Thanks

At some point I'm going to have to stop writing these kinds of posts, but in the interim, thanks to fellow geek pcal.net and A Random Walk (aka Kurt Johnson) for their recent plugs. Links are always welcome, and sidebar links doubly so.

Squeezing Energy From Public Waterworks

Hydropower from dams and even pico hydro in countries like Vietnam with poor, widely distributed populations aren't that uncommon. But how much thought has gone into even things as simple as reclaiming waste energy from municipal water flows already in place? Rentricity has designed a system that can capture from 30-200 kW from existing municipal water streams using microturbines, and the state of Rhode Island has given the company a grant from that state's Renewable Energy Fund. In addition to generating electricity, the system will provide advanced system monitoring capabilities not now present.

Extracting More Energy From Old Oil Wells

First, via peakoil.com, the US Department of Energy claims 43 billion barrels of recoverable oil could be reclaimed using new CO₂ injection methods.

Carbon dioxide enhanced recovery involves flooding a mature oil reservoir with large volumes of carbon dioxide. But there are actually two distinct recovery techniques using carbon dioxide — miscible recovery and immiscible recovery.

The miscible technique works with high-gravity oil. Carbon dioxide from an injection well mixes with water and oil in the reservoir to form a single, relatively low viscosity fluid phase that flows out through a production well.

The immiscible technique applies to reservoirs with relatively low gravity oil or with low reservoir pressures — in these situations the carbon dioxide does not mix with the oil but, instead, reduces the viscosity of the oil through swelling of the fluid. The pressure of carbon dioxide forces the oil out through the production well.

These methods could be made to work in domestic U.S. fields in onshore fields in California, Louisiana, Texas, Alaska, and Illinois, and offshore in the Gulf Coast and Louisiana. With Alaska, however, the problem is getting a CO₂ stream to the oil fields. Gosh, if they're having a hard time finding CO₂ sources, I can think of a few...

The second bit is a piece in FuturePundit about applying microorganisms in depleted oil wells to generate natural gas. LUCA Technologies has discovered that the same microorganisms that convert coal to methane are much more effective when applied to depleted oil wells. This process was thought to occur over geologic timespans, but recent research indicates it can happen in real time and in significant amounts. The FuturePundit article has a lot of good info on it which I'm not inclined to duplicate here; best to read that instead.

California Wind Initiatives

Following up on comments I left at Monkeysign, I stumbled across a couple pieces about the role of wind farms in California power generation. First, LAMWD is adding a wind farm at Pine Tree to its generation portfolio. The facility, part of the DWP's renewable energy initiative to produce 20% of the utility's power from renewables by 2017, recently received final approval from the city council and the DWP Board of Commissioners. The wind farm, north of Mojave, will have a 120MW capacity and is expected to start generating power in the first quarter of 2006. The city has also earmarked $1.7 billion to retrofitting combined-cycle technology to aging power plants already under LAMWD control.

Second, PG&E has submitted a plan for purchasing electricity from wind farms, all in northern California. With these purchases, PG&E hopes to generate 30% of its electricity from renewable sources.

Update 5/2: FuturePundit has a number of links and additional commentary on the LADWP moves.

Saudi Chief Justice Calls For Jihad Against US Troops In Iraq

Thanks to Winds of Change for this MSNBC article showing the Saudi's Chief Justice issued a jihad against American forces in Iraq.

Sheik Saleh Al Luhaidan, seen in video seated to the right of the crown prince, is chief justice of Saudi Arabia's Supreme Judicial Council. His sermons and words carry great significance.

In an audiotape secretly recorded at a government mosque last October and obtained by NBC News, Luhaidan encourages young Saudis to go to Iraq to wage war against Americans.

"If someone knows that he is capable of entering Iraq in order to join the fight, and if his intention is to raise up the word of God, then he is free to do so," says Luhaidan in Arabic on the tape.

Talk about foreign... a government mosque?

UtiliPoint On Coal

Thanks to Chiasm for this UtiliPoint International article about changes in coal production and consumption. Briefly, in the U.S., there's western coal (low-sulfur but fairly moist, thus lower energy content) and eastern coal (higher sulfur but dryer). Sulfur emissions regulations have increased interest in western coal, but sulfur treatment processing means higher energy eastern coal can still be competitive. Both compete against natural gas, and given coal's relative abundance, its share is unlikely to decline any time soon.

UtiliPoint's IssueAlert Archive also has good recent articles on coal bed methane, coal gasification, and the place of renewables in the utility energy mix.

Devil's Advocate

Politics is the art of the possible. Let me gently suggest the implausible for a moment, and that is that George W. Bush is actually doing the best he can for the American public in a moment of extreme crisis. Let me take as given that he knows about the issues of oil depletion. Does he tell the public the jig's up for oil? No, too problematic, and besides, too many conflicting opinions. Certainly, few of his top level pals (well, save for that pesky Simmons fellow) are going to go on record saying something like "oh, oil's about to run out, better start looking for alternatives." Say that, and you can kiss whatever cooperation you've got with the Saudis goodbye. And make no mistake, we'll need every last drop of oil the Saudis can spare.

No, you have to be subtler than that. So you let Simmons alone, knowing the worrywart will soon enough publish his spreadsheets of doom. What next?

You could start funding research worth millions and billions of dollars on alternative energy. It looks good at first, but realistically, how many inventions from government labs ever make it into usable, cheap form -- and make no mistake, cheap is the primary word here -- once the scientists get past the proof-of-concept stage? Fuel cells, hydrogen cars, high-efficiency solar panels -- all those things can be made, of course, but all of them are expensive and tend to end up in the space program anyway because nobody can afford the production models.

So, what, then? You give in to the oil companies because because they're your golfing buddies and because they gave the GOP so damn much money -- in short, because you have to. So, big tax breaks for exploration, check.

Anything else?

Mostly, you pray that everyone else actually gets it. This isn't the kind of problem the government can actually solve well, not in a democracy, anyway; the problem is the expressed will of the people, and that will involves driving cars, lots of them, and big ones. Any politician telling them they have to get into smaller cars with punier engines is in the fast lane to becoming an Out; just ask Jimmy Carter. No, the first order of business for any politician is to stay elected. So honesty isn't going to happen. Certainly, the public won't go in for any totalitarian style "forced relocations" -- if suchlike is even necessary (and it isn't). But there's going to be a lot of losers in the medium term, and the important thing is getting past the midterm elections without too much carnage. Hence, the lowering of expectations about relief from oil price hikes. ("... the energy bill is certainly no quick fix. You can't wave a magic wand.")

The jittery guys on the Merc trading floor -- now, they'll be useful. When the price of oil crashes through the sixty dollars a barrel figure, that's when people will take notice. And they will, eventually. And the majors -- well, they're about to have their own problems, as depletion takes them down, too, and nobody can miss that. Contributions or no, they're in for a rough ride on the way down, and there is absolutely nothing Bush can do to help them.

Will of the people. Those aren't the words they'll have swirling in their heads as they fill up at four dollar gas. But they should be. The people have to want to pursue alternative energy sources. They have to accept and even embrace conservation in a way no political leader hoping to win the next election can now justify explaining. To that end, you have to hope T. Boone Pickens is right about oil prices, and sooner rather than later.

Ezra Klein On The Undesirability Of Motivational Fuel Taxes

I've already spouted off once about why carbon taxes are regressive and wrong-headed. Now comes Ezra Klein, Liberal (at least, that's what I think his political persuasions are) into the fold with this grudging agreement of this Chris Pope piece appearing in the Daily Standard. In addition to the sawing-off-the-tree-branch-from-the-wrong-side revenue problems such a tax would create, aside from the perverse incentives it hands to the state to actually stop development of carboniferous renewable fuels, Pope adds that its influence in the UK has done little to retard car usage:

For all the promises of environmental salvation through gas taxation, car use has been limited more by the fact that roads are so jammed that people now get to places quicker by train. Yet despite the enormous popularity of cars in the face of a high gas tax, Britons still hear claims that an even higher tax is what is needed to save the environment. The fig-leaf of economic rationale has, however, fallen. With taxes accounting for such a large share of the gas price, this would imply that the benefit to society of road transportation is less than a quarter of its external cost!

But as Klein notes, an onerous fuel tax is profoundly regressive while doing little to get the most consumptive drivers -- e.g. those with Hummers -- off the roads:

The gas tax fails because it penalizes folks for conditions outside their control. We generally imagine the tax as nailing those morons peering down from Hummers, but most of the affluent, insecure drivers who're purchasing a tank for their morning commute do so fully aware that the gas bill will sting. They can take the hit. But the gas tax disproportionately hurts two other groups who don't deserve it: the poor, and the rural. The former often drive inefficient, older vehicles, and are simply less able to use them when gas prices and taxes rise. The latter don't have public transportation options and often have to go much farther to complete basic tasks, like food shopping or taking their kids to school.

