SUV owners (45%) showed the most interest in plug-in hybrid technology compared to other vehicle type owners.
The data was collected via the Internet from June 28 to July 18, 2007 and included nearly 10,000 U.S. vehicle owners.
On the flip side of this study, it was demonstrated that a full 47% of respondents were not at all familiar with the PHEV technology, this was true for 40% of males and 56% of females.
For those who were at least likely to purchase a plug-in, 84% said they would prefer plugging in the car in overnight, whereas only 7% said they would prefer a once-a-week gas fill-up.
I took this from http://www.gm-volt.com/2007/09/28/new-harris-poll-more-than-25-of-car-ow...
You can review the details of of the study results yourself here: http://www.harrisinteractive.com/news/allnewsbydate.asp?NewsID=1249
$$$$$The real problem in substitution is where is all the capital required going to come from? We should be using some of the oil proceeds to buy it. How do we do that? One way is taxes.
Indeed solar is a viable part of the equation. Most people, however think of PV when they think solar. What seems to be the up and coming technology is the solar Stirling generator. These have an efficiency of 40% as compared with about 15% for silicon solar panels. They can produce grid ready power directly without the problem of DC to AC conversion.
The State of California has contracted to have vast arrays of these generators installed in the Mojave desert.
http://www.stirlingenergy.com/breaking_news.htm
Those people are in deep doo-doo because they picked the wrongest stirling possible (well, some others might be even wronger). Fortunately, there are pretty good stirlings available, and eventually the dead ones will decay away and the good ones will rise up to demonstrate what can be done with solar thermal.
Or, some other widget will beat all. May the best one win.
Thing to do is
Recognize that solar is a real solution
Get going on picking the right gadgets, not just wth a lot of shouts and spittle, but with serious field trials of whole systems.
PS. 40% is too high for SYSTEM efficiency. Maybe 25%-- at lower $/watt (the only number that counts) than any PV.
Fortunately, there are pretty good stirlings available,
Where? Where can I go and drop $ and get a mass produced engine?
NASA is planning to put isotope powered stirlings on space missions lasting 14 years. I would say that's a strong indication that they are pretty good.
What I mean by available is "proven and ready for application". Stirlings are proven and ready for application. There are no mass produced ones yet. They are just one of a whole hell of a lot of good technologies proven and ready and not yet mass produced.
And all that good stuff will not be mass produced until we wake up to the need to get rid of FF's and go for solar.
And, for reasons I do not understand, solar funders don't seem to have done their homework and found the long life, high efficiency stirlings that NASA has worked on for years. It sure ain't no deep dark secret.
NASA is planning to put isotope powered stirlings on space missions lasting 14 years. I would say that's a strong indication that they are pretty good.
Yes, "pretty good", at astronautics designs specs, quality and prices...
And for a few kilowatts apiece!
It sure ain't no deep dark secret.
Probably not, only high tech materials, engineering skills and a few patents and/or trade secrets.
Right, Kev. But, as we all know, if you can do it the expensive way (NASA), you can do it cheaper when and if you really try --maybe motivated by profit? I am thinking of deserts world around glittering with concentrators. See above referenced article by Nathan Lewis, who has all the status to say what I believe and be heard.
Another invocation of the technological tooth fairy. Excuse me while I go outside and laugh. Always the assumption that something can be done far cheaper and better by the (not)free market. My response to that is "Tell me about fusion."
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
...is where is all the capital required going to come from?
No problemo. We'll just print it, like all the capital that's running around now.
Come to think of it, we can print the stirlings, too:
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/08/10/papercraft-stirling-.html
| The problem will solve itself.
| But not in a nice way.
Hey! Pretty cute. All we gotta do is run them printing presses and shovel stirlings outta helicopters.
Actually, there's an important point here. Low temp thermal machines can be made of REALLY CHEAP materials. I was putting a cover over my greenhouse yesterday and it was unbearably hot in the sun. So-make roofing material with fluid passages in it, take the hot liquid, run it thru whatever thermal cycle you love best, and get power. Cheap!
Now people, please do not give me some pious lecture on the second law, huh? I know all about it. And not one on simpleminded economics either. The only number that makes sense is the TRUE ALL-UP LIFE CYCLE COST per unit of power, not carnot efficiency, not square meters, not "is it in mass production?", and certainly not "never heard of it before and therefor gotta be bullshit".
We are sliding down the one-way slippery slope into an unknown new world, and we need, most of all, wits and willingness to wiggle anywhichwaythatworks.
Thanks for that, antidoomer.
See my reply above: working life for thin film, unknown, but for polycrystalline modules, at least 50 years, maybe 100.
Yes. For polysilicon modules, the main elements are silicon semiconductors (the silicon is purified in a forge which I believe could be powered by electricity), aluminum frames (aluminum is smelted using electricity, albeit a LOT of electricity, which is why the smelters are usually located near a hydro plant), and glass (which has been made for centuries using all sorts of different fuels, but charcoal will do). The other system components, as far as I know, can all be made with electrical power. For thin film modules, the energy inputs are considerably less, and I believe we can make all-electric fabrication work, esp. using nanotech.
theantidoomer's numbers are correct.
None of the elements used in PV are "scarce," but refining silicon up to the required grades is energy intensive.
--C
Energy consultant, writer, blogger www.getreallist.com
"the "square meter" comparison appears to be highly misleading because no mention is made of the intermittence of solar. Am I wrong about that? "
Yes. Daily insolation includes that already.
"The fossil fueled infrastructure required to produce polysilicon panels is vast and not easily replaced by alternatives."
Not really. PV is largely produced with electricity.
"viability of solar panels is only as great as the most scarce element used in their manufacture, which may or may not be fossil fuel."
Could you be more specific? Silicon (90% of PV, currently) is pretty abundant - think sand.
Haha, excellent points, Nick. Saying that the cost of production of silicon panels is prohibitive because of fossil-fuel concerns is pretty much equivalent in my eyes to the perspective of a caveman who refuses to believe in the modern proliferation of glass. (Another silicon-based human technology which really caught on in the long run.)
The other elephant in the room is embodied energy, we can't paper over those three little words "manufacture solar panels". The fossil fueled infrastructure required to produce polysilicon panels is vast and not easily replaced by alternatives.
I tell the person to close their eyes and picture a big D9 Catapillar Bulldozer. Now is a solar powered plant going to manufacture that? How about the rest of VERY heavy machinery. Solar Power with batteries to build them?
Power plants don't manufacture anything other than energy. Other factories build things like bulldozers, and tend to use a lot of electricity and heat to do it. So who cares if the power plant is solar or coal or nuclear?
As for running the bulldozer, batteries need to improve, but it seems a reasonable expectation to believe they will.
"As for running the bulldozer, batteries need to improve, but it seems a reasonable expectation to believe they will."
Actually, current batteries are viable, just not quite as cheap or convenient as would be desirable....but they would do in pinch.
BTW, one strong candidate, Firefly, was developed by Caterpillar.
I would like to be convinced, but I'm not. I'm skeptical about the ability to mass-produce today's batteries for such ubiquitous use - as in ALL our vehicles and large scale equipment. That's a LOT of batteries, and they have some ugly and sometimes expensive materials. I'm kind of holding out for carbon nanotube-based ultracapacitors. Actually, I'm hoping carbon nanotube materials science takes off in a big way.
