Nanosolar

The company Nanosolar has a potentially interesting technology: self-organizing solar panels based on nanostructures that should be manufacturable at a substantial discount relative to current silicon-based panels. I forwarded this company to peakoil.com back in December. Thanks to an article appearing in hindu.com, the company is receiving yet another wave of interest; this not only appeared via Knowledge Problem, but perhaps more forcefully, in Slashdot as well.

We should be skeptical. Recent history in Silicon Valley leads us to believe that extraordinary claims require extraordinary products, and thus far, nary a one is available for purchase. While the hindu.com writer almost certainly made a typo when he claimed 120 W/in², the reality is more like 120 W/m², given the rated efficiency of the units at 12% and the average solar irradiance of about 1 kW/m² at the earth's surface. In their defense, many of the principles' have advanced degrees from Stanford and other leading universities, and their investor list includes top-drawer names such as Benchmark Capital, U.S. Venture Partners, and Google founders Sergei Brin and Larry Page. Pedigree, of course, is no substitute for viable technology and a solid business plan -- as witness the multiply bankrupt HomeGrocer.com, which could count superstar Jim Barksdale among its early investors. We need the technological miracles indistinguishable from magic, certainly, but first we need for them to actually exist.

The First Resort Of A Scoundrel

Without knowing the specifics of their program -- and being admittedly less-than-knowledgeable about the mechanisms used to determine actual reserves -- this demand by the oil industry to change the SEC mechanism for determining oil reserves smacks of Enron-style fraud. That is, in the absence of actual reserves, the energy companies, smelling their own deaths, have decided to foist upon their shareholders outright fraud, and are trying to bully the SEC in the process.

The report, by Cambridge Energy Research Associates, calls on the SEC to revamp its reserves-accounting methodology to reflect changes in the oil industry since the guideline was hatched more than 20 years ago.

Among those changes: improved technology, which allows the industry to retrieve more of the oil and gas it finds, and increasing globalization, which means that more of the world's fossil-fuel supply lies in countries where the oil and gas is owned by the state, whose policies on production don't mesh with the SEC's rules. CERA officials noted that the industry has shifted from one focused on on-shore fields in the U.S. to one increasingly reliant on deep-water production around the world.

...

Daniel Yergin, CERA's chairman, said energy companies and Wall Street already focus on a broader measure than the SEC's in assessing reserves: not just "proved" reserves, which means oil and gas that can be produced given current technology and current market prices, but "probable" reserves, which takes into account longer-term estimates of technological development and price changes.

"Companies are going ahead and, indeed, investing billions of dollars based on indirect methods for assessing reserves," said Mr. Yergin. "They're making huge bets, and it is very, very dependent upon technological innovation." An SEC reporting standard that doesn't give companies flexibility to account for expected technological improvement "penalizes present investors," he said.

In other words, no matter how badly their fields decline, the firms should be able to report reserve growth based on "expected technological improvement". That is, they should be allowed to manufacture reserves growth based on speculation. That the report "was funded by oil and gas companies, accounting firms, law firms and industry consultants" is no surprise, but that the co-conspirators should include a consultant to the estimable CALpers public employee retirement fund is.

But they aren't the only ones criticizing the SEC's method. "To continue focusing on proved reserves is what really doesn't make sense," said Eric Knight, managing director of Knight Vinke Asset Management, a money manager that campaigns for improved corporate governance.

Mr. Knight's firm has been working with the California Public Employees' Retirement System, the largest U.S. public pension fund, which also has called on oil companies to subject their reserve estimates to external auditors. SEC rules don't require outside auditing of reserve numbers.

John Heine, an SEC spokesman, said agency officials "will read the report with interest but have no immediate comment."

As well they should. What makes this interesting -- and decidedly scary -- is the oxymoronic nature of the changes CERA proposes. On the one hand, they claim that the domestic piece of the energy puzzle is now overall much smaller than it was 27 years ago, when the current reserves accounting system was put into place. This is almost certainly true: CERA claims only 20% of SEC-registered corporations' reserves are found in "Texlahoma", the oil-producing region of Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma; the rest are overseas. So far, so good. But from there, it becomes rather more dangerous:

• Technological change "support[s] investment decisions costing billions of dollars", but we don't hear how this translates to usable reserves. The easiest way to make a million dollars, goes the cynical saw, is to start with two million.
• Oil in foreign countries can't be recognized as proven reserves for various reasons, but isn't this essentially hiding behind the skirt of governments reticent to disclose actual depletion?

The problem of reserve calculation is obviously difficult. Matthew Simmons in a recent lecture (PDF) likened the process to making "actuarial estimates of remaining years in a human life -- a scientific guess". But that guess is increasingly boosted by technological legerdemain: according to page 22 of Simmons' presentation, 6% of reserve growth over the last 20 years came from "drill bit" success; the rest was due to "paper barrels". Similarly, price increases in world markets mean oil-producing countries get a larger percentage of oil from existing fields, and cut into companies' shares. Simmons rightly observes that "'Trust me' was fine when the world's oil supply was young"; allowing the oil companies to change the rules of the game to invent new reserves virtually at will only serves to hoodwink existing oil company investors. Simply put: if reserves growth is real, why are we paying $51/bbl for oil today? Where's all the surplus capacity?

Update 3/3: It occurs to me that there is one part of their program that amounts to a step in the right direction, and that is reserves transparancy. However, the other parts of their program (such as accounting for "expected technological developments") puts even that into question.

Following Up On CO2 Reduction

The Engineer-Poet at The Ergosphere throws some cold water on my naive excitement over catalyzed CO₂ reduction. Not that it isn't still interesting, but paraphrasing, the chemosynthesis is the least of our worries here. I'm not quite so convinced, and I may try to contact the authors behind this paper.