Klein suggests that the answer is tacking a $3,000 fee onto new car purchases for guzzlers, while hybrids get a corresponding $3,000 rebate. I doubt such a thing could be made to work in practice, though, for the simple reason that hybrid sales are roaring skyward at a time when Ford and GM, both heavily dependent on SUV sales, have seen their bonds go to near-junk status. This is not a coincidence, and it foretells a problem that there won't be enough corresponding sales on the one side (SUVs) to balance increases in hybrid sales already present without such subsidies. Could it be that people are actually starting to pay attention, the market is doing its part to club sense into buyers (belatedly, as it turns out), and government tinkering is likely to make for a more complicated and less workable solution in not only the long run, but the short run as well?

Sonofusion In A Crystal

Via Slashdot, Seth Putterman at UCLA claims to have achieved successful sonofusion using a heated piezoelectric crystal immersed in deuterium gas. Putterman says the process remains energy negative, and is possibly of interest in applications that need a non-fission source of neutrons.

An article in New Scientist goes somewhat further in describing the mechanics of the system:

The key to the system is a crystal made of lithium tantalate. The crystal is asymmetric and, as a result, heating the material causes positive and negative charges to migrate to opposite ends of the crystal, setting up an electric field. The phenomenon is known as the pyroelectric effect. In 1992, James Brownridge at the State University of New York in Binghamton, US, used crystals of lithium tantalate to generate X-rays by heating the crystals to about 100ºC in a dilute gas. The resultant electric field strips electrons from the gas molecules and accelerates them to huge energies. The electrons then collide with stationary nuclei in the crystal and generate X-rays.

When Seth Putterman at the University of California, Los Angeles, US, heard of the phenomenon a few years ago, he immediately realised that the electric fields were powerful enough for nuclear fusion to occur, specifically to fuse nuclei of an isotope of hydrogen called deuterium. The fields inside the crystals can reach a “mind boggling” 10⁷ electronvolts, he says.

To test whether these fields could indeed cause nuclear fusion, Putterman and UCLA colleagues Brian Naranjo and James Gimzewski first bathed a crystal of lithium tantalate in deuterium gas. The setup was then cooled to -33ºC and then heated to about 7 ºC over three and a half minutes.

The resultant electric field accelerated deuterium nuclei over a distance of 1 centimetre to energies in excess of 100 kiloelectronvolts. The accelerated nuclei then collided and fused with deuterium nuclei that had permeated the surface of the crystal lattice. The fusion produced 400 times more neutrons than found in background measurements.

"Fusion science is littered with hype and over-optimistic claims", writes Justin Mullins in New Scientist. I agree, but this makes an interesting first step.

Update 4/28: More on this in the New York Times, a (temporarily shut down due to the Slashdot effect) link to Seth Putterman's UCLA web page on the research, and Physics News. The latter adds

By using a larger tungsten tip, cooling the crystal to cryogenic temperatures, and constructing a target containing tritium, the researchers believe they can scale up the observed neutron production 1000 times, to more than 10⁶ neutrons per second. (Naranjo, Gimzewski, Putterman, Nature, 28 April 2005).

Also, it appears Taleyarkin will have an article in the May 2005 issue of IEEE Spectrum. The contentious sonofusionist will have his day in print, it seems.

Hugo Chavez, Bearbaiter

Via the increasingly tiresome Peak Energy (a blog that couldn't recognize adolescent taunting if it tried, and it has), a New York Times article about the deteriorating relations between the U.S. and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. Unsurprisingly, high oil prices combined with his neighbor states' unwillingness to ruffle Caracan feathers have made Chavez impermiable to U.S. attempts to isolate the Latin leader. Minus the typical levers available to Washington -- i.e., loans -- Chavez continues to annoy the Bush Administration, which is rapidly running out of ideas on how to deal with him. Affairs descend toward open confrontation:

A multiagency task force in Washington has been working on shaping a new approach, one that high-ranking American policy makers say would most likely veer toward a harder line. United States support for groups that Chávez supporters say oppose the government has been a source of tension in the past. Under the plans being considered, American officials said, that support may increase.

"The conclusion that is increasingly being drawn in Washington is that a realistic, pragmatic relationship, in which we can agree to disagree on some issues but make progress on others, does not seem to be in the cards," said an American official who helps guide policy in Latin America.

The official added, "We offered them a more pragmatic relationship, but obviously if they do not want it, we can move to a more confrontational approach."

Not too surprising, considering the enmity between the two sides. The Bush administration's part in a 2002 coup attempt, immediately recognizing the Carmona government, has left a lasting and unpleasant taste in Chavez' mouth. Unfortunately, the results have led to more, not less, acrimony, with Venezuela actively bearbaiting the U.S.; at one point, Chavez called Bush a pendejo (prick). According to the Times article,

The American ambassador, William Brownfield, who took over in Caracas in September, spent fruitless months before getting a meeting with Mr. Rodríguez. Requests for meetings with other ministers and even midlevel officials are routinely ignored, and Venezuela has canceled dozens of routine exchange programs with the United States.

The one option that administration officials increasingly believe they have is to respond much more assertively and publicly to Venezuelan policies the United States does not like, ideally with the help of other countries and respected institutions like the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

"We shouldn't be afraid to say when he's taking away liberties, not at all," Robert B. Zoellick, now the deputy secretary of state, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February.

Of course, this doesn't make the Bush administration so good, either; how many are held incommunicado in Guantanamo and in Iraq? But, as with the war in Iraq, they can say what they want before Congress and get their war for Venezuela's crude; later on they can bemoan "intelligence failures" as the root cause for their all-too-transparent canards. The obvious alternatives -- actual action to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign energy suppliers -- doesn't seem to occur to anyone within the Bush administration.

LA Public Transit Meets Its Own Enemy: Its Ridership

Having come from a background in light rail systems, one interesting thing is to view the process of control through the eyes of others. The Skunks of Los Feliz, one of my favorite LA bloggers, passes on a Daily News article about how the Bus Riders Union is stymieing attempts by LAMTA to extend their light rail system.

Not least, this is because the Bus Riders Union (BRU hereafter) believes its mission includes freezing spending on rail. Rail is the natural enemy of the bus rider, says the Union, but that's no surprise; like all such single-issue organizations, the Union has one purpose, and over time, it's shifted from pushing for the rights of bus riders (with all the tedious shrillness of a Che Guevara rally) to providing a sinecure to the people running it. Populated with the sort of hacks who can, with a straight face, make the comment that "there is always a need for experienced, consistent leaders, who have been with the organization for many years", its leaders busy themselves pouring cement into the foundation and adding even more stories to the ediface.

Aside from their shopworn polemics citing their wishlists as unnegotiable human rights, and anyone opposing their demands racists, the BRU has become a boulder in the road to a more nuanced and comprehensive transit solution. Next year, a 10-year-old consent decree resulting from a lawsuit against the MTA expires, and the BRU isn't happy about it. From the Daily News article:

Former MTA board member Nick Patsaouras, who has been involved in local transit issues for more than 20 years, believes the consent decree has gotten in the way of developing coherent policies.

"They (the Bus Riders Union) are on a crusade and they don't look at the ramifications of what more buses means and I don't hear an articulate voice from the MTA side (saying), what are the implications five years from now?"

...

"Clearly we had to improve the bus system, and that's a given," said MTA spokesman Marc Littman. "[The consent decree] straitjacketed us to other solutions we could have done to deal with mounting traffic problems."

Which in part means fixed commuter rail. However, the MTA doesn't help matters by making its own idiotic and unintentionally hilarious comments. Consider:

But MTA officials say the consent decree limits their ability to adequately address the region's transportation needs because so much of their resources are going to buses used by fewer than 10 percent of Los Angeles County residents.

That's laughable, for two reasons: first, by the MTA's own numbers, bus ridership dwarfs rail ridership. Second, the number of passenger-miles driven by private vehicles (PDF) is roughly two orders of magnitude smaller than those used by public transit generally. In other words, public transit in Los Angeles is but little used in the first place, and the MTA's willing to score points for rail (the solution it prefers) even at the expense of public transit generally.

