Intel Thinking Bang Per Watt

This is an interesting bit of news: Intel is now selling its CPUs, not on the basis of clock speed but on the basis of bang per watt used. In some sense it sounds lame -- AMD's CPUs are well-known for their heat dissipation -- but if you're using thousands of commodity computers, as Google does, those add up.

Calling Bull On Growth Through Acquisition

It looks like not only the CNOOC attempt to purchase Unocal is dead, but so is Haier's bid for Maytag. The reason given is that Whirlpool outbid Haier, but lost in all this is the motivation for China, Inc. -- "Wal-Mart with an army" as Steve Lohr recently put it in the New York Times -- to try in the first place. Sure, they're awash in dollars, and what are they going to do besides buy the most expensive baubles they can get? But besides that, Steve Rosenbush in the BusinessWeek article above suggests it's something else:

The primary driver of China's M&A scene is social and political in nature. Beijing is worried about the prospects for political unrest. John Rutledge, a former economic adviser to President Bush, says disturbances and even riots in China are more common than many people in the West understand. While the Chinese leadership may not have to run for reelection, "it knows it can't hold onto power without raising the standard of living," says Rutledge, who now runs Rutledge Capital.

...

Through M&A, China can not only create economic growth but also help boost employment growth and raise wages. One part of that strategy involves Chinese companies buying troubled U.S. ones such as Maytag. With wages in China so much lower than those in the U.S., such deals also allow Chinese management to return broken-down U.S. companies to profitability, according to Liu.

Whoa, whoa, whoa! Mergers and acquisitions create economic growth? When did this start? Those who lived through the 80's might recall the less-than-successful history of Groupe Bull, which attempted to take the various parts of other unsuccessful companies and cast them into one giant, mega-... thing. The end result was a bunch of different fiefdoms that never really coalesced into a single company, and within a decade, the whole mess had to be undone. Mergers and acquisitions have to be useful at the end of the day, but the mere agglomeration of parts into a consolidated whole doesn't make for growth by itself. If that's really China's strategy, maybe the rest of the world has less to fear than I thought.

The Ummah's Answer To Harry Truman

Via Catallarchy, an interesting comment about the relative merits of murder in contests where the ends justify the means:

As President of the United States, Harry Truman ordered the deployment of two atomic bombs on civilian targets. Thousands of men, women, and children were incinerated instantly, turned into organic ash where they stood. ...

My view is the direct opposite of what they teach in government run schools. They teach that Truman’s action was a heroic choice that saved many American lives. With a similar line of reasoning, a friend of mine argued that the massacre of civilians during war may be justified if the reward is high enough. He hesitated to make a judgment in the particular case of Harry Truman’s wartime actions. According to him, the good of saving American troops at least partially offset the evil of incinerating Japanese homes and families, making it a morally nuanced situation.

Other men have used logic similar to Truman’s supporters to justify attacking civilian targets. However, I don’t think my American friends would hesitate to condemn their actions because they don’t bat for the home team.

For example, the name “Osama bin Laden” has taken its place among Hitler and Satan in the pantheon of evil. The reason? He thinks the freedom of the Arab world from Western imperial influences is important enough to sacrifice civilian lives. We might call him the Harry Truman of the Middle East.

As most Americans condemn bin Laden for putting civilians in harm’s way, so too do I condemn Truman. If bin Laden is a “terrorist”, then so is Truman. In fact, Truman’s actions are more indefensible because eventual victory was available through conventional military means. For bin Laden, direct military action, against the most feared armed force in all of history, is out of the question.

Of course, the reality of the situation is somewhat more nuanced than what Lyles presents here; the Japanese had intentionally and viciously mistreated the lands they conquered, so much so that the Chinese to this day retain a great deal of enmity toward the Japanese. And it wasn't just American lives that were saved; it was also Japanese lives, for the casualty estimates of the cost of an invasion of the Japanese homeland ran into the millions. Similarly, bin Laden's idea of governance involves a return to the barbarities of the 12th century, something that must be opposed at all costs. The comparison works at a superficial level, but it is a facile and wrongheaded one.

On The Economics Of Fusion

I was poking around the Fire Place news and happened across this Nature story about ITER. One interesting bit buried near the end:

Partly because of better modelling, most researchers agree that the smaller, cheaper ITER can be made to work. "In Europe we're optimistic about the future of fusion," says David Ward, a plasma physicist who studies the economics of fusion for the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority in Culham near Oxford. "But the big step will be going from where we are to ITER. Ward says that the reactor will provide definitive proof of the value of fusion power, as well as offering technical information about how to build a firstgeneration commercial reactor.