An Editorial Sidebar: On The Pogue Carburetor, Zero Point Energy, And Other Frauds

I don't always read every comment that appears in this blog, but mainly that's because the ones catching my eye tend to be those appearing in the most recently published stories. An older one came to my attention today while reading this very early post. Poster Steven asks about this book and in particular, what do I think about zero-point energy? Paraphrasing Leon from Blade Runner, let me tell you about zero-point energy...

I'm of two minds about it. On the one hand, it does seem to be a legitimate scientific pursuit. The existence of zero-point energy was first postulated by Max Planck; it seems that -- in theory -- there is some energy to be harvested from the vacuum, and infinite amounts of it, too. Why this is, I can't rightly say; I'm not a physicist by calling or inclination.

On the other hand, it seems that the nutjobs have chased the legitimate scientists out of the field, as witness this particular nutjob, this pseudo-university, this crank magnet, or any of a thousand other conspiracy theorists and loons, all searchable via the miracle of Google. If there is something there, it's not helping that transparent frauds are lining up, jaws agape, hoping to lure in a steady stream of the delusional.

There has never been anything remotely respectable, however, with the Pogue Carburetor, nor the dozen more where that came from. Conceived as a fraud, it languishes as a bait to lure suckers. Wherever there are technological grassy knolls, behind them will spring a dozen conspiracy buffs, each eager to "prove", with twisted logic, that the oil trusts or whomsoever is keeping this wonderful device out of the hands of the general public. Such ideas, romantic as they are, are also palpably false. Zero-point energy is detectable but only with the most sensitive of devices. We are not interested in infinite sources of energy that require our presence throughout the universe to harvest. Unless someone with legitimate credentials can step forward and demonstrate such a machine -- which, by the way, would make him immensely rich -- my inclination is to lump all such criers into the same intellectual dungeons occupied by the UFO mavens, the rabid believers in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the flat-earthers.

Laserbrains: Direct-Drive Fusion

One thing I find as a constant in my discussions of fusion (here, here, here, and here): I keep forgetting one subspecies of fusion or another, and this time it's inertial fusion. The idea is that a phalanx of lasers, equispaced, hit a deuterium-tritium target simultaneously with a big pulse of energy. This should be sufficient to make the whole thing compress mighty hard, hard enough to spark a fusion reaction and make everyone go home happy. (General Atomics has a pretty nice explanation on their website.) The boys working the big lasers are getting smarter about it; the University of Rochester is harboring one group working on ICF, and according to this Popular Mechanics article, they've learned a thing or two about the confinement process. In particular, the problem with ICF is not unlike that with conventional fusion: convincing the plasma to stay in one place long enough to fuse a large percentage of the fuel is really hard. But, say the UR folks, they claim to have developed a laser "polarization smoothing" technique that should allow them to get to actual ignition. This "bodes well" for further experiments both at UR and at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore Labs. The full paper from the UR team can be found in PDF form.

Dirty Hydropower?

Is there no human activity that won't produce greenhouse gases? New Scientist has an article (subscription required) indicating that hydropower, once considered clean, may actually create more -- and worse -- greenhouse gases than fossil fuels!

Hydroelectric dams produce significant amounts of carbon dioxide and methane, and in some cases produce more of these greenhouse gases than power plants running on fossil fuels. Carbon emissions vary from dam to dam, says Philip Fearnside from Brazil's National Institute for Research in the Amazon in Manaus. "But we do know that there are enough emissions to worry about."

In a study to be published in Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, Fearnside estimates that in 1990 the greenhouse effect of emissions from the Curuá-Una dam in Pará, Brazil, was more than three-and-a-half times what would have been produced by generating the same amount of electricity from oil.

This is because large amounts of carbon tied up in trees and other plants are released when the reservoir is initially flooded and the plants rot. Then after this first pulse of decay, plant matter settling on the reservoir's bottom decomposes without oxygen, resulting in a build-up of dissolved methane. This is released into the atmosphere when water passes through the dam's turbines.

Unbelievable! One wonders, though: don't rivers have decaying matter at their bottoms anyway? How much more does a dam really create? And if this is true, isn't this a good excuse to kill all the world's beavers and dynamite their dams?

Reducing Carbon Dioxide Using A Catalyst

Atmospheric CO₂ isn't especially useful by itself; among other things, it's implicated as a greenhouse gas. Plants, of course, convert CO₂ and sunlight into sugars and/or cellulose, according to the equasion

6CO₂ + 6H₂O + energy -> 6O₂ + C₆H₁₂O₆

The processes of photosynthesis are but little understood, though progress seems to have sped up in recent years. This three-year-old PowerPoint slideshow from Robert M. Granger, II, Ph.D of Sweet Briar College in Virginia, and this later one by Ana Ciric dated October 30, 2004, show remarkable progress in this field. Using a platinum-based catalyst, the team was able to convert raw CO₂ to various hydrocarbon chains (benzenes and simple sugars). If this can be made to work on a large scale -- and without reading anything more complicated than the slideshows, it's hard to tell -- this could have huge implications for global warming. Unfortunately, economic application is likely going to be limited unless another catalyst besides platinum ends up being used here.

Not knowing anything about chemistry, but why is it that platinum is always so critical to industrial catalytic reactions?

Alaskan Town To Provide Test For Mini-Reactor

A small Alaskan town may provide the location for a proof-of-concept mini-reactor, according to New Scientist. The reactor design, created by Toshiba, is novel and has never been built before. The proposed design will generate 10 MW, and has no moving parts.