"they have some ugly and sometimes expensive materials."
One nice thing about solar and batteries is that there is an enormous variety of solutions, so that if any one runs into a limit from some odd material, it doesn't really matter.
"I'm hoping carbon nanotube materials science takes off in a big way."
You should really take a look at Firefly - I think you'll like it. It's not an ultracapacitor, but it's very elegant, cheap and scalable.
Thanks for that. I think battery technology is one of the most important technologies we need to pursue post-peak. I've been thinking it would be smart to invest in some good battery companies ;-)
Why not just run the dozer on biodiesel? Just because biofuels are not the right answer for EVERYTHING, is it really true that therefore we must forgo using it for ANYTHING? Diesel engines are well-adapted to power heavy equipment. If biodiesel is limited JUST to those applications, the amount of land that must be dedicated to its production will not represent a very significant diversion of cropland from food production. If we cut back on our beef consumption a little bit, we could more than make up the difference.
I tell the person to close their eyes and picture a big D9 Catapillar Bulldozer. Now is a solar powered plant going to manufacture that?
Solar power DID make it. How do you think oil and coal came to be? Sunlight (from a long time ago)
Y'know, back in the day, people used a shovel. ;)
Thou art God!
"Similarly, one can drive our example cars for one year from ~30 m2 of oil fields, 90 m2 of photovoltaic cells, 1100 m2 of wind turbines, and ~18000 m2 of corn fields."
hmmmm. An average light vehicle (sedan, pickup, SUV) would take .35 kwh/mile. The average US vehicle is driven 12,000 miles, which gives us 4,200 kwh's/yr, or an average of .48 KW.
A 3MW wind turbine might take, generously, .5 acres (about 2,150 sq m) for access roads and the turbine itself, and generate an average of 900KW, or .42KW per sq m.
That gives us 1.1 sq meters of wind turbine per vehicle, or 1/30 of that of oil. Not bad.
I have to say that if this is an example of the rigor of Professor Patzek's work, I'm beginning to have some sympathy for bio-fuel advocates who have been criticizing his work for some time. I don't mean to suggest that I think that bio-fuels can scale up, but bio-fuel advocates keep saying that Patzek & Pimental are very careless with their calculations of E-ROI, and this certainly is an example of woefully careless calculations.
To generate 4200 kWhs/year of juice from solar panels requires about 2800 watts of solar panels depending on where you are.
Say 100 watts per square meter and that's 28 square meters of panels. That's less then the area of that oil well. And we ain't running out of sunlight.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
Another distortion is the claim that there is zero 'waste' biomass available for humans since biospheric cycles by definition produce no 'excess'. This is misleading, bordering on a dishonest equivocation. Human use of biomass falls within the terrestrial elemental cycles.
Clearly human use of biomass displaces some detrivore/herbivore activity, but that doesn't make it necessarily unsustainable. While current biomass production (like many forms of agriculture) may typically erode soils, it is possible to use biofuels to improve their carbon content. The recycling or preservation of other soil components should be addressed as well.
We already know biological energy capture is inefficient compared to PV, and the biofuel productivity numbers in the paper seem about right. For example in the UK, willow coppice produces about 15 odt/hectare/year which works out to 0.88 watt/metre^2. The various conversion factors and losses might be reduced with a more energy-aware approach, but I agree with the general conclusion that biofuels will play a minor role compared to PV, solar thermal, wind and water power.
"Finally, no future transportation system will allow complete “freedom of personal transportation”
for everyone. I suggest that good public transportation systems will free many, if not most people from personal transportation."
This is a peculiar thing for him to toss in, given that it doesn't derive from anything in the paper. In fact, the paper suggests that solar can replace oil perfectly well.
Good Post Robert.
Re: food thoughts, you don't get something for nothing, animals are required if for no other reason than their abiblity to consume grass (creates top soil) and to cycle nutrients.
What happens to the avaialability of commercial fertilizer and specifically P205(phosphorous) in our energy restricted future?
Of interest. A gentleman in Ontario named Thane Heins announced in our local media about a month ago that he has redesigned a transformer in such a way that the net result appears to be that the back or counter emf is virtually eliminated.
In his demonstration of an induction motor (composite) he shows how the rpm of the rotor increases as he shorts out the coils thereby increasing the back emf!
Independent tests suggest that this is not harmonic interference. Mr. Heins has released his findings to various scientific and educational groups that are busy studying this. Should his claim be true, it does not mean perpetual motion as such. It suggests that you might be able to greatly reduce the number of batteries you would need in an e.v. Furthermore electric motors would be more efficient.
In electrical jargon this appears to set Lenz's law on its head. As transformers are already exceedingly (95%) efficient. A more proper analogy perhaps would be that in effect he has eliminated the 'resistance' in the circuit.
Although Lenz's law is apparently breeched. Faradays laws aren't. (If I have understood this correctly)
If more information comes out I will post
Cheers
That would mean that he has "in effect" created a superconductor at room temperature.. Sounds a bit far fetched, at least the way you present it.
Eliyahu,
Are you familiar with this man
Kron, Gabriel. "...the missing concept of "open-paths" (the dual of "closed-paths") was discovered, in which currents could be made to flow in branches that lie between any set of two nodes. (Previously — following Maxwell — engineers tied all of their open-paths to a single datum-point, the 'ground'). That discovery of open-paths established a second rectangular transformation matrix... which created 'lamellar' currents..." "A network with the simultaneous presence of both closed and open paths was the answer to the author's years-long search." Gabriel Kron, "The Frustrating Search for a Geometrical Model of Electrodynamic Networks," Journal unk., issue unk., circa 1962, p. 111-128. The quote is from p. 114.
Kron, Gabriel. . "When only positive and negative real numbers exist, it is customary to replace a positive resistance by an inductance and a negative resistance by a capacitor (since none or only a few negative resistances exist on practical network analyzers.)" Gabriel Kron, "Numerical solution of ordinary and partial differential equations by means of equivalent circuits." Journal of Applied Physics, Vol. 16, Mar. 1945a, p. 173.
Google John Bedini. He is trying to carry on the work.
The pages are old. He was at a time with T. Bearden. Though I would look at Bedini's work.
He used to have a saying up.
"We are just taping the wrong dipole."
He claims he was intimidated and he packed up and moved to Idaho. He builds audio amplifiers in real life. In fact you probably (if you are old enough) enjoyed the fruits of his labor in theaters around the country.
Sound like the guy you watched was doing something similar, but for a short period of time.
Eliyahu,
Sounds to me like you've been drinking more Passover wine than is allowed under rabbinical law.
Thanks for the direction Step back. if this proves true. I will lead the cheer and toast Thane Heins.
I didn't say (or mean to anyway) that the resistence was eliminated but that the effect he has achieved is analagous to if the resistance was removed, much like the superconductor at room temp metaphor.
I can't testify to anything other than having met him and have seen several demo's of his claim. The increasing rotor speed is impressive. In fact he is forced to step in and stop it to keep the magnets from potentially flying off.
It is possible that this is some sort of scam, but that is not how I read it. A transformer company (Toroid Tech ) is apparently building a unit that will allow for mass assembly of these transformers and has partenered with his company. So apparently they believe that a) it is real or b) they also want in on the scam.