All this posturing is really about control. The BRU rightly sees its influence slipping with the consent decree's expiration, and minus that, the MTA winds blow toward more rail construction. Whether that rail goes anywhere potential users actually want is another story; consider the history of the now-defunct plans to install light rail from downtown to Santa Monica. As Skunks observed,

The MTA, rather unsurprisingly, is not in favor of an extension of the decree. They want to build rail, damn it, miles and miles of it, with hundreds of half-empty train cars ferrying people to everywhere in the city except where people want to go: malls, beaches, Dodger Stadium, and the airport.

If, as the MTA says, rail costs less to operate once going, and buses continue to consume ever-more expensive diesel, the BRU stands in the way of a more comprehensive and efficient mass transit solution. What they need to do is to change the title of their organization; they know who they represent now, but aren't especially interested in their future. The mortgage payment can wait if you can't meet the grocery bills.

Alex Trotman, Former Ford Head, Dies

Via Blue Oval News comes the news of Alex Trotman's death. Trotman ran Ford in the 90's:

Trotman became chief executive in 1993, two years after Ford posted a then-record loss of $2.3 billion. He directed the 1995 launch of Ford 2000, a restructuring plan that included the consolidation of the Dearborn-based automaker's North American and European operations.

Under Ford 2000, the company cut $5 billion in costs by having more cars and trucks share engines, transmissions and other parts, and by getting better prices from suppliers.

The result was one of the most prosperous periods in the company's history as Ford reined in costs and rode the popularity of pickups, sport utility vehicles and other light trucks, said David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor.

Trotman was a Lord in the UK. Within Ford, he ran the successful truck operations and then took over as Chairman of the Board and CEO in 1993. Given that, I wonder whether his legacy is the company's shift to SUVs, a position it finds itself backpedaling from somewhat.

Two Opinions On Valero/Premcor

Lynne has a post up about Valero's purchase of refiner Premcor. She says

The press on the Valero/Premcor deal seems to hit all of the right notes; I would add to this article on demand continuing to outstrip refining capacity that one of the stated drivers of the acquisition is the less-than-efficient utilization of Premcor's major refineries.

While there is an EPA green light for a new refinery in Arizona, it's the only one I'm aware of. Long lead times on construction combined with shaky or declining oil supplies should mean margins will remain fat for a while.

Geoffrey Styles labels the combination a potentially risky "one-trick pony" experiment, noting the combined firm will own 13% of U.S. refining capacity but will have no high profile brands. It's almost a pure play in the refining business, one he thinks is at risk of another wave of EPA regulation or weakening margins. As I said before, I doubt the latter is a possibility, and the former a distraction therefore.

Two On Canadian Oilsands

Here's a longish post on Power And Control about Chinese interests in Canadian oilsands. One possible benefit that it might have is by encouraging production, the Chinese are actually improving the world oil situation. This should be tempered with the understanding that the U.S. needs to build additional refineries capable of processing the heavy crude Canadian oilsands generate. (Thanks to John of Chiasm, who dropped word on my other blog, yo.)

Secondly, thanks to Reuters for a peek into oilsands extractor/processor Syncrude, whose profits dropped 43% on plant outages.

Sky-high crude prices are now set to translate into big benefits for Canadian Oil Sands, however, with Syncrude about a year away from completion of a C$7.9 billion ($6.4 billion) expansion, Marcel Coutu, the trust's chief executive, said.

If crude prices stay at today's levels, that expansion will be paid off in the same calendar year as the startup of the new equipment, which will boost output by 50 percent, he said.

That also means royalties paid to the Alberta government will jump to 25 percent of revenue after operating costs from the 1 percent oil sands developers enjoy while they make major capital investments on new projects and expansions.

Honda Enters Home Co-gen Market

Holy sweet mother of Jesus, the Engineer-Poet's gonna cream his jeans when he reads this Green Car Congress story about Honda entering the home microgeneration market.

The new MCHP system uses natural gas to provide residential heat efficiently, with the added benefit of producing electric power for residential use.

Honda will supply its compact home-use co-generation unit to Climate Energy who will combine it with a furnace or boiler, and market the entire system as an alternative to conventional space heating and electric power in new and existing homes. Working in coordination with state and local authorities as well as energy utilities, limited in-home field test installations will occur by late 2005, with more widespread distribution planned from fall 2006.

Honda bills the GE160V as the world’s smallest reciprocating gas engine. A three-way catalyst and oxygen feedback control reduce NO_x emissions, resulting in cleaner exhaust gas emissions than those of conventional domestic water heaters.

These are exactly the kind of efficiency measures we need during winter months when heating applications draw down natural gas reserves. As the E-P put it in his post, "Some people have been asking if we can afford to adopt measures like cogeneration. Unless I'm terribly wrong, it looks like we can't afford not to."

Thanks

Here's a big shout out to Personal Independence Day, Winds of Change and White Lightning Axiom for recent links back. Thanks, guys!

A New Wave Of California Drilling

California's heavy crude offshore has largely been offlimits to oil companies ever since a 1969 well blowout in Santa Barbara that fouled 40 miles of beach and hundreds of square miles of the Santa Barbara Channel, eventually turning up in the channel islands of Anacapa, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, and San Miguel. The political blowout (PDF), as surprising at the time as it was vigorous, drew together people of all kinds of political backgrounds, causing then-President Nixon to remark that the "incident has frankly touched the conscience of the American people."

That's where things lay for several decades, but now smaller exploration and production companies, pursuing the higher prices available today, have quietly restarted, according to the Los Angeles Times:

Drillers are reworking wells and considering reviving old platforms in places where exploration is allowed. They're attempting to extend the life of leases on undeveloped offshore tracts holding a combined estimated 1 billion barrels of oil and 500 billion cubic feet of natural gas that the companies have been forbidden to tap.

And, most controversial of all, the industry has been pushing quietly to lift federal bans on new oil exploration off California's coast, prompting an outcry by environmental groups.

...

"We're sacrificing pristine areas with the disingenuous claim that it will relieve high gas prices tomorrow, and that's just not true," said David Newman, spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of 10 environmental organizations that recently sued the Bush administration for recommending the extension of 36 leases of undeveloped tracts off the California coast.

A number of companies are thinking about restarting operations offshore, including Carpenteria-based Venoco, Pacific Energy Resources Ltd., Aera Energy, Exxon/Mobil, and Arguello are all looking into opening up existing wells that have been shut in (filled with concrete) in Long Beach and Santa Barbara. New drilling activity, however, still seems to be off-limits:

California for many years has blocked new exploration in state waters, which lie within three miles of the coast, where leases have not already been granted. Drilling in new federal unleased areas is prevented by a presidential moratorium instituted in 1990 and due to expire in 2012 and a congressional moratorium that has been renewed each year since it was enacted in 1981.

Environmental groups filed a lawsuit on March 8 to prevent further activity; they claim that even though the leases are inactive, oil companies continue to press for their extension by minimizing the environmental damage caused by their presence, citing surveying activity that causes damage to marine life. Some in the industry think with high oil prices, renewed drilling activity might take place, but

"Realistically, any drilling would be years down the road. Some of the plans, if they come in, could be within five to 10 years," [John Romero, spokesman for the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service,] said.

Nothing is certain, of course, as with any drilling activity, and the industry still recalls problems at the Point Arguello project in the 1980s, which was attended by years of expensive lawsuits and ultimately found little produceable petroleum.

But H. Sterling Burnett, senior fellow at the nonprofit and nonpartisan National Center for Policy Analysis in Washington, says energy company officials are eager to tap the outer continental shelf, where untouched energy reserves may be bigger than estimated, perhaps exceeding those in Alaska.

"The companies would not be fighting to have the leases extended if they didn't think there was the potential of a big find," Burnett said. "We suspect there's more oil off the coast than there is in ANWR."

Roberts vs. Huber on Peak Energy

Via NEI Nuclear Notes, this exchange in the Los Angeles Times between Paul Roberts, author of The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World and Peter Huber, co-author of The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy. Eric McErlain notes "I've read Roberts' book, and while it provides a comprehensive examination of the "Peak Oil" theory, he hardly touches on nuclear energy at all -- including its critical role in displacing oil-fired electrical generating capacity after the 1973 oil embargo." It's a good example of substitution that the doomsayers would rather we ignored. Unfortunately, it still only amounts to a stopgap -- fossil fuels can only last so long, and so can fission power.

More On Methane Hydrates

According to The Engineer, the U.S. isn't the only country pursuing methane hydrates (earlier covered in this story). Aside from Japan, Ireland is also looking at developing their methane hydrate resources. Dr Padraic Mac Aodha of the National University of Ireland, Galway hopes to leapfrog the U.S. in methane hydrate production. They are investigating several different methods of harvesting hydrates.