Dorland agrees, with one caveat: "I think that ITER will work, but I'm willing to bet you $100 that another fusion device will get more power out before it does," he says. There are perhaps half-a-dozen designs that might catch up with tokamaks, but the most impressive to date, he says, is a variation of the tokamak called the spherical torus. This more closely resembles a pitted apple than a doughnut, a shape that allows it to create a sharp boundary between the hot hydrogen plasma and the outer wall of the reactor and squeeze the plasma more tightly. Such a design might achieve a burning fusion reaction with less fuss than the more cumbersome tokamak, he says.

But because ITER is a government project, it will get built anyway, costs be damned. I'm in favor of fusion research, but there's serious reasons to question the economics of ITER.

Incidentally, David Ward has an interesting PDF available discussing the economics of a proposed fusion reactor, in which he projects such a device to be cheaper than photovoltaics and about the same as wind farms.

The Ministry Of Truth Opens

A new meaning of "shoot to protect" leads me to ask: protect whom?

The man, who had no backpack as seen on earlier suicide bombers, tripped, Whitby told the BBC. “They pushed him onto the floor and unloaded five shots into him. He looked like a cornered fox. He looked petrified.”

Canadian Oil Production To Spike 3.9 Mbpd By 2015

Canadian oil production is scheduled to increase by 3.9 million barrels per day by 2015, according to recent estimates by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. Nearly of that increase is attributed to the huge addition of oil sands projects, but some of it was due to mitigation of depletion rates from existing oil wells, as well as a doubling of production offshore of Newfoundland.

Ontario Suffering Blackouts

The Canadian province of Ontario is suffering blackouts lately and will suffer more in the future because of a failure to build new generation capacity, as well as the ill-considered closure of coal-fired power plants, according to the National Post. (Via peakoil.com.)

India Wants In On ITER

India wants to join the ITER consortium, and the U.S. (not to mention the other participants) is no doubt happy to have another country upon whose government it can throw the bill to.

GM Posts $1.2 Billion Loss In North American Operations

General Motors posted a $1.2 billion loss in its North American operations, and a $286 million loss overall as good news from Europe was dwarfed by major downturns in the U.S.

A highly publicized "employee discount" sales promotion did help boost U.S. sales and increase GM's North American market share to 27.3% in the second quarter, compared to 26.2% in the year-ago quarter. But the financial benefits from those additional vehicle sales were offset by lower production, proportionally fewer sales of high-profit cars and trucks and rising healthcare costs, the Detroit-based company said.

The loss was even worse when ignoring one-time items, totalling $318 million.

Saudi Envoy To U.S. Steps Down, Citing "Personal Reasons"

Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi Arabian envoy to the United States, is stepping down for supposedly "personal reasons". According to the Los Angeles Times, major changes are afoot in the Saudi kingdom, and King Fahd's health is said to have taken another turn for the worse.

Bandar has been close to the Bush family for years, especially President George H.W. Bush, with whom he worked organizing the Iraq war of 1990-1991. But Bandar's job became more stressful after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, when Saudi officials came under pressure to explain why 15 of the 18 suicide bombers were from the kingdom.

Fascist Chinese Government Denounces Report Calling It Fascist

... or something like that. Really, nothing going on here, nope, no blue-water navy being built up, no game of whack-the-Taiwanese going on here, nope, not at all.

Christ, it's 1936 again, down to the freakin' Olympics.

Unocal Board Backs Chevron Bid

... regardless of the increased price. CNOOC's bid was backed by low- and zero-interest state loans. Free money! Whee!

BS Detectors, Activate: Another Hydrogen Scam?

Green Car Congress highlights a device that supposedly turns water into hydrogen without external energy inputs, from Alternate Energy Corporation. Canadian companies give me the heebie jeebies, especially anything that looks like it's about to get listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, noted home of stock kiters and other frauds.

Bookmark: UC Davis AICF Group

Something I stumbled upon via Google the other day: UC Davis has an AICF (sonofusion) group.

Slashdot Thread On Pimentel Study

Relevant to the Pimentel study claiming pretty much all major proposed methods of ethanol production are energy negative: here's a Slashdot thread on the topic. A few data points of interest, maybe...

