The Trouble With State-Run Research

... is that it takes an act of Congress to change priorities. Kevin Bullis in MIT Technology Review passes along complaints about government-funded energy research priorities being screwed up, but is that a surprise? Everything they're doing is going to be five years too late.

Squeezing The Last Drop Of Oil

Hey, speaking of the oil patch, here's a BusinessWeek article about Cano Petroleum, an outfit that's taking detergent and sudsing oil out of otherwise spent wells.

[M]ost oil wells still have a fair amount of life in them. That's because it's relatively easy to extract the first 20% or 30% of a field's capacity. After that it becomes progressively more difficult and expensive to tap the remaining reserves. "That's why for every barrel we produce, there are two more in the ground," says Jeff Johnson, founder and CEO of Fort Worth (Tex.)-based Cano Petroleum (CFW).

Johnson, 41, a former finance executive, is betting that he can make a fortune extracting those stubborn reserves buried beneath the plains of Texas and Oklahoma. Oil is traditionally pumped by flooding wells with water. When the pressure reaches a certain point, the oil comes rushing to the surface and pours out of the well. As the field becomes depleted, the pressure created isn't sufficient to force the oil from the ground. So Johnson is using a form of high-tech detergent that loosens the oil, much as soap loosens oil from a cooking pan.

Cano has a half-dozen oil wells in Texas and Oklahoma, and while they haven't yet shown a profit, their stock price has doubled recently. I better stop now, I sound like some of the spam I've been getting lately.

A Couple Freebies From John S. Herold

Hey, remember John S. Herold, the industry researchers who predicted peak oil for the individual majors? Well, they're back with a pair of reports (PDF) about the future of energy. Not much you didn't suspect, but good stuff nonetheless.

That's One Way To Sell Cars

... though not likely to be a very successful long-term strategy: Ford has decided to force their employees to buy their own product or park across the street.

George Soros: Get Ready For $262/bbl Oil

Well, maybe not a certainty, but Soros lays out six scenarios in which the price of oil could easily break through the $100/barrel mark, and even get as high as a (very arbitrarily made) $262/bbl mark. He sees new supplies coming online in 2007, but, well, China and India.

PINR Report On U.S./India Nuclear Ties

A long one at the Power and Interest News Report about Indian and U.S. nuclear ties. What a mess this is...

Joint Venture To Convert Rendered Animal Fat To Biodiesel

Via Green Car Congress, Veridium Corporation and Mean Green BioFuels are looking to create biodiesel from rendered waste animal fat. Good stuff.

A Ray Of Hope On Torture

A recent study indicated that partisan thinking is hard-wired into the brain, and that the most rational thinkers are less partisan. Along those lines, I see that Armed Liberal at the often absurdly partisan Winds Of Change has had second thoughts about the chain of command involved in torture now that Chief Warrant Officer Lewis E. Welshofer, Jr. has received the not-especially strict punishment of $6,000 and essentially house arrest for the killing of a prisoner. AL's response is particularly interesting:

Overall, other than the telegenic Abu Ghreib defendants, the penalties meted out for killing Iraqi prisoners appear to have been very light.

This kind of blows my argument - that this isn't an issue because we find the people who do Bad Stuff and punish them - out the window.

And it implies a higher level of organizational responsibility than makes me happy. I'm not advocating closing Camp X-Ray, nor am I suddenly of the belief that reading terrorists their rights in the heat of battle before shooting them is a requirement. But there is a line, and it looks to me like we are on the wrong side of it.

When the president's first order of business is finding legal grounds to justify torture, and his chief lawyer is involved in the writing of this memo, it's astonishing to me how anyone could possibly not see the bright, clear line between that document and boots on the necks of Iraqi prisoners, waterboarding, and all the rest. If the conscience of the right is finally awakening to all the evil their excusifying has caused, it's a step, if belated, in the right direction.

More On Ford

Reason Express has a great, short bit on Ford's troubles, which come down to two things:

1. Aside from losing surplus production capacity, get rid of the minivan, which is losing money.
2. If that causes the dealers to complain, cut 'em loose and work with Wal-Mart.

Now, having been in the car business for a time (in an ancilliary way), I can attest that the states have laws that, if most car buyers knew about them, would make them riot; the car dealers have anti-competition laws in most states that prohibit the siting of new dealerships in places where the existing dealerships don't want them. This started as a way to prevent the manufacturers from opening competing dealerships near trouble franchises, but that kind of nonsense is just the beginning. Wal-Mart isn't getting into the retail car dealership business anytime soon, but if it could be accomplished, it would be a huge boon for car buyers everywhere.