The principle behind it is that he is using a second secondary that has a core with half the reluctance of the primary return flux path. Magnetic flux always follows the path of least reluctance. The secondary coils induced back emf also follows the path of least reluctance into the second secondary coil and also cannot couple back to the primary because the reluctance flux path is higher. Therefore all the current in the primary is reactive. He was showing a 3,000% increase
This is testable. Is it repeatable? I suspect yes? And are the implications of this as they appear? If so ladies and gents. We are in for quite the ride. And that be electric
Thanks prisonerx I will look into that.
I would hope claims of a perpetual motion machine can be dismissed without comment. Magnetic flux always travels in a closed circuit just like electric current. It can no more skip a high reluctance piece of track than current can skip a high resistance section. Unless the magnetic field doesn't flow at all.
They make air gap transformer so that all the field strength drop is in the gap. And they make transformers with multiple secondaries. This isn't really a new field of inquiry. As Heins says, this is something anybody can string together. No doubt, somebody has.
I don't know any electrical engineers that have been arrested for tax protesting. We make a good enough living that we can pay our taxes. We aren't required to pretend the government does something useful with our tax dollars.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
The laws of energy could be better described as just facts of life.
There are many people who are trying to make devices that simply violate these facts of life, and even some scientists get caught up in the moment, looking at some of these to see if they will actually work.
It is where hope triumphs over reasoning and people are willing to though money, hoping for a miracle of science.
They so fully believe in their projects, that they are able to convince many others to invest in these projects. They are also able to make presentations so convincing that they can even get formally educated people to assist them.
The usual claim is that other scientist have been so indoctrinated that they can not open their minds to different ideas.
For those people putting money into these, they should be made fully aware that the developers are attempting to defy the laws, and so likewise the risk of loss of all money is great.
Most of the time this is not done, as the inventors try to convince people that these projects are miracles, and that is the problem.
DocScience
The laws of thermodynamics are generalizations based upon centuries of observations. One part of this generalization is the assumption that these observations are part of a continuous function. As some physicists have noted, the most likely way we will be surprised about thermodynamics is if we ever discover that it is a discontinuous function. The problem is that, if any of the "laws" of thermodynamics actually are discontinuous functions, then the discontinuity very probably occurs under conditions very alien to our normal life on earth (maybe in the depths of a black hole, for example) and thus, even if these discontinuities occur, it is extremely unlikely that Joe Blow in some garage is going to uncover such a discontinuity. This is why I am always willing to let someone who claims perpetual motion make the claim if and only if his claim can be independently verified. Interestingly, no such claim has ever, not even once, been independently verified, hence the extreme skepticism towards perpetual motion machines and the like. Now personally, I do not expect any discontinuities in the laws of thermodynamics but I do recognize that they are at least theoretically possible. So I am still waiting for the peer reviewed paper in Nature or some other major science journal and reproduction of the results in independent labs for any perpetual motion machine. Until that day arrives, I'll continue to treat perpetual motion machines as scams to separate a gullible mark from his money.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
Hey Robert
Long time since I was in Tuscon. I don't profess to be an expert, I am more at the technologist level of understanding so your indulgence is most appreciated.
In his demo he points out that there is a complete magnetic circuit from the induction motor. He proves this by first demonstrating what one expects to happen and has a brass coupling on the shaft of the motor that extends into the circuit so that this magnetically isolates the motor from the circuit he then places an iron bar inside this coupling to then magnetically couple the circuit. And then when he shorts out the coils then you see the rotor speed start to increase.
(How would you explain this?)
He is not claiming perpetual motion. And his circuit shows tremendous increase but notperpetual motion. So this is an innaccurate portrayal(no doubt unintentional,I appreciate that you didn't suggest perpetual motion but I wanted to address docscience and mr grey.)
Furthermore, although I don't know the gentleman other than having had several phone conversations and a meeting with him he strikes me as most genuine. At no time has he ever asked me if I wanted to invest, he has no web site with fanciful claims so unless offered evidence to the contrary. I can not find fault. In fact I have found his behavior to be most honorable. He stated his goals are genuinely motivated to helping us get off of oil and he is concerned about the boys oversees dying for oil. He said he had a patent but at the same time understood that he in no way could prevent off shore interests from 'stealing' his idea. And despite this has sent this information freely to many scientific groups around the world.
I have yet to hear any of them be able to explain this. And you can see the behaviour of the rotor, so what is going on?
Robert other than rebuilding the circuit to test it myself. (I was thinking about using a rotary transformer with a strain gauge or torquemeter). I can't see any flaws. Any suggestions? I would be delighted, having been now stumped for the past month to have an explanation presented that can dismiss his claims in a manner that explains it. I can see the rotor speed up. So if it's not shananigans then where is the extra juice coming from? Maybe his explanation of what is happening is wrong. Then fine, why is the rotor speeding up under load.
Thanks for the engagement.
I need to make a clarification here.
Someone can claim that they are not making a perpetual motion machine, but if they are claiming to get more energy out then they put in, it is exactly the same concept, just using different wording.
DocScience
http://www.angelfire.com/in/Gilbert1/grid.html
Hi Eli,
And then when he shorts out the coils then you see the rotor speed start to increase.
(How would you explain this?)
It's tough enough to debug stuff that actually works. It sounds like there is magnetic energy stored in the coils during steady state operation. Shorting out the coils converts that magnetic energy into a one time burst of rotor acceleration.
It doesn't take much energy to spin a rotor if there is no load on the shaft. I got a one watt solar cell that makes a toy PMDC motor spin a propeller into a blurr. It's only when the rotor wants to push a car or pump water or otherwise do work that it needs real power behind it.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
Thanks for the suggestion I will need to consider this more.
What would be an appropriate test to isolate this? Have the
shaft hooked up to something else as well? And should this pass proving that it is not a one time hit? Then where do you go from there? In other words what component(s) of seeing is not believing should be tested?
Definite repeatability. When or If I can repeat this and post
this what would be the response? I don't need to ask docscience this as we already know his response in advance.
I know that there are others seeking to try to apply this.
And will report back either way with results
P.S. Is the view from the mountains still superstitious?:-)
Cheers
The soothesayers are mired, their existence foretold.
Always chasing, chasing fool's gold.
I hope you do not mind if I give you an answer here.
If you can get more energy out of a machine then you put in, then the machine should be able to be made to run perpetually without difficulty, by just returning enough extra energy into the machine to keep it running.
The requirement for perpetual motion is less energy needed then above, since all you need to do is to reduce the friction to zero, so that any energy output from the machine is put back into the machine to keep it running.
In theory this should be possible, and one of the CLOSEST examples that we have are, the earth spinning around the sun, perpetually. Since there is no friction to slow it down.
So the first step is a perpetual motion machine, and then when you achieve this, you then try to take energy out as a next step.
For the first step of perpetual motion machine, you get the machine operating, and just let it operate, to see how long it will keep operating.
Some people have made apparatus that has kept going for several hours, but eventually stopped because of the friction in the machine.
Should you ever accomplish the first step (the perpetual motion machine) then you try to take energy out of the system.
The first step then, once you have the perpetual motion machine operating, is “do not touch it or interfere with it.
You then build a second machine, (duplication is important) and use this second machine to try take energy out.
This is because of those annoying people who say that they sucessfully made a perpetual motion machine, and when they modified it, they could not get it to work properly again.