As I mentioned in the earlier article, the Uncle John is on an exploratory mission looking for methane hydrates in the Gulf of Mexico. The project has a home page at the DOE, with a great deal of useful information.

Cleaning Wastewater, Making Hydrogen

Science Daily writes about a new fuel cell that converts wastewater to hydrogen. The cell uses biological fermentation to achieve its ends, but with a twist: by adding a 0.25 VDC charge, Penn State researcher Dr. Bruce Logan was able to quadruple the amount of hydrogen produced. The process works by forcing the bacteria to process what are normally "dead end" byproducts of fermentation, acetic and butyric acids.

The New York Times On Citgo

Citgo Exec Antonio Rivero

The New York Times ran a lengthy article Wednesday on the mess at Citgo. (Earlier this week I wrote a summary of an International Herald-Tribune article.) Citgo faces lost opportunities thanks to the chaos its Venezuelan owners have put it through:

Citgo's turmoil has been masked by recent record high oil prices and some of the fattest refining profit margins in history. Citgo's net income increased 42 percent, to $625 million last year, on revenue of $32.3 billion, from $439 million in profit on $25.5 billion of revenue in 2003. (While Citgo does not have publicly traded shares, the company sells its bonds in the United States and files financial statements here.)

It appears Citgo's new Venezuelan overlords quickly consolidated power, and may have engaged in an intimidation campaign against American executives to help speed that along:

Mr. Rivero and Mr. Marín, the former chief executive, quickly set about changing the Citgo culture. They brought in some two dozen more Venezuelans, for a total of about 60, who were placed in the executive suite, refineries and human resources, Mr. Marín said.

The two reorganized Citgo's structure into committees, and Mr. Rivero ended up as head of all of them. Decision making slowed considerably. Managers felt paralyzed in their ability to approve what had been routine expenditures.

At one point in 2004, a memo to employees said that no one could pay an invoice without approval from one of the committees, two former Citgo employees said. Mr. Rivero traveled extensively on corporate jets, which by that time had been reserved for use only by Mr. Rivero and Mr. Marín.

In Tulsa, some managers complained about a culture of intimidation. Jim McCarthy, the former vice president for government and public relations, said that files relating to the Venezuelan Embassy began disappearing from a desktop file on his computer, and sometimes reappearing. An internal Citgo investigation could not find a culprit. One night in early 2004, someone "tore up our entire front yard," knocking down trees. Mr. McCarthy filed an insurance claim but never discovered who was responsible. Still, he said, "I was afraid for my family."

Shaken by the incidents, he retired at the end of 2003. "I got the message," he said. "I was no longer wanted there. I was uncomfortable with the leadership and I was in a position to see where things were going." Mr. Rivero denied he ever tried to intimidate Mr. McCarthy but said that Citgo's board members had decided they wanted him out.

Rivero denies any such campaign, naturally.

Hugo Chavez has as his advisor one Bernard Mommer, who presently leads Citgo's board of directors. He is "a German-born leftist whose writings on oil inspired many Chávez adherents and who has long criticized foreign involvement in Venezuela's oil industry". The obvious danger is that disinvestment and unrealistic expectations of patronage will lead to problems for both Venezuela and the United States.

A Doom Is A Wish Your Heart Makes: Apocalypses Through The Ages

Thanks to crank.com for this hilarious website detailing apocalyptics through history. With this subject, it's too easy to get caught up in the Götterdammerung scenarios and miss the big picture: humans have been so far pretty good at escaping from ends-of-the-world, manufactured or otherwise.

NEI On Nuclear Baseload Generation

Eric McErlain of the Nuclear Energy Institute was nice enough to forward this transcript (PDF) of John Kane's testimony before the Senate Committee on Natural Resources. One point they make is that limited natural gas supplies makes it a poor choice for baseload generation. They wrap up with a comment that the Feds should help out the industry by paying for its next generation design costs "associated with a new and untested federal licensing process".

Natural Gas: Demand Destruction, Finding New Supplies

Relevant to my brief mention of UnPlanner's interview with an energy executive on natural gas: I mentioned this to the Engineer-Poet in private correspondance, but it's interesting to note that, according to CERI, the amount of "easily destroyed" natural gas demand is only about five percent of usage.

But that's not to say the supply side is being ignored. Syntroleum, a company mainly famous for their thus-far commercially unsuccessful gas-to-liquids process, is busying itself drilling for nitrogen-contaminated natural gas fields, dovetailing into a process they have created for separating nitrogen from the output gas stream.

Carbon Nanotube Wires

Carbon nanotube wires could have performance characteristics similar to superconductors but at room temperatures, according to the MIT Technology Review:

[Dr. Rick] Smalley’s lab has embarked on a four-year project to create a prototype of a nanotube-based “quantum wire.” Cables made from quantum wires should conduct much better than copper. The wires’ lighter weight and greater strength would also allow existing towers to carry fatter cables with a capacity ten times that of the heavy and inefficient steel-reinforced aluminum cables used in today’s aging power grid.

Such nanotubes have virtually no resistance to electricity, but are stronger than steel. Nanotubes 100m in length have already been synthesized, but their construction must be identical for their conductivity to work. Smalley thinks he has a solution to this problem.

Smalley has a nice series of slide shows at his rice.edu website; he also has a curriculum vitae, from which we learn he won the 1996 Chemistry Nobel Prize for the discovery of fullerenes, the predecessor to nanotubes. The presentation Our Energy Challenge (PowerPoint) given at the University of Illinois indicates he's very aware of the problems of using fossil fuels to power industrial civilization. Citing energy production as the number one problem facing mankind in the 21st century, he estimates that world energy consumption will rise to 30-60 terawatts by 2050. Noting that 165 TW of sunlight impinges on the earth's surface, he foresees

• Energy transported electrically rather than as mass (coal, oil, etc.)
• Radical increases in the amount of power routing capacity, interestingly on a grid that "does not need to be very reliable"
• Local production and storage, supplemented by mass generation of all kinds,
• "Mass Primary Power input to grid via HV DC transmission lines from existing plants plus remote (up to 2000 mile) sources on TW scale, including vast solar farms in deserts, wind, NIMBY nuclear, clean coal, stranded gas, wave, hydro, space-based solar... ”EVERYBODY PLAYS”" (i.e., all energy is welcome)
• Hydrogen and methanol are the transport fuels

He sees these being enabled by tenfold improvements in solar power generation cost, and the photocatalytic conversion of CO₂ to methanol (one of my favorite approaches).

Update, 4/24: In a comment on a Knowledge Problem post about using auctions as a mechanism for access to physically common resources such as transmission lines, I made the point that power generation isn't like telecom, which Lynne used as the basis for her idea. (Incorrectly, I said that copper is being used in long-distance power transmission; in fact, it's aluminum over reinforcing steel.) But carbon nanotube wires could change all that. Carbon nanotubes have already been measured in the lab to support current densities of 10⁷ A/cm², measuring resistivity at 3.4x10^-5 ohm-cm. (By comparison, copper's resistivity is 1.5x10^-3 ohm-cm -- about two orders of magnitude worse.) Replacing aluminum-steel transmission lines with carbon nanotube power lines would radically increase power density without requiring additional space. In sum, it could be the kind of breakthrough that might make her idea plausible.

Update 5/4: thanks to the anonymous commenter who pointed out my incorrect value for copper's resistivity; the correct value from Physics Factbook is about 16.7 nΩ-m, still appreciably better than the 340 nΩ-m. So perhaps what Smalley's after is a theoretical maximum of nanotube conductivity that has yet to be achieved. In any case, I regret the error and hope to have a followup post revisiting this matter published shortly.

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Thanks to Knowledge Problem and Winds of Change for their recent links here. If this is your first time visiting, welcome.

UnPlanner Talks To A Faceless Energy Exec

An interesting interview with a nameless energy executive in UNplanning Journal. To be taken with some grains of salt, to be sure, but nothing you haven't heard before: mostly, that natural gas capacity in North America is about to run under demand. Combined with a likely spike in oil prices, natural gas will zoom heavenward as well.

Energy Bill May Block NIMBY LNG Opposition

Congress today will vote on a provision that would block NIMBY opposition to LNG terminals. (ObNote: I live close enough to the proposed site of one such that it could be a concern for me.) Democrats, not known for their love of states rights, suddenly find themselves taking plays from the rebel handbook as they fight a rearguard battle against LNG terminals and for conservation measures.