• This post provides a link to a site itself with a 2002 University of Michigan study (PDF) rebutting earlier Pimentel studies.
• This post talks about the Union of Concerned Scientists' SUV which makes some questionable assumptions under the hood as to costs.
• CapsaicinBoy notes Pimentel releases similar reports annually, sorta like spring vacation.

Anyway, a lot of stuff in there to consider. One of these days I'll have to actually read the original source material, I suppose.

Petty

I'd like to hear why Mann et al. have blocked Steve McIntyre's home IP address block from accessing his FTP server.

Danish Scientists Create Longer-Lasting Plastic Solar Cell

... if you consider two and a half years long-lived. Plastic solar cells are cheap compared to silicon-based ones, but also are terribly inefficient and short lived.

Pimentel Strikes Again, Claims Organic Crop Yields Equal Conventional

David Pimentel, the Cornell University researcher whose ongoing series of reports have condemned virtually every biomass scheme I've heard of as energy negative, now comes forth with a new study claiming organic farming methods produce the same yields as conventional farms.

The study compared a conventional farm that used recommended fertilizer and pesticide applications with an organic animal-based farm (where manure was applied) and an organic legume-based farm (that used a three-year rotation of hairy vetch/corn and rye/soybeans and wheat). The two organic systems received no chemical fertilizers or pesticides.

Inter-institutional collaboration included Rodale Institute agronomists Paul Hepperly and Rita Seidel, U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service research microbiologist David Douds Jr. and University of Maryland agricultural economist James Hanson. The research compared soil fungi activity, crop yields, energy efficiency, costs, organic matter changes over time, nitrogen accumulation and nitrate leaching across organic and conventional agricultural systems.

"First and foremost, we found that corn and soybean yields were the same across the three systems," said Pimentel, who noted that although organic corn yields were about one-third lower during the first four years of the study, over time the organic systems produced higher yields, especially under drought conditions. The reason was that wind and water erosion degraded the soil on the conventional farm while the soil on the organic farms steadily improved in organic matter, moisture, microbial activity and other soil quality indicators.

Here's where I begin to wonder about Pimentel's honesty. Technically he's correct in that the organic yields for the crops specified are about the same as for the conventional farm, but you cannot plant and harvest the same crop year in and year out. This is the sticking point I continue to see in every shootout between organic and conventional farming, and it's one that's vitally important.

Pimentel noted that although cash crops cannot be grown as frequently over time on organic farms because of the dependence on cultural practices to supply nutrients and control pests and because labor costs average about 15 percent higher in organic farming systems, the higher prices that organic foods command in the marketplace still make the net economic return per acre either equal to or higher than that of conventionally produced crops.

In other words, only if you raise prices substantially will these methods become economically viable. That says volumes about where all this is headed.

"Billions Of Barrels" Possibly Located In New Deepwater GOM

Underwater sand avalanches cover terrain that could contain enormous quantities of oil and natural gas in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico, according to Carlos Pirmez, a Shell geologist.

During the last glacial period when more of Earth's water was locked up in glaciers and sea level was lower, sediments discharged by rivers such as the Brazos and Trinity formed beaches and deltas near the continental shelf's edge. Catastrophic underwater sand avalanches, called turbidity currents, carried the sediments into the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, where they accumulated in bowl-shaped basins.

Carlos Pirmez, an expedition geologist affiliated with Shell International in Houston, said, "basins are now buried thousands of meters beneath the Gulf of Mexico sea floor, and likely host billions of barrels of oil and gas. Sediment records we acquire from the basin off Texas shores will boost our understanding of how these deeply buried reservoirs are formed."

...

Jan Behrmann, a scientist at Germany's University of Freiburg, emphasizes that, "The goal of this expedition was not to explore or drill for oil, which lies much deeper than the sediments we recovered. In the next several months, we will analyze sediment samples and gain an understanding of when and how turbidites form. We will then have a better picture of why and where these important [petroleum] deposits are formed."

Where Green And Wall Street Intersect

UtiliPoint has a great piece up today about renewables and venture funding for these same:

Having run an energy and environmental venture fund for two years and seeing many well intentioned but uncommercial alternative energy projects, it occurred to me that something new needed to enter the "Green Finance" space. Things tend to happen when you least expect them. Call it serendipity or just dumb luck, but that's what's been revealed to me recently as I entered the energy & environmental hedge fund world a year ago. Venture capital wants returns. Hedge funds want those returns even faster. So, what's a poor entrepreneur to do? Impatient investors want returns and don't want to hear that you didn't make your numbers.