If you want to test an apparatus, and see if you can take any energy out, take out as little as possible at first.
You could use a small led diode that uses only a few mili-watts for a very small load or even a resistor that would make a load of about a micro-watt of energy.
There are yahoo group sites that talk about these topics.
Best of luck.
DocScience
I am sute that if luck has anything to do with this. That a lot will be required. (Can chance be a driving agent)?
Clearly laws take a good while before gaining this status. As such showing tolerance for those of us who would swing at the windmills, must require a great deal of restraint.
I hope at the least that we can serve as comic relief.
Since those who 'know' better are so sure of what they rightly know. Should any exceptions to the rule ever show up, the inventors, no doubt, would have a good lead time to market, due to the incredulity of the competition.
I guess this speaks to our nature. Reject, then get angry then acceptance as if it had never been challenged. When such endeavours are being used to fleece those of us who form the majority of the 'ignorant masses'. It is always nice to know what the monster looks like so that we can get it with our pitchforks. :-)
Since science is your specialty. I have been wondering how to explain and understand what line loss means. If energy can neither be created nor destroyed then when it is lost to the 'vacuum of space' does that mean that it no longer exists?
Obviously not so does it pool together like a lump in a vacuum? How does this energy behave? What theoretically would be required to 'extract' this energy?
Thanks
Are you are referring to line loss in the electricity supply line to your house ?
The loses in any electricity carrying line would be the same situation.
The metals have a certain amount of resistance in them, varying according to the type of metal. .
As electricity goes threw them, this resistance causes heat and the heat is just slowly dissipated into the environment.
Also, as the electricity goes threw the wires, it also creates an electro magnetic field which radiates away from the wire in each direction in an expanding wave, diluting more the further it travels, as it spread thinner, somewhat like a light source.
A light source is also similarly an electro magnetic wave, but just a different frequency.
Just like the heat that is dissipated, it is too diluted and dissipated to be of any more value.
If you have a sensitive meter to detect the electro magnetic waves, you can get a reading on the strength of the waves that come from the power lines near your house.
As far as waves in space, They dissipate somewhat evenly in all directions, just continually becoming weaker.
Did I answer the question that you were asking ?
I do not like to put so much off topic stuff in here,
you can email me at DocScience @ hotmail.com
I'll give you the same advice Warren Buffet gave you. Don't invest in things you don't understand. I know there is one lottery number that will make me a hundred million dollars richer. But I don't know which one and I'll go very broke guessing. And while the lottery makes a lot of money for the states, at least it isn't run by conmen. You know the rules up front.
In a high school science course, they should at least teach you that energy is conserved. They have so much to teach you, that even a bachelors of science doesn't go near the frontiers of understanding. I have a MSEE, four years for my college diploma and two more years for the MS. Can I teach you what I know in a few short posts? And my field isn't electrical power which is its own subspecialty.
In the absense of charges, magnetic fields behave no different than electrical fields. They are thoroughly understood and obey conservation of energy. Energy can be stored in a magnetic field just as a capacitor stores energy in an electric field. It can be stored indefinitely except for wiring losses.
The original poster R^2 has a PhD in biosciences. He works full time for a Big Oil company evaluating biofuel opportunities. Someone will make a billion dollars in this field. It won't be you Ely. If they really have working technology, they won't waste their time raising money a thousand dollars at a time from the gullible public. There are venture capitalists that work full time sorting wheat from the chaff. In addition to money, VCs have something more important to start up companies which is connections. They can introduce you to potential customers who otherwise won't let you in the door.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
I'm trying to work out if by condemning 'wet' processes (alcohol) Patzek is endorsing 'dry' processes like gasification. If so should current subsidies be redirected, given that some liquid fuels will aways be needed?
If there are no battery breakthroughs we may have to work around the fact that solar is largely realtime while biomass is storable. For example we could do nighttime cooking and heating with charcoal created as a byproduct of biomass gasification.
"If there are no battery breakthroughs we may have to work around the fact that solar is largely realtime while biomass is storable. For example we could do nighttime cooking and heating with charcoal created as a byproduct of biomass gasification."
There are plenty of ways to store electricity, they just weren't competitive with ultra-cheap natural gas for peak generation. Wind and nuclear will produce at night. For the storage that is needed, pumped storage, flow batteries, even lead-acid & li-ion will work.
PHEV's will buffer wind variance, and V2G will probably also provide some buffering.
What are the long term methods of controlling, storing nuclear waste without using energy for containment ??
This includes producing metals for containment vessels, any type of cooling systems, and any other energy needs, when available energy will become very scarce in a hundred years time, but these wastes must be contained for thousands of years.
I don’t want theories , but information on actual working systems that we actually using now.
DocScience
I'm not the person to ask about nuclear - though I think we'll use it, I don't think it's quite the best solution.
I would note that "available energy" is likely to be abundant in 100 years (assuming we get there intact - we still have to transition from FF's, and avoid turning ourselves into nanogoo).
Probably the easiest approach is to wait for the next nuclear weapon to be detonated, then dispose of it there.
Say, have there been posts on TOD (or elsewhere) which more closely examine CSP with steam storage? I've seen mentions of it but no efficiency estimates for steam storage. Should scale well.
I'm curious too. On the one hand, I don't think CSP with heat storage has really been scaled up anywhere. OTOH, I don't see any real engineering obstacles (not that I've looked into it deeply).
Nick. Thanks for your many good contributions.
Heat storage tanks are expensive, and heat leaks, and hot heat leaks faster.
water storage is big but cheap. Water does not leak (much), and high water does not leak any more than low water.
So, (back to my johnny one note mode) Concentrated solar thermal power in the deserts of the world, pumped hydro storage scattered all over the place, and high voltage DC transmissions for long distances, like from Arizona to St. Lewis, or from Sahara to Berlin.
Then run everything on electricity. I would recycle my old toyota for an EV with joy in my heart.
Now, would the good thinkers here present, such as Nick and Alan D and RR, for example, please tell me why that is not a way to go? Or maybe THE way to go? If I am proven wrong, I will be happy to shut up and go back to thinking about automatic transmissions on bikes and other such non-grandiose stuff.
I also appreciate your comments.
Pumped storage can take power from any source when production exceeds demand.
Wind is in fairly high volume series production today, solar PV also, at smaller volumes. The types of Stirling cycle engines that you advocate are still on the drawing boards & prototype stage, although this is changing.
I would VERY much like to see solar Stirlings as part of the future generation mix. Even a 90 minute delay vs. solar PV would narrow the gap between solar PV generation and air conditioning demand. But I cannot see a 94% Stirling, 6% hydro mix as being the best and most economic solution.
So please continue, although I think Stirlings will be just a few % of the total renewable generation mix. even 1% is WELL worth striving for !
Best Hopes for Solar Stirling Engines !
Alan
Thanks. And thanks to Alan (if that was directed to me :] ).
"please tell me why that is not a way to go? "
It is a very important way to go. As Alan notes, wind is also very important, and wind has the lead at the moment in terms of scale and cost. CSP has much better correlation with demand, but higher costs, especially in lower insolation areas: Ausra promises 10 cents/KWH now, and 7 cents eventually, while wind is 4-8 cents now, and will be 3-5 cents eventually.