The news isn't all bad, however; the bill does include a provision demanding the EPA actually test cars under likely driving conditions rather than the current regime, which is widely derided for producing unrealistic mileage figures. But that's about the only good news; the bill also contains a provision that lets MTBE producers off the hook for groundwater pollution. (On the other hand, who ordered that chemical into gasoline, hmm?)

Citgoing, Going, Gone: More Venezuelan Cronyism

I keep picking on Venezuela, but mainly because articles like this one in the International Herald Tribune keep popping up. Petróleos de Venezuela, the state-owned owner of US Citgo, is shaking up that operation from top to bottom. "Almost every high-ranking executive has resigned over the past two years, including the refining chief, the chief financial officer, the head auditor and the marketing director." Transparency is a problem, it seems:

Geoff Reid, a former assistant treasurer, said in an interview that he had left in part because it had become hard to track the company's cash flow and he had become concerned about his "personal liability" in approving Citgo's financial statements.

Worse, it appears that crony capitalism is moving in as part of the deal:

Of the recent moves, perhaps the most debilitating have been Chávez's efforts to put his loyalists, including some former military colleagues, in charge of the company. In doing so, he has reversed a tradition, in place since Petróleos de Venezuela took control in 1990, of letting American executives run Citgo.

In interviews, more than a dozen former Citgo managers said a marked shift in Citgo's culture had followed the arrival of the Venezuelan expatriates. In moving the company from Tulsa, Oklahoma, to Houston last year, for example, they spent lavishly on a bulletproof enclave at the new head office. A company plane took a top Citgo executive and his family on trips to Europe. And a large donation came from a related company bank account to one of Houston's most exclusive private schools, attended by the son of Antonio Rivero, a Citgo executive who participated in a failed coup attempt with Chávez in 1992.

Much of the intrigue is linked to Rivero, who was named Citgo's No. 2 executive in 2003 as part of an effort to make Citgo more accountable to Caracas. Rivero, together with Luis Marín, Citgo's former chief executive, were placed on leave from Citgo in recent weeks after an investigation into corruption accusations against them gained momentum in the Venezuelan Congress. In its most recent filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Citgo revealed that it had engaged a team of outside lawyers to investigate corruption accusations related in part to the move. Citgo said it expected to incur total costs of $69 million for the move, of which $37 million went to refurbish its new offices.

Rivera had no prior experience in the oil business, naturally enough. These were the sorts of shenanigans that went on at Gulf Oil prior to T. Boone Pickens shaking that kind of extravagance out of them. That Americans (not to mention the world) relies on suchlike for their energy future is appalling.

IMF Urges OPEC To Implement Reserves Transparency

At the risk of running a story from Al Jazeera (which of the about three or five websites with that name is it this time?), I forward this bit in which the IMF recommends greater transparency from energy producers:

The IMF strongly urges full oil data transparency to document current global oil reserves and their locations. By referring to the lack of data transparency in "non-OECD" (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries, the IMF is telling Opec to allow its reserves to be fully audited, and soon.

...

Inadequate data transparency is particularly harmful because it contributes to increased perceptions of risk and consequently, a reduced willingness to invest. This ultimately increases price volatility, the report says.

As a worst case scenario, the IMF contemplates the prospect of data on Opec reserves turning out to be false. The IMF says that by 2010 the demand on Opec supply will be 32mbd, an increase of around 3mbd "excluding inventory changes".

"Inventory changes" is shorthand for the possibility that Opec may not have as much oil as its data shows. If inventories have to be changed, or marked down, then Opec may find it impossible to meet demand. That would throw every forecast wholly out of sync.

Twelve months ago it would have been unlikely to see such strongly worded questioning of production and reserve data from a body such as the IMF. What they will be saying in another 12 months is anyone's guess.

Wolverine Claims "Billion Barrel Province" In Utah

Covenant Cross-Section

Wolverine Gas & Oil Corp. thinks their Covenant Field strike may be be part of a larger field containing as much as a billion barrels, according to an article in EXPLORER.

"I honestly expect this to be a billion-barrel province -- I expect that we'll find another 10 fields out there," said Doug Strickland, exploration manager for Wolverine in Grand Rapids, Mich.

Production so far is 210,000 barrels; the field may extend into Canada, where it would be flanked by nearby Albertan fields. Lease rates have already climbed to $1,000 an acre.

Low Temperature Combustion

Thanks to Science Blog for passing along this Oak Ridge National Laboratory article about low-temperature combustion of carbon fuels.

In a paper scheduled to appear in the May 18 print issue of the American Chemical Society's Energy & Fuels, Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Hu describes a novel method to achieve spontaneous ignition and sustained combustion at room temperature. He achieves this "nano-catalytic reaction" with nothing but nanometer-sized particles of platinum stuck to fibers of glass wool in a small jar with methanol and air – with no source of external ignition.

Although this began as little more than a curiosity, Hu quickly realized that the implications could be significant because of the potential gains in energy conversion and utilization. Hu now cites possibilities in the area of distributed power generation and perhaps military and homeland defense.

While additional research needs to be performed to understand the phenomena, Hu notes that natural organisms such as microbes, plants and animals obtain energy from oxidation of the same organic chemicals at their physiological, or body, temperatures. Many of these biological reactions also use metals as part of their enzyme catalysts. Still, this is a surprising result in the field of metal catalysis.

"Since the caveman days, we have burned things to utilize their energy, and the high temperatures and the entire process have created a lot of problems that we're then forced to deal with," said Hu, a physicist in the Life Sciences Division of the Department of Energy's ORNL.

If this can be somehow harnessed to perform useful work, it might easily improve efficiencies in all kinds of devices.

Winds Of Change On China's Futures

One hell of a long article at Winds of Change on the subject of Chinese futures. China's huge inland borders and relatively small coastline is a big handicap:

China's big geopolitical weakness is, of course, geography. Though it will be dependent on naval lines of supply for many of the its future resource, including food, China is ringed by satellite powers that are well positioned to choke that access. Belmont Club's Big Trouble in Little China drives that point home with solid analysis and interesting facts, including this GlobalSecurity.org shipping map

No wonder the Chinese are effecting a simply staggering blue-water navy buildup, including their own answer to the US Navy's AEGIS-class missile frigate. Much of this is driven by the staggering demographic changes ahead for China. Coercive familiy size controls have created a society principally consisting of young men; such societies tend to be unstable:

One data point that fixates a lot of people's attention is China's surplus of young males, a statistic that has often been a predictor of war and social instability. This article is an excellent and balanced look at that phenomenon. I especially liked their note that each young Chinese male being responsible for 2 parents and up to 4 grandparents; it's a useful reminder of how cultural & social patterns can change the context of the data we see. "China's Time Bomb" also touches on the less-discussed but equally significant phenomenon of China's rapid aging, as its median age soars from about 32 today to at least 44 in 2040. Hu Angang, an economist at Qinghua University in Beijing, puts it this way: "We will have the social burden of a rich country and the income of a poor country."

Good, good stuff, and well worth reading in its entirety. I haven't even been over to most of the links, but they look fascinating as well.

Matt Simmons: Saudi Oil Likely Peaking

Matt Simmons, in his latest PDF presentation, claims to have the "smoking gun" indicating Saudi oilfields, including the supergiant Ghawar field, are about to go into steep decline, and may already be there. The gun he refers to are the obscured findings of the 1974 Subcommittee on Multi-National Corporations of the Comittee of Foreign Relations Hearings, United States Senate, and the 1979 Staff Report to the Subcommittee on International Economic Policy of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate. The latter he says are "33 pages of garbled text concealing 'the smoking gun'", which is that Saudi Arabia damaged their principle oilfields in the 70's, which will limit the amount of hydrocarbons ultimately recoverable. From his slide "Key Issues Which 'Twilight' Spells Out":

• Saudi Arabia does not have an inexhaustible oil supply.
• Four to five key fields provided 90+% of its oil output for [the] past 40 years.
• Three lesser fields made up almost everything else.
• Real proven reserves were 110 billion barrels in 1979 (and 77 billion probable reserves).
• Since then, oil produced totaled 63 billion barrels.
• Traditionally, once 50% of recoverable reserves are used, production begins to decline.

In a related presentation Simmons gave at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, he says that "vertical wells in Saudi Arabia now appear to be obsolete". The signficance of this is that it means the easy to get at stuff has vanished, and "they drain the last thinning columns of easy oil". Since "technology led to the production collapse in Oman's Yibal field", that Ghawar is taking a similar route is ominous for the world.

Study: Underinvestment Makes Blackouts Likely In UK

Blackouts similar to those in the US could hit the UK, according to a PriceWaterhouse study, says Bloomberg News. The cause is an underinvestment in new utilities generation capacity.