Standing Up (And Turning Around) For Liberty

This is just wonderful to see: a roomful of Georgetown Law students standing up and turning their backs to alum Alberto Gonzalez while he was at the podium yammering away at how the Bush Administration's torture, wiretapping, etc., etc., etc. policies were all legal. They finished with a (inaccurate) quote of Benjamin Franklin on a huge banner. Way overdue, IMO, and here's to hoping the Bushies' codependents in Congress are turned out in the November elections. Hey, unleaded regular out here is $2.30 a gallon, and we haven't even hit summer yet...

Late: Kuwait's Actual Reserves Half Of Official Numbers

Thanks to Odograph for delivering the word that the Kuwaitis are close to confessing what we already knew: that their reserves are about half of the official numbers. Sobering news, but not unexpected. I wonder how long it'll be before we hear similar noises from the Saudis...

Update: Since that Reuters report came out last Friday, there's been some additional reportage of interest: first, Kuwait has revised their reserves estimates upwards; and second, Farouk Al Zanki, chairman of the Kuwait Oil Company, says "I have no idea where they got this figure from ... I don't think it's accurate." Insert sustained laugh track here.

Great Daily Kos Diary On Peak Oil

Way too much stuff to cover here, but a great, relatively short read nonetheless. Pretty much every oil major, and even Bush's Energy Secretary, Spencer Abrams, have admitted that peak oil is upon us, if not now, then soon.

Another Nanotech Solar Solution, From Penn State

Via peakoil.com, an interesting physorg.com story about something called "titania nanotube arrays" which seem to be principally designed for splitting hydrogen from water using only sunlight:

“This is an amazing material architecture for water photolysis,” says Craig Grimes, professor of electrical engineering and materials science and engineering. Referring to some recent finds of his research group (G. K. Mor, K. Shankar, M. Paulose, O. K. Varghese, C. A. Grimes, Enhanced Photocleavage of Water Using Titania Nanotube-Arrays, Nano Letters, vol. 5, pp. 191-195.2005 ), “Basically we are talking about taking sunlight and putting water on top of this material, and the sunlight turns the water into hydrogen and oxygen. With the highly-ordered titanium nanotube arrays, under UV illumination you have a photoconversion efficiency of 13.1%. Which means, in a nutshell, you get a lot of hydrogen out of the system per photon you put in. If we could successfully shift its bandgap into the visible spectrum we would have a commercially practical means of generating hydrogen by solar energy. It beats fighting wars over middle-eastern oil.”

Counterproductive Activities Dep't: Iraqi Oil Production Down 8%

And nobody in the Bush administration saw this coming? Really? You mean, minus a plan to actually administer the country, bad guys might come along and do bad things? Man, those PNAC bozos look stupider and stupider every day.

Fortune On Ethanol

Adam Lashinsky of Fortune inexplicably smiled upon me with this hopeful piece about ethanol as an alternative fuel. The arguments against have been pretty well covered by Patzek and Pimentel; this one brims with can-do optimism, which may or may not be well-founded. Unsurprisingly, we learn that ADM is behind a lot of this, but then, so are some of the oil companies. There's still plenty of unnerving talk of government subsidy, which sounds suspiciously like P & P might just be right about the direction of the energy arrow.

The Death And Rebirth Of Ford Motor Co.

Ford is only a hair's breadth or so away from bankruptcy, and so a new commercial for that company's future has everyone in a tizzy criticizing Ford's Way Forward, a corporate strategy that has the usual elements American carmakers have unleashed on their workforces since time immemorial, or the 70's, anyway: more plant shutdowns, more cuts in workforce, and the ever-present threat of actual Chapter 11 proceedings hinted at slyly.

Like all the other domestic carmakers, Ford got blindsided by the side effects of high oil prices. Bill Ford, in the understatement of the decade, mumbled that "Domestic demand for SUVs fell sooner than anticipated," which is essentially code for having been caught outdoors in a blizzard in only his tighty whities. He's not alone in that; over the last two years, despite the considerable increase in the price of oil, every time I've seen a GM ad, it focused on their already slow-moving truck lines at the expense of their smaller cars, sights American car buyers are increasingly rejecting. If these guys are going to get off the mat, it's going to be through more than just terminating product lines, firing UAW employees (no matter how enjoyable that might seem to certain parties) and mouthing platitudes about catching up to the imports.