From a utility point of view, CSP & wind are the future. OTOH, from an individual consumer point of view, PV is the future. As I noted elsewhere, PV is installed by retail customers on their roofs, and there is a real tension between utilities, who are trying to limit PV (unsuccessfully), and their customers who are pushing it hard. PV competes with retail peak pricing, and once it's priced below that point nothing will stop it. Utilities may be able to limit the extent of net-metering, but the kind of installations we're seeing on commercial buildings, that don't depend on net-metering, are unstoppable - the same thing applies to smaller residential installations, where there is rarely surplus production. It won't matter what kind of new generation the utility is installing, unless it allows the utility to drastically lower the retail, marginal cost of kwh's.
Now for storage, I expect PHEV's to be more important than pumped storage (PS). PS is great, but it requires a large scale, which will slow it down (a problem shared with nuclear). PHEV's will be purchased in very large volumes, and price-sensitive charging will buffer wind & solar variance. This buffering will be almost zero-cost to the utility, as the PHEV's will be cost-justifed for transportation purposes, and the buffering will be a bonus. Eventually V2G will become important, when wind, solar & PHEV's dominate their respective markets.
I agree with Alan that the heat storage of CSP (if it works half as well as promised) would provide a nice solution to the lateday peak problem. OTOH, as I've said before, demand management (time of day pricing with smart meters) can also solve this pretty straightforwardly.
The heat storage won't be that important at low rates of market penetration. Eventually it may be very valuable, but I also agree with Alan that a very high market % for solar (IMO, higher than 35%, for both CSP & PV) is probably not optimal.
I thank you gentlemen for your kind attention and well-reasoned replies.
I knew I would regret not mentioning wind. Pumped hydro works with any sort of supply, as you note.
I refrained from specifying the kind of hardware on the solar thermal plants for the obvious reason that I happen to be severely prejudiced.
There are more kw-hrs being generated right now from line focus vapor solar plants in the southwest than all the PV in the USA--right? Or, almost right?
I love my little PV system that pumps hot air out of my too hot greenhouse, but it cost me 10$ a peak watt and I would not want to purchase a megawatt's worth.
And don't forget the long distance HVDC. With storage, it makes any % of solar/ wind good.
PS- secret message just between us- stirlings are just iron, like a toyota 4-banger. Sure, they have more stainless and less cast iron but not one wandwave of magic. The design procedure is widely known and accurate. When the capitalists wake up, good, sort-of-cheap stirlings will be rolling off the assembly like hot dogs offa barbecue.
PPS My last month's electric bill was $23. Would I care if it were $46 and the world was saved thereby for my grandkids? I would be very very happy. But I'm not getting the opportunity. Maybe the Germans, maybe the Chinese will.
Best Wishes for Them- and US.
PV installed capacity is probably just ahead of concentrated solar even after Nevada Solar One came on line this year but it is going to be a horse race as GW scale concentrated solar as well as more 100 MW scale plants break ground. There were about 140 MW of PV installed in the US in 2006. Their high projection for 2011 would be 1.2 GW installed in that year, but this fails to account for the rise in US production which should be at least a gigawatt in 500 MW fabrication plants alone in 2010 with may expansions of smaller plants as well as a big expansion in thin film. Getting 3 or 4 GW plus imports might not be too unlikely in 2011 so that concentrated solar would need to be quick to keep up.
Right now PV offers a nice hedge against natural gas price volatility which accounts for its rapid adoption in the commercial sector, but with $1/Watt wholesale prices in thin film starting this year we'll see adoption as a generally lower cost alternative which broadens the market considerably. How soon most of the production reaches this price point will depend on silicon prices and manufacturing efficiency. 2015 is the usual date given for this. Reduced pricing for inverters is also beginning to be an important issue and applying scale to this will likely be part of the resolution.
The market will change again as 40 to 50 percent efficient concentrated PV comes into production in 2010. This will likely be used first in remote field applications such as military missions. These use less material but require tracking and so may come to displace some utility scale efforts based on concentrated thermal solar.
Hope this helps. The industry is moving so fast that it is hard to keep up.
Chris
Helps a whole lot! Many thanks for that good info, Chris.
Well, once again I cite my good Prof at Caltech telling us in his valedictory lecture (early '50's) that gas turbines would run all the diesel trucks off the road in a couple of years.
Didn't happen ( anybody notice?). Reason- a very old one- the competition ahead at the time declined to stay still- just kept staying ahead. Diesels ruled the road then, and they do now. Turbines got better and better, Diesels started ahead and got better and better too, and are still ahead of those way better turbines today.
Right at the moment,concentrated solar thermal is a good deal cheaper/watt delivered than PV. But, as you say, PV is getting better fast. So? Solar thermal is getting better fast too; they are ahead right now, and, I will bet, will be ahead in 2010.
And keep in mind another little fact- solar thermal likes to generate the volts and frequency (if any) wanted, whereas PV has to go thru a couple of hoops to get there. As you say, those hoops tend to be expensive, not to mention yet more failure modes.
This is the kind of race I really like. We can all win.
"Right at the moment,concentrated solar thermal is a good deal cheaper/watt delivered than PV. But, as you say, PV is getting better fast. So? Solar thermal is getting better fast too; they are ahead right now, and, I will bet, will be ahead in 2010."
Well, the thing to keep in mind is that CSP & PV don't really compete with each other: one is utility-scale, and the other is on the customer premises.
But, I agree, they're both growing, and that's great.
I should have said that there were 140 MW of PV installed during 2006. That was a 33% increase over the amount installed during 2005. I took those two numbers and an estimate of total installed in 2001 (so that 02, 03 and 04 were not counted) to get an estimate comparable with installed CSP. So, my guess is PV is slightly ahead. Probably want to bet on both horses.
Chris
On a slightly different, but related note, using water to store heat has other useful applications beyond the electrical grid. I am reminded of something they did at the Floriade festival in Netherlands in 2002: they used a very large (millions of gallons, if I remember correctly) manmade underground aquifer to store heat collected by solar thermal panels all through the summer, which they then used to warm the greenhouses at night and through the cold months using some sort of heat pump.
--C
Energy consultant, writer, blogger www.getreallist.com
Ladies and gentlemen,
One word. Modems.
I just traveled here at the cost of $.05 per hour (total depending on the length of stay). If I want to go to India the cost is the same.
Your focus is too narrow.
As Bucky Fuller says (loosely quoted): "We don't have an energy/resource problem. We have a thinking problem."
BTW how are you going to change China/India?
The only way is to lower the cost of green energy below coal/oil.
BTW it is a natural human propensity to elevate fear over hope. Nice to see so many normal humans here. And yet...
"BTW how are you going to change China/India?
The only way is to lower the cost of green energy below coal/oil."
Well, there is another way. You can raise the cost of coal/oil so that it's higher than green....
China and India aren't totally passive players.
India is installing a lot of wind.
Tata Motors (very large India manufacturer of vehicles) has bought up the 'air car'. They apparently see it as a way to deal with the needs for urban transport.
Good point. I think car-pooling will be easier for most people to do, but heck, it was 1954 when information workers started to outnumber manual workers...
Without Lenz's law you could get more energy out of a transformer than you put in.
What are the odds?
Slim, none, and are you going to fall for this stupid crap again?