About $12.7 trillion of investment, greater than the U.S. annual economic output, is needed through 2030 to meet an expected doubling in electricity consumption, a report by consultants at PriceWaterhouseCoopers said. That total is higher than the estimated $10 trillion spending on electricity called for by the International Energy Agency during the same period.

...

North America will need about $3.4 trillion of investment through 2030, more than any other region, because it's also the biggest energy consumer, the report said. China will need about $2.4 trillion of investment in power and gas assets, the report said.

Europe will need about $1.9 trillion of the total worldwide investment through 2030 because some of the continent's wires, including those in the U.K., are at the end of their 40-year life.

Funds will also be needed to build new gas import terminals in the U.K. as the country's reserves in the North Sea dwindle. Britain will import about 70 percent of the gas it needs by 2010, said Mark Hughes, director of European utilities at PriceWaterhouseCoopers in London, during an interview.

Most countries reported interest in expanding nuclear power as an option; most electricity in France is generated through nuclear power.

Somebody's Gotta Pay For Those Votes

Via AP, Hugo Chavez wants to add a 50% income tax on top of all the other myriad ways he's thinking about squeezing oil companies operating in Venezuela. As I suggested earlier, being a "populist" means there's a lot of people to buy off, something the article makes quite clear in its final sentence:

Chavez says he is leading a "revolution" for the country's poor, and his government allocated more oil revenues toward a range of social programs for the needy.

And I'll bet the "needy" starts with whichever hacks are working the precincts for him.

Update: I should have mentioned something else here: Mexico's Cantarell is expected to go into decline starting in 2006, and one reason is that Mexico's Pemex is run as a patronage system rather than a real oil company. With worldwide petroleum demands hinging on such governments, is it not likely that the rest of the world will have an interest in installing more pliant if not less corruptable governments in countries with these resources? Investments can't be made in a vacuum. Russia has similar problems, with their capricious and unchecked tax agencies.

Thanks

I haven't posted anything of substance in a couple days, but just a thank-you post to Odograph and Ezra Klein, who've linked to me and/or given me a sidebar link lately. Thanks, guys.

Real posts soon.

Death On The Layaway Plan

An interesting story in Pointblank Des Moines, in which the U.S. military pays 14 year old boys up to $10,000 in early enlistment bonuses:

Colin Hadley spends most of his days after school skateboarding or playing Halo II on his new X-Box with friends. He sleeps until noon or later on weekends and rarely, if ever, does any schoolwork outside the classroom, where he pulls down solid C's and a few D's - just enough to get by. He's the typical 15-year-old American boy: cocksure in demeanor, certain the world revolves around him, and confident that life is going to serve him well.

And he's the new "target of interest" for U.S. military recruiters who've begun signing up boys as young as 14 for military service, which they will be required to begin when they turn 18.

"It's a sweet deal," says Hadley, who boasts that he bought his X-Box with the enlistment bonus he received after signing up last month. "I don't have to do hardly anything for three years, but they're paying me now."

Wait 'till he sees what that signup bonus just cost him... With all branches of the military reporting difficulties meeting their recruiting goals, especially in former easy targets such as foreigners eager to gain U.S. citizenship and African-Americans, proposals for a new draft have so far been limited to Pentagon outsiders. That may change if manpower levels decline too precipitously, and given the Bush administration's hair trigger to send men into harm's way, that's becoming increasingly likely.

Update: Unfortunately, that story was about two weeks old and now has been erased from Pointblank's website as part of a complete revamp of the paper, which has now been renamed City View. You can still read it in the Google cache.

Update 4/18: Snopes says I've been hoaxed. Oops.

Venezuela To Rewrite Oil Contracts As Joint Ventures

Something we can expect to see a lot more of: despite an earlier decision to raise tarriffs on oil, the Venezuelan government has decided that isn't enough, and seeks to rewrite contracts on 32 fields to turn them into joint ventures.

"With oil prices so high, they think they can change the contracts without any problems," Jose Toro Hardy, an independent oil analyst and former Petroleos de Venezuela board director who oversaw the contracts, said in an interview today. "The basis of these contracts were approved by the National Assembly."

It goes almost without saying that the point of these moves is to secure even more money for Venezuelan state coffers. Hugo Chavez is a populist, which is to say, he needs cash to keep him in operation.

"No contract is above the law," Ramirez said. Current contracts are detrimental to the government and Petroleos de Venezuela, he said. "We are the owners of the resources in our house."

Petroleos de Venezuela lost $260 million last year on 16 of the 32 operating agreements with private oil companies, Ramirez said. Most of the oil companies also evaded paying taxes on their operations, he said.

Such claims should be taken with a grain of salt; one wonders how, as a state agency, Petroleos de Venezuela calculates expenses. The real issues, longer-term, is how this will affect exploration and production down the road:

Venezuela's decision to pressure companies to convert their operations comes as the country is seeking up to $10 billion in investment from foreign companies through 2009 to about double production capacity to 5 million barrels a day.

The decision also comes four months before a planned auction of six offshore blocks in August. Venezuela is relying on international companies to explore and develop the fields, partially to alleviate a shortage of natural gas in the western part of the country.

"I am surprised that they are making this kind of announcement just prior to a bidding round," said David Voght, managing director of energy consultant IPD Latin America, which has offices in Caracas and Mexico City. "It's better for the government to be clear in its energy policy."

... unless they think they're going to have the upper hand for a long, long time.

The decision to change the contracts must be seen in the perspective of the government's other economic policies, which are aimed at short-term gains of revenue to finance burgeoning government expenditures, said Toro Hardy.

``This is a very short-sighted policy,'' he said. ``They are just trying to get revenue at any cost to cover spending.''

Which, again, is almost certainly the point. Chavez wants to stick it to the US as much as possible, and knows a good thing when he sees it. Whether this backfires or not is up to us.

Research Connect Report On Chinese Petro-Politics

This morning, Thomas O'Keefe of Research Connect e-mailed me about a rather lengthy report by Kevin Skislock of Laguna Research (direct PDF link) on the effects of oil on China and her neighbors, entitled "Crisis On The China Rim". I haven't had time to digest it all, but I'll give you the lead graf as a teaser:

Based on our analysis of the intense economic, crude oil, and military confrontations developing among the China Rim region’s largest economies, we believe that the most aggressive crude oil price targets calling for $100 per barrel within the next three years will prove to be conservative. In our view, specific crude oil price targets are the realm of financial organizations with equity and commodities trading desks. As a pure independent research firm, we have neither. However, it is our opinion that the “likely direction of surprise” in crude oil prices will continue to be to the upside.

Watch this space for more; I may have a detailed summary up in a bit.

USGS Optimistic About Worldwide Reserves

The ever-optimistic gang at the USGS says there's plenty of oil left, according to senior research geologist Peter McCabe. Most of the oil left is in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico and in foreign countries.

Using figures gleaned from USGS studies, he said cumulative oil production to the end of 2004 amounted to 952 billion bbl, which represents about 32% of the world total available reserves. Some 2,029 billion bbl, or 68%, he placed in a category labeled remaining recoverable oil.

McCabe broke this latter figure into five categories. The greatest volumes are included in "remaining reserves of conventional oil outside the US (859 billion bbl), undiscovered conventional oil outside the US (649 billion bbl), reserve growth in conventional fields outside the US (612 billion bbl)" and a box he called "future resources."

He pointed out that the amount of oil in most fields is underestimated and that over time additions can be made through stratigraphic and geographic extensions and better recovery factors. He added that initial estimates of reserves are often conservative for a variety of political and financial reasons.

Of course, there are other opinions...

Better Late: Nanosolar Update

I just found this review of Nanosolar at Monkeysign, including the first skeptical article on the subject (aside from mine), a piece by John P. Mello, Jr. appearing in TechNewsWorld. The Monkeysign article provides some useful back-of-the-envelope calculations on the cost of solar, noting that inverters alone, even if financed with a 0% interest rate loan, would cost around $0.055/kWh. That Nanosolar presents operational costs at around $0.05/kWh is therefore somewhat at odds with this figure:

The only way Nanosolar could possibly eliminate [the requirement for inverter usage] is to manufacture modules that produce AC power, suffer little to no efficiency loss at high temperatures, and can be installed virtually for free.

Perhaps they have done that. More likely, in my opinion, they have not considered BOS [balance-of-systems] costs or, as one of Mello's sources suspects, they have been creative with their amortization calculations. Another of Mello's sources suspects that they are overly optimistic in their manufacturing cost calculations, pointing out that such costs are commonly underestimated when transferring laboratory technologies to commercial production.