And unlike yesteryear, "imports" no longer means just Japan and Germany. With the dubious capitalists in China hawking implausible stories of self-made men rising to positions of power (come on, now -- would the Politburo really allow such a thing?) in their fledgling auto industry, Detroit looks vulnerable to the kind of kneecapping it hasn't seen since the 70's.

Another Way To Extract Oil From Tar Sands Without Natural Gas

I've already written about one process for converting Canadian tar sands to usable crude oil without taking up valuable natural gas to cook the stuff; Green Car Congress has another one such, this time from Petrobank, which has a proprietary means for doing the extraction that involves pumping air into the tar sands, and burning part of it. This causes a large amount of heat, which in turn upgrades and loosens the oil, which is then pumped out. The company estimates that about 80% of the oil trapped in the sands can be removed this way; even more of the crude could be upgraded on the way out using catalytic means.

A thought a couple days later: I wonder, could something similar to this be used on tapped-out conventional oilfields? If two-thirds of the oil is left behind in a regular oilfield, that could be something like 50% more recovery, not too shabby, and without requiring a source of CO₂.

More On Taleyarkhan's Latest

Science News has more on Taleyarkhan's latest paper describing his attempt to get the rest of the world to take his "bubble fusion" research seriously; this time, he's knocked off with the neutrons to trigger the bubbles, and is using alpha particles from uranium to do the job. Unfortunately, he's still having trouble with that repeatability thing, and so we continue to wonder just when the heck all this will turn into an electric bill (on the other side, I mean).

New Lead-Acid Battery Tech Reduces Weight, Increases Energy Storage

Via Green Car Congress, Firefly Energy has come up with a novel foam design for lead-acid batteries that greatly reduces problems with sulfurization and corrosion while reducing weight and increasing performance. The new batteries provide 170 watt-hours per kilogram, versus 30 Wh/kg with conventional lead batteries. The big difference is a graphite foam core upon which the lead sits, increasing surface area and reducing material requirements (removing half to two-thirds the lead), so the new batteries are much less heavy as well. The batteries are expected to find application in plug-in hybrid automobiles, as well as conventional vehicles, where their weight savings will also translate to energy savings.

Iceland Tries To Cut Its Gasoline Usage To Zero

Probably covered elsewhere, but here's an interesting ABC News story about Iceland -- which gets most of its power from geothermal wells -- trying to convert its transportation system entirely to hydrogen. Easy enough for them, considering they have tons of energy to start with, but not so easy for the rest of us, who have to get hydrogen from water or natural gas. Still, any steps toward thumbing our noses at the desert sheikhs are good ones.

Man, I Love Chinese Press Releases

This one, about Chinese attempts to get a fusion research reactor going, contains some pretty funny chinglish sentences:

The energy resource crisis has begun to threaten the world, as oil, coal and other types of non-renewable energy resources will be used up in a century. Scientists recommend the extraction of deuterium from sea water and the ignition of nuclear fusion of this element in temperatures as high as 100 million degrees Celsius. In nuclear fusion, deuterium abstracted from one kilogram of sea water will be able to produce as much energy as that of 300 liters of gasoline.

"Abstracted"?

Missouri Shuts Down Carthage Thermal Depolymerization Plant

Governor Matt Blunt of Missouri has shut down the Carthage thermal depolymerization plant run by Changing World Technologies, whose website itself appears to be effectively offline. Local residents complained that the smell eminating from the plant is "putrid", resembling burnt chicken feathers.

So, What Data Have You, Mr. Maugeri?

Leonardo Maugeri, group senior vice president at Eni, and a passionate "debunker" of Matt Simmons:

The skeptics take for granted that big oil states are thoroughly explored, which is not the case. From 1995 to 2004, fewer than 30 new wildcat [exploration] wells were drilled in Saudi Arabia, compared with more than 15,700 in the United States. The numbers are similar throughout the Persian Gulf.

This state makes plausible the recent Saudi response to its accusers: Oil Minister Ali Al-Naimi said estimates of Saudi "original oil"—the broadest definition of reserves, including proven, probable and possible future reserves—could rise in coming decades to 900 billion barrels, up from 200 billion, due largely to improving recovery technology. And the U.S. Geological Survey's estimate of Saudi Arabia's unexplored reserves is higher than Riyadh's.

Yes, but based on what data? The politically manipulated numbers from Riyadh?