It may be helpful to review what is now occurring in the "Clean Technology" also called Clean Tech space recently. When mainstream press like Business Week, Forbes and The Economist all have articles in one week on this topic as it did in June 2005, the time has arrived for green technology for main street to take a hard look. But the space is very different than many envision. Unfortunately, it is now frankly over-hyped, and I am seeing poorly conceived business plans getting funded. So-called "science experiments" don't cut it on Wall Street where I live. The mantra of good venture projects for the clean technology space, as with any other venture capital project, is "revenue stream, seasoned management team or repeater CEO, exit strategy." Science experiments in this space today are mostly funded by the Pentagon as they have the deep pockets to fund financially unsustainable technologies (since when has the government ever been run like a business with a P&L). Many of these technologies are so debt ridden that they will never be commercially viable. They depend on government funding to continue their research and perfect their commercial applications. I would add to this equation all those hydrogen economy projects that the United States' DOE is now so fond of should be included in this science experiment group.

As has been stated in this column before, we should be ramping up both hybrid engines and gasification of coal technology for rapid deployment and commercialization. These are two fundamental energy technologies that work and would contribute most effectively to the dual goals of energy efficiency and emissions reductions using today's technology.

NYT: Chinese Oil Demand Slowing

Thanks to Anonymous in the comments for pointing me to this New York Times story: apparently, Chinese oil demand has slowed a bit recently, declining one percent from the same quarter last year.

The drop is the latest in a series of unclear and often conflicting indications about whether the Chinese economy is still growing strongly. Top officials of the agency said in interviews they believed that the decline was temporary and that they expected Chinese demand to rebound in the second half of the year, but added that world oil prices could take a heavy blow if Chinese use did not increase.

The International Energy Agency, supported by the governments of the world's leading consuming nations, has recently become known for warning that the world does not have enough oil and calling for the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to push its member countries to increase their output. But William C. Ramsay, the agency's deputy executive director, said Wednesday that there were signs that worldwide production capacity was starting to move ahead of demand for the year, and he expressed surprise that oil prices had nonetheless stayed high.

Really? Imagine...

... [IEA chief economist Fatih] Birol said there had been a vigorous debate in the last two days within the International Energy Agency over how to explain the decline in Chinese consumption, and he acknowledged that other, longer-term explanations were possible.

These include the possibility that the overall Chinese economy is starting to slow, that China is generating more of its electricity from coal instead of oil, and that China is improving energy conservation in response to high prices.

Economic statistics have been contradictory. Exports are still growing rapidly. But energy-intensive production of steel, cement and other construction material has started to slow as the government cracked down on real estate speculation.

Real estate speculation? Say it ain't so! The U.S. was founded by the ultimate real estate speculators! How can China ever hope to become liberalized if they "crack down" on speculators?

(That is not a joke, by the way.)

Get Your Oil From Crazy Chavez!

... 'cause he just can't stop slashing prices! At least, to those countries he likes in his little regional trade group, PetroCaribe. (Trinidad and Tobago has taken a pass, thanks, for fear it would gut their market.) Chavez wants to give oil away at preferred prices to his neighbors, which makes sense; the only thing a socialist really knows how to do well is buy votes, whether that's from inside or outside the country. I have to wonder what the limits of his generosity really are.

Higher Oil Prices Spurring E&D Activities

Higher oil prices is prompting more exploration and development activity among oil producers, according to the Financial Times of London. The long-term price floor for oil is now seen to be $40/barrel, and companies are changing their activities accordingly. But interestingly, the U.S. EIA and the IEA don't see eye-to-eye either on worldwide demand nor supply:

The IEA on Wednesday revised downward its demand forecast for 2005, while the EIA did the opposite just the day before. The IEA now expects oil demand this quarter to be 83.7m b/d, while the EIA has a forecast of 84.9m b/d a difference of 1.2m b/d, which is the equivalent of Algeria's entire production.

The agencies' supply estimates are not much more in tune. Non-Opec production is expected to increase by 1.4m b/d this year, according to the IEA, while the EIA, expects growth of only 800,000 b/d.

The U.S. EIA recently upgraded its price forecast for oil to $59/barrel through September.