In one of the comments, the Engineer-Poet notes that inverter costs are actually a function of production scale. Lastly, someone posting under the name Roscheisen says about what you might expect someone working for the company to say. For me, I'll believe it when I see it.

Termite Guts Save The Earth!

Former Stanford University researcher Steven Chu says we could save the earth, if only we could understand how termite guts work. Termites turn cellulose, the stuff of which wood, grass, and most biomass is made, into ethanol, quite efficiently:

The US already subsidises farmers to grow corn to turn into ethanol, but $7bn in the past decade has been wasted because the process isn't carbon-neutral. "From the point of view of the environment," explains Chu, "it would be better if we just burnt oil."

"But carbon-neutral energy sources are achievable. A world population of 9 billion, the predicted peak in population, could be fed with less than one third of the planet's cultivable land area. Some of the rest could be dedicated to growing crops for energy. But the majority of all plant matter is cellulose – a solid, low-grade fuel about as futuristic as burning wood. If scientists can convert cellulose into liquid fuels like ethanol, the world's energy supply and storage problems could both be solved at a stroke."

This is where the termite guts come in. A billion years of evolution have produced a highly efficient factory for turning cellulose into ethanol, unlike anything which humans can yet design. By exploiting these tricks, says Chu, we can use biology as a solution to a pressing world problem.

Update: As a follow-on, I note that Green Car Congress has a piece up about this as well, and mentions efforts to push renewables by certain farm state politicians as well as representatives from Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Sweden and Thailand.

Update 2: I should have also pointed out the links in the above story to a pair of very interesting and detailed research papers by Tad W. Patzek (and others) analyzing the net energy available from biomass and corn, both of which Patzek calculates to be energy negative once all inputs are considered -- and he is quite exhaustive. Journey To Forever has differing viewpoints on this subject.

Further, GCC runs another article on biomass-to-ethanol, this time a breakthrough in cost reduction of the enzymes needed to process cellulose and turn it into ethanol. Claiming a 30-fold reduction in price in four years, the new process is still far from commercially viable, as other substantial obstacles remain:

Successful commercialization of the biomass-based process for production of fuel ethanol and other useful products will still depend on further refinements of the enzyme technology, establishment of a formal collection system for biomass, further progress in overcoming the technical barriers in biomass pre-treatment, optimization of current yeast organisms, and financial incentives for industry to invest in facilities utilizing biomass instead of corn starch as feedstock.

Goldletter International Uranium Report

Via Peak Energy, a report on the uranium industry. The synopsis paragraph states

Uranium industry shows strong rebound with prices having tripled to more than $20 per pound U308 for the first time since 1984; shortage in supply will result in further price increase above $30

Thanks to mine closures, the release of government stores (some of which are tied to nuclear weapons conversion to peaceful purposes), high-quality, low-cost Canadian imports, and the systematic destruction of prospecting, uranium production in the U.S. has plummeted. Unanswered is the question about how the events at Three Mile Island and the Chernobyl disaster affected the industry, and whether U.S. production represents a geological limit or merely an economic one.

New Method Of Biodiesel Production

Science Blog points to a USDA Agricultural Research Service piece about producing biodiesel using a simplified process. Most biodiesel starts with soy beans and strips the oil from the plant using hexane, a petroleum derivative. Instead, biologist Karen M. Scott, chemist Thomas A. Foglia, and biochemist Michael Haas have created a process that skips that step. Instead, oil is leached from the bean using methanol and sodium hydroxide. The normal cost of biodiesel is $0.38/gallon, but this method produced biodiesel at $1.02/gallon. This price may be further reduced by the sale of the waste protein from the soybeans.

Update: Heh, I thought I saw that on Green Car Congress first.

More On ITER

More news, if you can call it that, about the ITER impasse: a UPI piece indicating the French are willing to go it alone (again), and this time they mean it: they have set a decision deadline for July. "European Research Commissioner Janez Potocnik has emphasized that the EU plans to start constructing the reactor in Cadarache, France and will do so without an international agreement."

U.S. reaction has been unfavorable:

Dr. Ray Orbach, Director of the US Department of Energy Office of Science, told a public meeting of his Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee that, in a meeting earlier in the week, he told a high level European Union official that the US viewed "unfavorably" reports that the EU was considering making a unilateral decision to proceed with construction of ITER in France. Orbach said he told the official that if the EU were to proceed without an agreement on site from the other 5 ITER partners (Japan, Russia, China, Korea and the US) the US would consider that the EU had withdrawn from the ITER collaboration, reducing it from a 6-member to a 5 member partnership. He said the US position remains that the EU and Japan must resolve the site issue in 2-party negotiations and bring that resolution to the other 4 partners.

Oil News

IEA: Oil Demand To Cool

According to Reuters, the IEA projects demand to cool near term, as Chinese demand actually slowed in the first two months of 2005, and interest rates in the U.S. rose. The IEA cautioned it was too soon to draw definitive conclusions and that economic growth in China remained strong, but left its 2005 projection of Chinese oil consumption at 500,000 barrels per day.

Crude Moves Up

Crude prices inched up to $53.89/bbl.

"The hedge funds have become if not absolutely bearish at least feeling that the highs are behind us and will have to wait until the third quarter to take prices back toward their $60 (a barrel) target," said analyst Deborah White of SG Securities in Paris.

Nigerian oil workers declined to strike, also easing fears of renewed tightness.

CNOOC Buys Into Canadian Oil Sands

Chinese oil company CNOOC "has acquired a 16.69% stake in privately-owned Canada-based MEG Energy Corp. for C$150 million", according to Dow Jones news services.

"It might ring some alarm bells in some political circles in the U.S. But most of Canada's oil exports will still go the U.S. It's logical due to the proximity of the market. U.S. will not lose a large chunk of its supplies," said Shum.

Economists Revising Effects Of High Oil Prices On U.S.

Despite the Macroblog's optimism (hat tip: Knowledge Problem), it appears a number of economists are negatively revising their growth estimates for 2005. Nobody's talking about the R-word -- recession -- just yet.

What's feeding the pessimism compared with last year is that oil prices aren't expected to retreat after breaching $50 a barrel in February, as they did after passing that mark in October of last year. Monday, light, sweet crude for May delivery settled 39 cents higher at $53.71. Gasoline has exceeded $2 a gallon for five straight weeks, climbing to an all-time high; the Energy Department predicts a record average of $2.28 for regular gasoline in the summer.

GNN Interview With Petroleum Institute UK Head Chris Skrebowski

Global Public Media, nominally one of the shriller of the Peak Oil websites, has a useful interview with Petroleum Review UK chief Chris Skrebowski, on the subject of his megaprojects analysis. Essentially: no, Virginia, there's no big projects coming online between now and 2010 that would make a difference in supply. In fact, he suggests peak production will hit this year. It might be interesting to get Skrebowski together with Geoffrey Styles, who recently called such short-range predictions of peak production irresponsible and not indicative of a geological peak in production.

Oil In The News

As I have said before, President Bush and the Republican Party are the most likely first victims of expensive oil, and so he's decided to come out talking. It's usually a bad idea to lead with your jaw, but that's never stopped Bush before.

Second, OPEC talks down the super spike mentioned earlier, claiming they will be able to meet world demand and then some:

Crude oil won't climb as high as the US$105 a barrel suggested in a report by a Goldman Sachs Group Inc analyst, said OPEC's Acting Secretary-General Adnan Shihab-Eldin.

​ "We do not think that prices have to go that high," Shihab-Eldin said in an interview on the Australian Broadcasting Corp's Inside Business program yesterday. A March 30 report by Goldman analysts said crude oil prices may reach US$105 because of a "super spike" caused by increasing demand.

Shihab-Eldin, a Kuwaiti who formerly headed research at OPEC, said prices are "high enough and maybe too high and we need to bring them down to a moderate level."

Well, good luck with that, eh?

Last, former Yukos head Mikhail Khodorkovsky has a sentencing date. The word "kangaroo" comes to mind, and not prefixed with the word "captain", either.

Australian Canola Crop In Doubt

Slightly old, but I stumbled across this article in ABC Rural about the costs of oil on farming. One key passage here reads

With winter plantings due to start in the next month, Mike Chaseling from the Emerald Group says it is a tough time for growers, with a raft of rising costs.

He expects less canola to be planted, with many farmers turning back to livestock.

With canola -- aka rape -- forming one basis crop for biodiesel, one wonders whether the energy inputs to biodiesel aren't too high to support it on an ongoing basis without petrochemical inputs. The economists tell us that EROEI doesn't tell us anything beyond what a conventional economic cost/benefit analysis would give us; is it possible that they are in some way equivalent, at last?