Pretty much all else has been said. However I wanted to make two points:
1. Being a grandfather, I am concerned about my grandchildren, and yet, I'm still young enough I'm likely to see a lot more consequences of our collective choices than you or I fear to think about. The enormous inertia of what we have likely already done is so great that our action must be fantastically greater to halt it. If we stopped all Co2 emissions today, it would take 50 years to get back to normal. However, all things considered we may well have passed the trip point in arctic and tundra thaw feedback effects. So why try? Because I'm a father and grandfather.
2. As mentioned earlier, we absolutely must address the demand side and somehow get past selfish, religious and cultural roadblocks that prevent us from taking the serious population control measures needed to address the long term demographics. If not, we are merely bacteria and we live in a petri dish called earth. No amount of sensible energy and environmental policy will help.
What tool can we use? The most frustrating, inefficient and yet powerful one: politics. That means education and peer pressure. The world is starting to eke in the right direction, but I'm afraid it will take some serious frights to get the majority charging toward a hopeful solution. If we must wait for serious fright to set in, will the climatic momentum be too great?
Perhaps we will just be sucked in by solutions like ethanol that let us burn topsoil in our cars while a few claim they have helped (themselves pocket our cash).
I realize this post sounds dire, but without multi-generational buy-in, and good people at the helm, it's going to be mighty high seas.
Kata Maran
Please check this link which documents past climatic variations.
Summary: Climate changes.
All the time.
We are just looking at it through a pinhole of time and erroneously assuming we are to blame. What hubris!
http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:64XGEN4LTboJ:www.fakr.noaa.gov/npfmc...
How much electricty does a houshold need ?
I am looking for a 1.2K (approx) Solar PV system .... What is tne newest technology that I can buy now ??
I'm living with a 1.2 kW system. Can give you some practical insights, perhaps....
Don't go for the "latest, greatest, whiz-bang". Go with "tried and tested".
Panels on a rack that you can adjust throughout the year. (Unless you live close to the equator.)
Separate battery charger/inverter. Either one fail and you loose both. Get an inexpensive inverter as a backup. Specialized stuff doesn't get repaired quickly.
Start with "golf cart" batteries. Much less expensive up front. And cooking a set of batteries is not impossible. I know two people who have ruined a set. Golf carts will last you 4-7 years. (I've gotten 7.) I'm guessing that 6-7 years from now we are going to have much better battery options than what we have today.
Don't undersize your wire. Go higher voltage from the racks , at least 24v, better 48v. That means that you can use smaller gauge wire (and copper has gotten expensive).
Even before you start listing the parts to put your system together get very, very serious about conservation. CFLs, Energy Star appliances, laptops rather than desktops, ....
My 1.2 kW give me refrigeration (Kenmore 18 cu.ft.), lights, music, computers, washing machine, pumps water, runs power tools, .... What it doesn't do is to heat water, warm the house, or cook food.
laptops rather than desktops
The Apple MacMini has the "guts" of a laptop but w/o the battery (add a UPS if you want to) and screen, keyboard & mouse. Add your old LCD screen and USB keyboard & mouse (or buy). $599 direct from Apple. (Packaging is minimal, just the essential basics :-)
Mine uses 31 watts with Airport turned off, 33 watts with Airport turned on. Dimensions 6.5" rounded square and 2" high.
Best Hopes for Efficiency,
Alan
Thanks
Considering a grid tie with battery backup to get a state rebate and Fed tax credit
6 - 200 watt Sanyo modules on a Zomeworks tracker (need pole mount anyway)
Outback inverter/charger
http://solarhome.org/index.aspPageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=2258
Budget $5500 with rebate and tax credit
Step 1: Do everything you can to reduce your electrical loads.
Step 2: Write down your kWh/month from your utility bills for a few months AFTER you have reduced your loads.
Step 3: Size the system based on that, using available data for solar insolation in your area. A qualified solar contractor should probably do this.
FYI in many cases the added production of a tracking system for a grid-tied system isn't worth the cost, because the incentive systems are set up based on the rated production of the modules and inverter ONLY (without tracking). And tracking units are notorious for failing after a few years. So you can oftentimes increase your output equivalent to that of a tracking system by merely adding another module or two, while actually INCREASING your rebate and having a far more reliable system.
--C
Energy consultant, writer, blogger www.getreallist.com
jmygann
As a data point for you, my home uses ~9600 KWhrs per year, an average of ~1.1 kw per hour. This is a 3000 sqft house with 2 adults (i know, its oversized for 2, but the kids are gone and i like my home). This includes central AC (northern virginia) and cooking, but not heating or hot water (natural gas). Note that this usage is a 22% reduction from original consumption, before adding CFLs, upgrading AC unit, disconnecting phantom loads and becoming an energy Nazi (in my wife's opinion, i.e. constant demands that lights/TV/etc be turned off when not in use)
budr
Ok, here's reason to not have hope that we'll ever change our way of life until it is physically forced upon us:
Full article
(sorry if it requires registration)
Later in the article they state that they can't change their plans because they already sold tickets. Wow we are really stupid!
Mountain out of Molehill Dept.
38 gpm is a pittance, hardly worth noting even in your drought. A garden hose runs around 5 gpm. And it will reenter the water table relatively unscathed, as opposed to being spout into a treatment plant and then on to surface water. Someone must hate Stone Mountain for that to be published.
Don't get me wrong, I think snow machines and such for skiing borders on ludicrous. Especially at 80 degrees. One more step, to that of Dubai, and there's complete decadence.
Thank you Robert. Good post.
That needs to be underscored. IF people use bicycles, IF people walk, IF communities take charge of their own destiny and enable public transportation - and no, huge density is NOT a requirement - I remember riding small, crowded minivans throughout the DR in a very rural and thinly settled context. IF many die, IF IF IF. It's not a replacement.
Reading that post is just like my discussion with John Howe last week. In addition to his solar powered MG, farmall cub and golf cart, he now has a mid-sized Ford tractor pulling a serious plow through Maine soil - where construction of a new garden and $25 gets one membership in the Stoneworker's Guild. The same PV array powers them all interchangeably - there are synergies.
The other good point you make: existing biosystems are already using what they produce. We can't simply take more biomass from the planet any more than we can take more hydro. Rain falls and wears away rock to create soil and floodplains. It feeds the grasses and the fish. Dam it and the crops die, the fisheries shut down and the cities sink. Everything in the solar cycle is in use already and it cannot be repurposed for human use without depriving a whole chain of other uses on which we depend as well.
Is PV benign? For a planet of 6B I don't know. For a planet of 2B probably. 4B? 8B? I don't know. Howe calculates that if we drop energy use in US to about 1/8 (it's not clear what numbers elsewhere) we can stretch out current supplies long enough to ramp up PV and other renewables.
But there are all sorts of other problems to bite us. The grades on our road system, for example, suck up huge amounts of power. Electric vehicles don't want to go over hills, but around them. We might take a lane away and convert it to rail because we can afford the regenerative braking on a train (can we, I don't know). But it triples the cost of the power system for a small EV.
Another problem that will certainly bite us: public health. That's both far and near to this thread - transportation is so important to the current way of life. Later.
cfm in Gray, ME
A Solar Electric Tractor
Is it really being powered by the sun or a weeks worth of sunlight in batteries ??
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R26RdfqGvUE
There is not enough power from those panels to run a tractor IMHO
How many watts to pull a plow or ripper shank ?