Smokestack Algae Turns Power Plant Exhaust Into Biofuels

Instead of doing a cranky deconstruction of William F. Buckley's idiotic defense of soon-to-be-administration-rubber-stamp Samuel Alito, how about a nice story about converting smokestack exhaust into biodiesel using algae? It's an idea proposed by Isaac Berzin of MIT, who's literally -- wait for it -- a rocket scientist.

Fed a generous helping of CO2-laden emissions, courtesy of the power plant's exhaust stack, the algae grow quickly even in the wan rays of a New England sun. The cleansed exhaust bubbles skyward, but with 40% less CO2 (a larger cut than the Kyoto treaty mandates) and another bonus: 86% less nitrous oxide.

After the CO2 is soaked up like a sponge, the algae is harvested daily. From that harvest, a combustible vegetable oil is squeezed out: biodiesel for automobiles. Berzin hands a visitor two vials — one with algal biodiesel, a clear, slightly yellowish liquid, the other with the dried green flakes that remained. Even that dried remnant can be further reprocessed to create ethanol, also used for transportation.

Being a good Samaritan on air quality usually costs a bundle. But Berzin's pitch is one hard-nosed utility executives and climate-change skeptics might like: It can make a tidy profit.

"You want to do good for the environment, of course, but we're not forcing people to do it for that reason — and that's the key," says the founder of GreenFuel Technologies, in Cambridge, Mass. "We're showing them how they can help the environment and make money at the same time."

GreenFuel has already garnered $11 million in venture capital funding and is conducting a field trial at a 1,000 megawatt power plant owned by a major southwestern power company. Next year, GreenFuel expects two to seven more such demo projects scaling up to a full pro- duction system by 2009.

(Via Slashdot.)

Taleyarkhan's Back

Well, what the heck. It hasn't been all that long since the last time we heard from him, was it? Now in nature.com we get a dose of Rusi Taleyarkhan's latest stab at making desktop fusion a reality, which really amounts to a press release for an upcoming article he's managed to get into the peer-reviewed journal, Physical Review Letters. But just how peer-reviewed? UCLA physicist Seth Putterman, himself something of an expert in the field, wondered out loud why neither he nor University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign physicist Ken Suslick were invited to review the submission prior to publication.

Taleyarkhan says that Suslick and Putterman are welcome to visit his lab to see the results for themselves. Both are eager to go as soon as possible. "We look forward to seeing the experiment run," says Putterman.

Update 1/12: Some good discussion (and some not-so-good discussion) at Slashdot.

Let's Try This Again: Spiked On Kunstler

Okay, so maybe what I should have said is that my posting's going to get ever more infrequent, but I did want to share Joe Kaplinsky's Spiked review of Kunstler's The Long Emergency:

The deeper theme of The Long Emergency is not oil so much as human powerlessness. The projection of all the products of human resourcefulness on to fossil fuels is only one example of this. Another example is disease. Kunstler relates the now standard warning about a flu pandemic, whose impact he says will be magnified by its coincidence with peak oil. But in telling the story of the 1918 outbreak it becomes clear that for Kunstler influenza becomes not just a threat but a moving force in human history. Apparently it was not people who were responsible for the outcome of the struggles for new societies in Russia and Germany - it was a virus.

...

His underlying argument about human powerlessness [...] cannot stand. In abolishing old problems, progress brings new problems. How could it not? The new problems can sometimes appear larger than the old, existing on a global scale. But this just arises from human society operating on a global scale, which carries with it the benefits of global cooperation, trade and travel. History shows that exchanging older problems for newer, sometimes greater, ones has been a good bargain.

...

This question assumes overwhelming significance for Kunstler because he seems to believe we must fail. A more reasoned approach balances it against two other questions. What if we succeed? Everything worthwhile in human culture and civilisation has come from such successes. What if we do not try?

Kaplinsky falls down in his analysis by relying on IEA estimates of oil consumption and demand, which we now know are hopelessly wrong. But his broader points are mostly on the mark. When Shell announces a cellulosic ethanol study for Germany, we have to take seriously the idea that new ideas are taking root, and people are very aware of the potential hazards ahead.

Okay, Well, Mostly:Background On The Sago Mine Collapse

I still have the same opinions as expressed in the last post, but I did for some unknown reason want to share this fascinating DailyKos diary about the Sago Mine collapse. He gets into thin ice when he starts talking about why the mine collapsed (but admits as much), but the background is worth reading.