CNOOC May Raise Bid For Unocal

Thanks to mdmhvonpa for the note that state-owned CNOOC is considering raising the stakes on its Unocal bid, though the amount is not yet known, according to the Associated Press.

Purdue Researchers Reproduce Taleyarkhan Sonofusion Results

Xu and Butt

Researchers at Purdue University have reproduced sonofusion results reported by Rusi Taleyarkhan. The results, replicated by researchers Xiban Yu and Adam Butt, were published in the May issue of the peer-reviewed journal Nuclear Engineering And Design. Yu and Butt are now working with Taleyarkhan in his Oak Ridge lab, but were not prior to the publication of their paper.

Update 7/17: An article appearing in heise.de includes comments by Seth Putterman, Taleyarkhan's nemesis, who raises his earlier objection of inadequate detection:

Professor Seth Putterman from the Californian University at Los Angeles thinks, that "the data that [Xu and Butt] presented in the paper is not convincing basically for the same reason as all of Taleyarkhan's papers." Putterman demands a timed coincidence between flashes of light due to sonoluminescence and neutron measurements in a time window of a billionth of a second. Taleyarkhan's group had only shown a correlation to be within a 2 millisecond window.

OT: I Guess Lynne Is Screwed, Then

Sorry 'bout your career, Lynne:

A pseudonymous professor at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest advises academic job candidates not to blog. His remarks are addressed to graduate students and junior professors, but honestly, they apply to anyone who might ever want to move from one institution to another. I’ve long accepted that if I ever did feel a desire to move, this blog would probably be the thing that would put the final nail in any application. (After the dabbling in cultural studies and game studies and my unorthodox attitudes towards my major field of specialization.)

Tribble’s reasoning isn’t entirely about blogging: it reveals a larger and more typical kind of academic parochialism. Yes, there’s certainly a whiff of pure distaste for blogs. But it’s also not blogs as such, but the decomposition of guild controls over what is verified as legitimate scholarship that they potentially represent. It’s the same attitude that lets other scholars justify opposing electronic publication of journals: all in the name of defending the high standards of peer reviewed publication. Tribble doesn’t tell us what discipline he’s interviewing in. If he’s in the humanities (as I suspect he is), defending the normal practice of peer review as being something worth saving is a bigger problem than an attitude towards blogs. Most peer review in the humanities functions less as a way to authenticate the accuracy and originality of a journal article or manuscript and more as a way to confirm that the author has the necessary hierarchical position within academia to publish the type of work they are trying to publish and as a tool for the enforcement of orthodoxy. Tribble’s defense here is about an entire view of academic knowledge to which blogs are only one small challenge.

Econbrowser On Markets And Peak Oil

"I for one", starts Econbrowser's latest post on peak oil, "would like to see better communication between economists, geologists, and petroleum engineers about the timing and consequences of the eventual decline in global annual production rates of crude petroleum." Hear, hear. The economists and a fair number of the geologists seem to be talking through each other, with both sides missing the others' point.

I know that many physical scientists feel that economists have a misguided, mystical faith that "markets will always solve everything." Though I understand how outsiders might get this impression, I would guess that more than half of the published research in economics has to do with how the market can misallocate resources rather than how it always does a perfect job. But one thing in which most economists do place a great deal of faith is the powerful forces that are unleashed, for good or ill, by people's efforts to make themselves richer. The argument I'm making here is not an abstract, mystical claim about the market, but rather a very specific claim about the particular matter of interest. The claim is that profit-seeking works strongly in this instance to make the oil price rise now rather than wait until production actually declines, and that this force further works to produce the kind of changes that society needs to make now in order to prepare for the coming production decline.

It's another reason I'm skeptical of Apollo-type programs in the energy milieu. Apollo had a specific engineering goal: get a man safely to the moon and back. As with all such projects, the old saw goes "cost, quality, schedule: pick two", and Apollo's project managers picked quality and schedule. We don't know which two the government will pick with some new energy source, but if they don't pick "cost" (read: ITER), everything else is ultimately immaterial. It's a mistake sellers in an open market can never make.

Senators: CNOOC Bid Violates Chinese WTO Pledges

Senators Jim Bunning and Kent Conrad have asked Secretary of Commerce and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Portman to investigate whether the CNOOC bid violates pledges China made when it joined the WTO. In particular, some of the financing CNOOC would use in the acquisition would come from below-market state loans, something the Chinese promised to end.