I reckon you want 75kw/100hp for pulling power, hydraulics and PTO. A half day's work is say 4 hours, so you want 300kwh in the 'tank'. To do that with lead acid batteries start converting 3 or 4 buses (to contain the battery packs) and get a football field of solar panels. Charge up the idle tractor-buses while one is pulling the plow.
"I reckon you want 75kw/100hp for pulling power, hydraulics and PTO."
Do you really use 100hp continually, or is that the peak power rating for the motor?
Using a tractor with 100 "horses" seems wrong somehow. I don't know about the reality of it, but if 2 (750W) horses can pull a plow "all day", 2kW of power should be able to do the similar work (plus move the tractor itself). Maybe with bursts of 5-10kW or so.
75kW seems like modern excess based on the idea that "energy is free", but it doesn't seem unreasonable to use $10-20K of solar panels (2kW) to make a tractor that can do the work of two horses, if we need to downscale things a bit.
Now, the roof on the tractor in the video looks a bit small--if I assume 4 square meters at 15% efficiency at ridiculous sunlight levels, I only get 600W. My guess is that that little tractor is about as good as a sick pony, maybe up for a few hours a day of work before conking out.
"Now, the roof on the tractor in the video looks a bit small--if I assume 4 square meters at 15% efficiency at ridiculous sunlight levels, I only get 600W. My guess is that that little tractor is about as good as a sick pony, maybe up for a few hours a day of work before conking out."
Yeah, I can't see powering a tractor by same-time solar power - bateries will be needed.
You are forgetting the efficiency differential between horse drawn plows and machine driven plows. Someone recently posted here on TOD the exact numbers, which I cannot recall, but today, with machines, a farmer can work the same number of acres in a few hours that used to take more than a week to work with draft animals and by hand. If we lose the machines, we lose that efficiency. If the electric tractor is only as efficient as the horse, then we have to look at additional costs of building and maintaining the tractor versus the cost of the horse through its lifetime. It is only when the tractor becomes much more efficient than the horse that we start to re-examine the relationships on a different basis. It is reasonable to assume then that if the efficiency of the tractor were to drop that low then the old considerations would again become dominant.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
"If the electric tractor is only as efficient as the horse, then we have to look at additional costs of building and maintaining the tractor versus the cost of the horse through its lifetime."
The problem with a "direct-PV" powered tractor is power throughput, not efficiency, which is limited by the amount of PV you can mount above the tractor. The easy answer is to not insist on mounting the PV on the tractor, and use batteries instead, powered by PV on the farmhouse (or in an adjacent field...). Batteries will work just fine instead of, or in addition to the tractor-mounted PV.
The tractor-mounted PV would extend the battery life/tractor range a bit - you'd have to balance the cost of PV on a tractor that's only used a short part of the season, vs the convenience of additional range. Perhaps if the PV were modular, and you could attach it to the farmhouse array when plowing was done...
Yes, bioengineering has improved. It has brought about splicing viral DNA into food plants, jellyfish DNA into land plants just to name a few.
We now have "Round Up" ready corn which can be sprayed directly on corn crops. This is only creating new resistant species of weeds which will be even tougher to control in the future. To put your faith in "them" figuring it out eventually strains reason IMH but biologically trained opinion . Bioengineering has created more headaches for an energy constrained future to deal with. I plan to be one of those people in the future and I have NO faith in "them". Sad part is, we'll only know how well this experiment in playing God will end when my adult children and grandchildren are two decades older. I'm sure it will be "fun" finding out the results. WHat? The autism rate is 1 in 150 now? Really? Couldn't have a thing to do with bioengineering pesticides, could it? Naw, "they " wouldn't lie to us!
Robert, a point of curiosity -- some articles about furans surfaced here a couple months back, and a small flurry of interest. At least it got me to read the WikiPedia articles on furans. {oxygenated, cyclic, unsaturated hydrocarbons produced by 'toasting' (poly?)saccharides}
First off, can furans be produced from cellulose like they are from sugars? Have you explored that avenue?
Although it still won't be an energy bonanza, it seems to me the process might be more efficient than trying to distill a very weak cellulosic beer.
I think that the articles you're thinking of are:
Science (2007) 316:1597-1600 "Metal Chlorides in Ionic Liquid Solvents Convert Sugars to 5-Hydroxymethylfurfural" and Nature (2007) 447:982-986 "Production of dimethylfuran for liquid fuels from biomass-derived carbohydrates".
They both came out at almost the same time, and they both used fructose (a 6-carbon sugar) as their raw material. Cellulose is a polymer of glucose (also a 6-carbon sugar), and you could in principle achieve the same result by digesting the cellulose with a cellulase and then isomerizing the glucose to fructose.
However, these papers are both very preliminary observations that point the way in interesting directions, but probaly won't result in anything directly applicable to commercial biofuels for at least 5 years.
As far as Patzek's paper goes, my thoughts are:
(i) he (and Robert) are right--there won't be enough biomass available to power any significant fraction of our current society the way it now is set up--but my response to that is, there still will be enough of a worthwhile use for biofuels (or biologically derived chemicals) in the amounts that could be produced sustainably to justify developing cellulosic refinery technologies (the potential catastrophe comes if we refuse to restrain ourselves to sustainable levels of biomass harvesting);
(ii) (and this is the key point) the controlling parameter for the efficiency of the process is the amount of energy required to concentrate the ethanol after the fermentation. Therefore, if you want to make efficient cellulosic biorefineries (of any sort) there are two places to concentrate your efforts: first, find less energy intensive ways to separate ethanol and water, and second, find ways to increase the biomass concentration that enters the process per unit time (and volume).
I know that work is being done on improving ethanol purification, and I'm currently working with a group in Toledo, OH that has developed a way to increase the biomass concentration (and therefore the final ethanol concentration) to about 45 wt% (instead of the 20 - 25 wt% that Patzek feels is the practical maximum). This will result in a corresponding increase in the ethanol concentration after fermentation, and a substantial improvement in the energy efficiency of the process.
So, the analysis as it's presented is very compelling and certainly instructive, but it may be more useful to see it as a way to identify where more work should be done than to use it as an excuse to give up on cellulosic biorefineries generally as a bad idea.
I think that the statement,
is really not as important from a fuels standpoint as it is from a social standpoint. There are underlying fundamental problems with a society (or species) that competes for NONrenewable resources with itself, its children, and with the natural environment which it is dependent upon and then blindly looks for new ways to continue expanding this self-destructive mentality through poisonous replacement fuels (nuclear, pesticide-dependent corn, toxic waste-heavy solar cell production facilities, etc).
Meanwhile, the economic follies are going to be churning out billions of idle minds and hands that are under-exercised and underutilized, and will be without the cash to buy the gas that the System of Systems is so bent on replacing.
Shortage of cash is not a problem since we humans can print out as many of these artificial tokens as we please (and by "we", I include the government in that collective term).
No the problem lies in the human brain since it is easily fooled into thinking, "Once I have "money", I can have anything my heart desires."