Recycling Tires Into Oil

An Australian, John Dobozy, has discovered a simple method to recycle tires (or tyres, as they're wont to spell it in Oz). Most recycling processes shred the old carcass hoping to recover the rubber, but Dobozy's method heats tires in a large microwave to 1300 degrees (we assume Celsius). He then removes the steel beads from the carcass, soaks the heated carcass in oil, and "reduces the rubber to the consistency of cream cheese". The process renders the product to crude oil, which is then sold. He further claims the process is self-sustaining, i.e., he is able to run his plant off the oil he gets from the tires, and makes AUS $3 per tire, versus about $0.40 using shredding methods.

A more recent ABC (Australian) interview with Dobozy can be found here. Dobozy is building a pilot plant in Sydney and says he could build two plants in every U.S. state and work round the clock.

More Thanks

... this time to FuturePundit, for giving me a sidebar link. Collect the whole set!

If We Open The Seacocks, Is The Ship Unseaworthy?

Looking at my referrers lately, it's becoming increasingly clear that peak oil awareness has spread, and I'm getting search terms like "peak oil skeptic", "positive views on oil peak", and the like. It's little wonder; there's hardly anybody out there who recognizes the problems ahead who isn't going into full paranoia, head-for-the-hills mode (viz, Matt Savinar).

I sometimes wonder that a good part of this is that the millennialists aren't all that interested in doing the numbers, unless of course you count the number of dead. One recent Malthusian to try yet again to model the grim equasions of death is Russell Hopfenberg at Duke University, as quoted in (and hosted by) Anthropik. This latter blog is a self-described primitivist, of the same stripe I wrote about in January. Interestingly enough, he does make an attempt to comprehend why the Malthusians have lost debate after debate. Ceding the point that humans are capable of rational thought,

Humans are different from other animals. We can think. We can rationally observe the situation, and decide for ourselves how many children to have. While this is certainly true of individuals, groups are governed by much more deterministic criteria. For every individual who decides to be responsible and only have 2.1 children, another will take advantage of the space that individual has opened by having seven.

Which, of course, explains the fact that the average family size in the US is declining. Ah, but wait, he's got an argument to deal with that, too:

If population is a function of food supply, why is the most significant growth taking place in those areas producing the least food?

The answer, I think, lies in globalization. How much of what you ate today came from your own bioregion? Unless you do a significant amount of your grocery shopping at Farmers' Markets or eat only USDA-certified organic food, probably not a lot. Interestingly, those same countries which produce so much food but don't see it translate into their population, are also the heaviest exporters, and the impoverished countries with significantly rising growth rates are often the recipients.

But as usual, the author (unidentified from several contributors) doesn't bother asking the really primo, bonus question for $64,000 that needs asking: why are women procreating less? Looking at a national birthrate map, it's plainly clear: living in rich countries causes declines in birthrates; living in poor countries causes increases in birthrates. Now, I note exceptions for countries like China that have taken draconian steps to reduce birthrates, or Russia, where other factors have led to birthrate declines, but in the main, food supply has nothing to do with population. Once again, it comes down to technology. Conveniently enough, he gets himself out of this obvious jam with this choice bit of circular reasoning:

My thesis is that the "population problem," as conventionally conceived, is a member of this class [of insoluable problems]. How it is conventionally conceived needs some comment. It is fair to say that most people who anguish over the population problem are trying to find a way to avoid the evils of overpopulation without relinquishing any of the privileges they now enjoy. They think that farming the seas or developing new strains of wheat will solve the problem -- technologically. I try to show here that the solution they seek cannot be found. The population problem cannot be solved in a technical way, any more than can the problem of winning the game of tick-tack-toe.

In other words, get on the cart, you, a morbid and Procrustean solution if ever there were one. Do advances in migrating cyanobacteria to live in sugarcane not count? Or practical trials of cyanobacteria-innoculated wheat? As one poster on a recent thread on The Ergosphere cried in exasperation,

... a lot of these Peak Oil types seem similarly misanthropic, gleefully rubbing their hands together at the thought of the coming apocalypse. They are at the bow of the Titanic and not only see the danger but are cheering on the iceberg.

What's worse, they're cheering on the iceberg just so they can say they were right at last. At this point I repeat my offer for any millennialists so inclined, knowing they're unlikely to take me up on it.

GM Pulls LA Times Ads After Bad Review

I don't mean to turn this blog into a running commentary on the auto industry, but given that's one of the largest world consumers of oil products, it's not a surprise that I keep coming back to it. General Motors has pulled all ads from the Los Angeles Times after new auto columnist Dan Neil declared the new Pontiac G6 "a sales flop" in an April 6 article. Neil's column, titled "An American Idle", is a litany of what's wrong with a GM in which things continuously go from bad to worse. Subtitled "The Pontiac G6 is a sales flop. At General Motors, let the impeachment proceedings begin", he calls for the head of Bob Lutz (already accomplished earlier in the week):

In his 3 1/2 -year tenure, GM has lost something like 3 percentage points of market share. I was about to make the case that, given GM's current China syndrome -- North American market share dropping to its lowest point in decades, and market analysts, sensing no real momentum for reform within the company, downgrading the company's bond ratings to near-junk status -- someone's head ought to roll, and the most likely candidate would be the numinous white noggin of Lutz.

GM claims to be in uproar about his comments about the G6:

Honestly, it takes some sort of perverse genius to make the Grand Am, the car the Pontiac G6 replaces, look like a showroom winner, but the G6 is selling at about half the volume of the unloved and unlovely Grand Am, which dates to the 1980s. Even a multimillion-dollar giveaway of G6s on "Oprah" in September wasn't enough to fire up sales of this car.

But the real winner, the true reason for this tantrum, might be his demand that Lutz's successor at North American operations, Robert Wagoner, should get the axe, too:

... given recent events, I have to revise my story. To wit: Dump Wagoner.

It was Lutz, after all, who candidly averred at a Morgan Stanley meeting last month that GM might have to phase out some of its product lines, even using the word "damaged" to describe Pontiac and Buick. In the ensuing furor, Lutz claimed his remarks were taken out of context and over-hyped by the sensationalist media, like that scandal rag Automotive News.

Wagoner memo to Lutz: Stop making sense.

Pulling it all together, Neil concludes that the bland G6 and current management are of a piece, and both need to go:

[The G6] is an uncompetitive product, an assertion borne out not by my say-so but by sales numbers. When ballclubs have losing records, players and coaches and managers get their walking papers.

At GM, it's time to sweep the dugout.

GM may wish to hide from such bad press, but it can't, not when it's lost 3.5% market share during Lutz's tenure. Moreover, I'd be willing to bet that GM has lost even more points in the critical California market. Worse still, from GM's point of view, this embargo can't really last; the Times represents a market GM can't ignore. Whether they actively fix their product offerings to reflect sensibilities in the second half of the age of oil is another matter.

The $29.95/Year Carnies

So long as there are supermarkets -- a subject of speculation a number of millennialists would like to take the unders on -- so long will the Weekly World News be with us. Its more specialized cousins, Infinite Energy Magazine and ZPEnergy, run articles of similar credibility. For instance, I always find EXTENDED USE OF ALL CAPS just that much more authoritative. "This is a NEWS PORTAL dedicated to experimental research on REVOLUTIONARY ENERGY TECHNOLOGIES", screams the opening sentence on ZPEnergy.com. Forget to take your meds? Or this passage, from Infinite Energy Magazine's sample PDF:

Perhaps you have heard of the terms "cold fusion" or "zero point energy," with claims by some scientists that from new findings in the laboratory there could come effective infinite, clean, and abundant sources of energy -- inexpensive, safe, and widely distributed forms that could beneficially transform virtually every aspect of human civilization. Perhaps you have also heard that such claims are all bogus, "pathological science," or worse. (Of course there are some unsupported claims that are in that category, from deluded people or con-men.) [Whew! Best to keep your bases covered.]

[...] So, with such great possibilities at stake, can you afford not to learn more? Why not join us in a courageous journey of intellectual exploration? Why not subscribe immediately! The subscription price for our magazine is still just $29.95 a year ...

Judging strictly on the basis of entertainment per page, legitimate publications like New Scientist or Scientific American are a positive waste of money. But here I belabor the obvious; what I'm really irked at is that junk magazines are treated with any authority by Google searches (try "sonofusion 2005" as an example). Google might be smart for a lot of things, but it's no smarter than the people choosing to link to articles on those sites.