Canadian Native Group Agrees To Halt Gas Pipeline Suit

Map of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline

A native Canadian group has agreed to cease legal stalling tactics that were delaying a large natural gas pipeline from being built. The Mackenzie Valley Pipeline will carry gas from Canadian arctic fields near the Beaufort sea to southern markets. The Deh Cho people, whose lands the pipeline is planned to traverse, launched two lawsuits last year, claiming "insufficient representation". The Deh Cho have further received $15 million in funds from the Canadian government, for "economic development"; as well, the Canadian government must consult with the Deh Cho before "issuing any development authorization that would affect the Deh Cho's rights."

The pipeline is scheduled to open late in the decade, and will carry 1.5 billion cubic feet of gas per day once operating. More on the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline can be found at the project's home page.

Where's The Oil Coming From? Don't Ask Chevron

What a remarkably frank admission by Chevron that they're not finding any more oil. More here:

The trends are in motion.

Energy demand is soaring as never before and driving economic growth. And improved standards of living are requiring increasing amounts of energy. In fact, some say that in 20 years the world will consume 40% more oil than it does today.

The facts are compelling.

Many of the world’s oil and gas fields are maturing. And new energy discoveries are mainly occurring in places where resources are difficult to extract—physically, technically, economically, and politically. When growing demand meets tighter supplies, the result is more competition for the same resources.

Chinese Laborers In The American Oil Patch

With the same kind of fanfare about alleged shortages -- which, at least on the surface, could be true immediately -- we now read that Chinese laborers could be sent to the U.S. to work on gas drilling projects.

The oil and gas well services sector in Colorado is struggling to meet demand for new rigs and to find enough workers to operate them. As consumption of oil and natural gas grows, the effects have been felt globally.

"If they were just talking about bringing in foreign workers for the sake of lowering costs, then I think it could be grounds for pretty substantial opposition. But it's because the industry is running pretty much flat out," Mr. Boras said.

Carpet Gasification!

As we have gasified coal, so now (via peakoil.com) do we have gasified carpet scraps:

The Carpet and Rug Institute says 4.7 billion pounds of carpet is dumped in U.S. landfills each year, filling up almost 1 percent of the country's total landfill space.

...

Now a shiny, high-tech plant stands in contrast behind the old factory it helps power -- a gray, sprawling building that once made parachutes for World War II paratroopers.

When the power plant goes on line later this summer, truckloads of carpet will be stacked three stories high in a cavernous warehouse, waiting to be sent through an imposing shredder. The remnants will then be shipped to the gassifier, which is much like an oven and converts the scraps into a synthetic gas. The gas is then pushed through two pollution-controlling processes before it's funneled to the factory, where it can be burned much like natural gas to help create 2 million yards of new carpet each year.

I wonder how many other industrial waste products could be successfully gasified. I know I've recently read about producer gas to methane processes, one of which sounded like an outright fraud. But these guys are owned by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, about as far from fraudulent as they come.

A Bunch From Crumb Trail

Call this a roundup post for the excellent blog Crumb Trail, which I for some reason have overlooked on the sidebar. Back to it presently enough. Anyway:

He points us to this story about University of Oregon researchers coming up with a way to create ammonia at atmospheric temperature and pressure.

In the atmosphere, nitrogen gas is inert. However when nitrogen is converted to ammonia, it becomes available as a nitrogen source for plant growth – and as such is the fertilizer that drives the world's food supply. Industry produces ammonia using the century-old Haber-Bosch process, which directly combines nitrogen from the air with hydrogen under extremely high pressures and temperatures.

The Haber process requires pressures of 200 atmospheres.

"In the eyes of chemists, the conversion of nitrogen to ammonia in water, using simple hydrogen at room temperature and pressure is the holy grail of nitrogen fixation," Tyler said. "The next challenge is figuring out how to carry out the complete cycle in water."

So far as I can tell, Kyoto is a feel-good sop that does absolutely nothing to change global atmospheric carbon dioxide levels principally because it omits developing countries like India and China. Reading Roger Pielke, Jr., he cuts to the chase on a matter that has bothered me previously, namely the idea that the IPCC report has been subjected to insufficient scrutiny. This graf from Gary neatly encapsulates my concerns:

The problem is that the study was elevated to iconic status by the IPCC without due dilligence, and defects in the methodology used in the study have provided ample opportunities for those who object to the politics for which the symbol stands to discredit it. Pielke does a good job of explaining some of the problems with the stick study and makes an interesting observation.