Well, I meant "money", actually. "Cash" implies paper that 'says' it is money, when it is really a promise based upon perceived value. The value is gone, spent as down payment on mohagany floors and granite countertops and oil to drive to work to buy a car to drive to work. When all is said and done in America, there isn't any actual value left above the debts that are promised. The economy just doesn't have the grace to fall over. The paper has already been printed, the promises been made, and when TSHTF, we will be trying to figure out what we are going to trade in order to buy fuel for our concentrated farming operations to run on to feed the people. Now that we have 'outsourced' our manual skills and paid someone to take all that old manually operated machinery off of our hands, who and what are we going to use to rebuild after the dollar tanks? We might as well ask the Chinese how much of our value they will pay back to us for our empty parking lots and empty factories. Chances are, they will inform us that they have already purchased those things and we spent the money on movies and football games and borrowed even more to finance bigger TVs.
The truth is finally getting out...:-)
http://www.prometheus.org/
RC
Thanks for taking the time to write a very worthwhile article. The thing I focused on most was Patzek's debunking of the theoretical energy returns for cellulosic ethanol.
I have known intuitively that they can't possibly make sense. For one thing, we don't actually have any plants in operation producing in reasonable quantities. For another, just the transportation costs and storing of all the biomass would suggest that the energy return is not all that good. Yet I have seen the very optimistic energy return estimates repeated endlessly. I think the latest place I saw the optimistic cellulosic ethanol energy return was in the National Geographic article that came out in the past week.
If we have Patzek's article, there is at least one article we can point to explaining why the energy return numbers cannot possibly be as good as reported.
Global warming is already a very serious problem for us, not just for our children. In Australia, drought has been worsened by climate change to such an extent that it is not only a matter of reduced grain production in certain years but that we may face abandoning argiculture in some regions altogether.
If climate change continues in the non-linear fashion which we discover now, soon the question of what drives our cars will be the least of our worries.
The Earth is out of time
http://www.theage.com.au/news/in-depth/the-earth-is-out-of-time/2007/09/...
Here is a project that uses emissions from a natural gas-fired power station to *significantly* enhance algol-based biofuels.
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2007/09/greenfuel-techn.html
From the article.
More info..
Great job, Robert. Excellent posts.
Another nail in the coffin...GHG emissions. Although Patzek chooses not to discuss emissions, it is important to point out that, in addition to the emissions of the FF inputs, the total cycle field-to-wheel GHGs must be described by
CO2e = CO2 + 23xCH4 + 296xN2O + others
N2O release from agro-biofuel production negates global warming reduction by replacing fossil fuels
Atmos. Chem. Phys. Discuss., 7, 11191–11205, 2007
"...When the extra N2O emission from biofuel production is calculated in “CO2-equivalent” global warming terms, and compared with the quasi-cooling effect of “saving” emissions of fossil fuel derived CO2, the outcome is that the production of commonly used biofuels, such as biodiesel from rapeseed and bioethanol from corn (maize), can contribute as much or more to global warming by N2O emissions than cooling by fossil fuel savings..."
BTW, N2O has an atmospheric lifetime of 120 years.
Fascinating article.
In the end the question must be not "how do we move through the landscape", but "how do we inhabit the landscape so that we reduce our need to move through it?"
We're still in a transportation mind set that assumes that stuff we need (goods, jobs, people) are "over there" and we will need portable energy to move the people to the stuff.
The real energy solutions involve arranging the stuff so that you can use your own legs to get to it.... call it "landscape design" or "urban design" or call it "civilization design."
I'm less interested in ways of making transportation work than in ways of obviating the need for transportation itself (on the current scale.) The rising cost of energy will push that process of course... but redesigning the environments that people inhabit and the spatial relationships between the stuff in our environments should be thought of an equal partner in any effort to reach a new stable human civilizational energic balance.
Let's flip our thinking from build first... figure out how to get there later... to build it from the start so that we are already where we need to be. Again, the rising cost of transportation energy will force this in any case, and I don't know that we can get ahead of the economic curve very far, but I want to encourage people to realize that all of our talk about ecologically sustainable ways of moving people and goods from place to place is focussed on a problem that doesn't have to exist. We are solving a problem that exists because the cost of transportation energy has been negligible for so many decades.
As the article points out, we could eat up most of the ag land in the world trying to move people between places that are less and less worth being in, across landscapes that less and less pleasurable to move through. The same critique will probably apply to the massed PV solar collector farms that would charge the batteries that would run the cars of the future. Energy to move people around is not the problem to solve. It's the need (perceived, and possibly delusional) to move around (to the extent that we currently feel it) that is the deep problem that we can and must attempt to solve.
We don't need solutions to the challenge of transportation, we need to solve the civilizational design problems that create the need for massive transportation infrastructures.
---
Everybody's got an opinion.
There is a radical solution that will work and we dont have to calculate EROI nor depend on 'magic carpets' ie future technology. The government must plan to use less. There is a lot of low hanging fruit to be picked there easily.
IMHO the best method is a rationing scheme, Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQs). TEQs, sensible, carefully planned rationing seems to me to be the only way to put the mind power of each and every person to ways of using less energy. That will be the only way to avoid a catastrophe in first world countries.
Cheers
Michael Dwyer
Beyond Oil South Australia
If you have not done so, I really recommend reading the short post, just a few posts above, from -
oregon7 on October 3, 2007
I believe that many of the above excellent posts by “Nick” about running the world on electricity are very do-able, and would represent an ideal technical solution / fix, that many people would like to see happen.
Even I, would like to see much of his outlook become workable.
If we could get governments to push for all these changes, many of these ideas could happen.
BUT to this point, all the people in government, as in most of society do not see the problem.
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3045
I expect that the world will be in a severe (oil shortage induced) depression, before people finally realize that these changes must be made.
At that point, it will be very difficult to make these changes, on a large enough scale, as shortages of everything effect society.
DocScience
http://www.angelfire.com/in/Gilbert1/grid.html
"I believe that many of the above excellent posts by “Nick” about running the world on electricity are very do-able, and would represent an ideal technical solution / fix, that many people would like to see happen.
Even I, would like to see much of his outlook become workable."
Thanks. I agree, our response is much slower than it should be. OTOH, there is some cause for optimism: wind was 20% of new US generation last year, hybrids are at 2%+ market share (and will become PHEV's almost seamlessly), and wind, solar and hybrids are doubling every 2 years. In 10 years we could be in pretty good shape: all non-FF for new generation & starting to sharply reduce coal consumption, and 50%+ PHEV's for new vehicles.
Again, not as fast as we need, but not too shabby.
I guess you are assuming business as usual for the next ten years while the wonder machines come on line.
Is there a need to worry about jobs for truck drivers, airline staff, road maintenance, pesticide production, mining, shipping, petrochemicals, plastics, auto and related industries and farming?
As long as everyone, especially the poor has electricity for their home and an electric vehicle, why would we need a job and money?
I can see electricity one day being the energy of choice but by then, the population will probably have been culled sufficiently to allow it.
It is best to dig the well before you are thirsty.
"I guess you are assuming business as usual for the next ten years while the wonder machines come on line."
Not at all - I expect the transition to be painful.
"I can see electricity one day being the energy of choice but by then, the population will probably have been culled sufficiently to allow it."
I think you're going a bit overboard there...
"It is best to dig the well before you are thirsty."
Absolutely. OTOH, we will get through it. Most of our problem is awareness of the problem. Think of what we did in WWII - we could do it again. It wouldn't be easy, but we'd get through. Don't forget the enormous potential of conservation: we could reduce the gasoline used for commuting by 2/3 in 6 months with carpooling.
Thanks!