Here is how I see it -- MBH conducted several studies that, by the conventional norms of the climate science community, represented excellent work and were published in leading journals in the field. But the norms of the climate science community for peer review and replication are not widely shared in other fields. So when MM were drawn to MBH (indirectly or directly by the IPCC SPM no doubt) from outside the climate science community with an eye to take a close look at the their work I’d venture that MM likely brought along with them a perspective on norms of peer review and replication quite different from MBH. . .

He concludes with this:

Politicians can do very little good but very great harm. This is an instance when I'm pleased about grid lock and trances since this isn't a policy issue, it's a technology issue. Once that is understood it may become possible for policies that assist technology development to be formulated. I don't mean pork-barrel policies like ethanol subsidies and mandates or pie-in-the-sky hydrogen projects. We don't need an analog of The Apollo program or ITER which picks some technology and persues it at all costs, even when the benefits are questionable, just to be able to say we did it. This is fine for individual American states, such as California's proposed Million Solar Roofs program, but it is inappropriate for national or international bodies since that would stifle innovation and experimentation with alternative approaches. (Although boutique sized nations that are far smaller than American states such as California have little alternative to the pick-one approach.) At higher levels support should be broad and non-specific. The sensible action is to grease the discovery machine and smile benignly on both the failures and successes as the world network works the problem, and carry water for them all, helping to publicize their efforts and results so that others can learn, adapt and improve.

I'm more a little more sanguine about the utility of ITER over the long haul -- fusion uses a potentially inexhaustible fuel cheaply and readily available everywhere on earth (deuterium) -- but the Apollo program is a very astute analogy. It's one thing to spend a ton of money to accomplish a straightforward goal. But the history of governments doesn't show they're very good at producing cheap anything for the masses. ITER has a noble goal, but there are real and significant questions as to whether it can ever really be cost-effective. After all, DARPA-let contracts may have developed the IP stack, but it wasn't until the NSF got out of access in the 90's that the Internet really took off.

Unocal May Drop Objections To CNOOC Bid

Unocal may drop its objections to the CNOOC bid if certain conditions are met, according to a recent report. The alternatives for CNOOC now apparently are abandoning the bid and raising the stakes.

Saudis Anonymously Hint They're Out

The Saudis are anonymously hinting they won't be able to meet demand within ten years.

Ecotopians Strike Again: Altamont Pass Windmills To Be Idled

Altamont Pass windmills could be idled from November through February -- nearly a third of the year -- in order to placate environmental groups, according to the Alameda Times. I've pretty much had enough of this: there's always something to complain about, and modern legislation makes it possible to tie up everything -- including clean, renewable energy.

Two Questions From Science

Science has a list of its top 125 unanswered questions in science, two of which are particularly relevant to this blog: first, "What can replace cheap oil, and when?" Second, "Will Malthus continue to be wrong?" My answers, in order, are, I'm not sure, but we'd better get busy, and I hope so.

It's All How You Count

An interesting sidebar in the War on Terror: the Bush administration may have been purposefully undercounting casualties by not counting deaths in German hospitals as war-related.

Daniel Ellsberg had a good editorial piece in the Sunday Los Angeles Times in which he declared "I Wrote Bush's War Words -- in 1965". The lies accumulate, only unlike Vietnam, it could reasonably be argued that the prize in the middle east has real value. There is a case to be made for going into Iraq, but it has not been made publicly for fear of its political ramifications, and that is: the world's (read: U.S.) oil supply must be kept secure.

Update: Odograph provides this useful link to the Huffington Post, which in its comments threads lists this Daily Kos diary about the TBR source for this. Not very credible, it seems.

Analysts: $80/Barrel Crude By December Within Sight

Via Green Car Congress, the likelihood of $80/barrel crude has increased appreciably:

New York Mercantile Exchange data show 6,900 options contracts outstanding that allow buyers to purchase oil for December delivery at $80 a barrel, compared with an average of 77 contracts in January. The probability that oil will top $75 a barrel when the December crude contract expires is 21 percent, according to Adam Sieminski and Michael Lewis, strategists at Deutsche Bank AG, up from 5 percent at the start of the year.

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``We've certainly seen people asking for prices on $100'' contracts, said Orrin Middleton, who markets options and other securities for Barclays Capital in London. ``This was way off people's radars 12 months ago. They now believe there's a possibility, but it's going to take a supply disruption to take us there.''

Iranian Price Subsidies Mask True Costs

Two dollars to fill up a gas tank? It's everyday reality in Iran, where the government keeps the price of unleaded artificially low.

The country may boast 10 percent of the world's oil reserves and natural gas fields second only to Russia's. But every ounce of gasoline sold at Station No. 11 at a fraction of the world market price is an ounce Iran does not get to sell abroad. And at least 80 percent of the country's export revenue -- and perhaps 50 percent of its national budget -- comes from selling petrochemicals to foreign markets.

"There's a huge opportunity cost, because they could be selling that at world prices," said Ben Faulks, an analyst who follows Iran for the Economist Intelligent Unit, a consulting firm based in London. And every time the price of crude climbs, "that implicit cost gets larger."

That helps explain why, despite record high oil prices, Iran routinely runs a net deficit.

Another reason: The oil-rich country pays billions to import gasoline.

Does Anybody Believe This?

From today's Los Angeles Times:

"We believe this is pure commercial," Fu said. "We are not only trying to deliver oil and gas to the U.S. market but trying to secure U.S. jobs. You know, free trade is the fundamental cornerstone of the U.S., and I believe they will understand this is purely business."

Sure, they are. I guarantee whatever they buy will be rerouted to China within a year after the purchase.

Administrivia: Back To Smaller Fonts

After looking at it for a few days, I'm reverting to the smaller fonts, and I'm changing the base font on my browser instead, which seems to work better.

BTW, happy 4th of July to all my US readers.

Senate Votes To Kill NIF

The Senate has voted to kill the National Ignition Facility. The NIF is said to be the costliest big-science project currently funded by the U.S.

The Bush administration backs the National Ignition Facility, and the Senate action could be reversed or modified later this summer in conference with the House.

"There's going to be some meeting of the minds," said Greg Mello, director of the Los Alamos Study Group, a private organization in Albuquerque that monitors the nation's nuclear laboratories. "I think NIF will be hurt, but I doubt that it will come to a complete standstill."

In nuclear fusion, atoms merge and release bursts of energy, as in the sun or in hydrogen bombs.

The facility's powerful laser beams are intended to produce blistering hot conditions similar to those in exploding nuclear arms, helping scientists ensure the reliability of the nation's nuclear stockpile without the need for underground tests. Less directly, scientists want to use the beams to explore laser fusion as a way of producing commercial power.

But last month, Senator Pete V. Domenici, the New Mexico Republican who heads the Subcommittee on Energy and Water, proposed to delete all construction money, $146 million, from the administration's request for the coming year.

The bill does provide $314 million for limited research. Livermore scientists have built 4 of NIF's planned 192 laser beams and are firing them at targets the size of a BB, producing the first scientific insights.

The Economist On ITER

The Economist has a brief article up about ITER. Excerpt:

The challenges of achieving fusion should not be underestimated. A large volume of gas must be heated to a temperature above that found at the centre of the sun. At the same time, that gas must be prevented from touching the walls of the reactor by confining it in a powerful magnetic field known as a magnetic bottle. The energy released in fusion is carried mostly by neutrons, a type of subatomic particle that has no electric charge and hence cannot be confined by the magnetic bottle. Ensuring that the reactor wall can cope with being bombarded by these neutrons presents a further challenge.

The costs involved are immense. The budget for ITER involves spending $5 billion on construction, $5 billion on operating costs over 20 years and more than $1 billion on decommissioning. Yet the reason why taxpayers should spend such sums is unclear. The world is not short of energy. Climate change can be addressed without recourse to generating power from fusion since there are already many alternatives to fossil-fuel power plants. And $12 billion could buy an awful lot of research into those alternatives.

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Like the International Space Station, ITER had its origins in the superpower politics of the 1980s that brought the cold war to its end as Russia and the West groped around for things they could collaborate on. Like the International Space Station, therefore, ITER is at bottom a political animal. And, like the International Space Station, the scientific reasons for developing it are almost non-existent. They cannot justify the price.

The skeptics are certainly right to focus on the cost. The big concern anyone should have with ITER is that in the end it's not likely to produce anything like cost-effective energy, for the simple reason that governments hide the cost so effectively.