Peak Oil Optimist

And So, Good Night

2010-05-23T20:43:00.000-07:00

I haven't blogged on any topic here in quite some time. This is a combination of fear and disinterest; this is a cobweblog from here out. Good night.

An Interesting Interview With Dick Weir Of EEStor

2009-07-22T07:45:00.000-07:00

GreenLiving has Yahoo video (not video, but all audio) of an interview with Dick Weir of EEStor, in what has to be the longest interview I've ever seen him do. Weir is claiming production in 2010 now; he's missed important deadlines before, so let your skepticism be your guide there. He also addresses (or claims to) a long-form post at TheEEStory.com outlining why the paramagnetic phase of the proposed barium titanate dielectric cannot do what he says.

Rick Nebel On The Limited Results

2009-02-13T10:41:00.000-08:00

For what it's worth:

Here's what we know and what we don't know:
1. We don't have the spatial resolution of the density to see if the cusps are quasi-neutral on the WB-7
2. In one-D simulations the plasma edge (which corresponds to the cusp regions) is not quasi-neutral. Therefore, if the cusps are quasi-neutral it must be a multidimensional effect.
3. Energy confinement on the WB-7 exceeds the classical predictions (wiffleball based on the electron gyro-radius) by a large factor.
Our conclusion is that both the wiffleball and the cusp recycle are working at a reasonable level.

Also getting press elsewhere (Glenn Reynolds among others).

Hugo Chavez Changes His Mind

2009-01-16T22:59:00.000-08:00

Hahahaha:

President Hugo Chávez, buffeted by falling oil prices that threaten to damage his efforts to establish a Socialist-inspired state, is quietly courting Western oil companies once again.
Until recently, Mr. Chávez had pushed foreign oil companies here into a corner by nationalizing their oil fields, raiding their offices with tax authorities and imposing a series of royalties increases.
But faced with the plunge in prices and a decline in domestic production, senior officials have begun soliciting bids from some of the largest Western oil companies in recent weeks — including Chevron, Royal Dutch/Shell and Total of France — promising them access to some of the world’s largest petroleum reserves, according to energy executives and industry consultants here.
Their willingness to even consider investing in Venezuela reflects the scarcity of projects open to foreign companies in other top oil nations, particularly in the Middle East.

Mark Goldes, Where Are You?

2008-12-24T10:08:00.000-08:00

Because your ultraconductors still haven't shown up.

How would you like your crow served?

EEStor's New Patent

2008-12-22T07:38:00.000-08:00

There's so much noise — Slashdot, at The EEStory, gm-volt.com, and EEStor Ultracapacitors — that it's hard to understand the major issues being bruited in the new U.S. Patent (7466536B1) filed recently by EEStor. Perhaps the most interesting part of this comes in this The EEStory discussion thread about the patent. This post in particular interests me (all lower-case typing is a direct quote):

i found it interesting that the patent describes taking the alumina and PET materials down to -150 degrees C! i'm no expert, but i doubt seriously that's a common practice. that's very cold.
maybe that's the magic fairy dust everyone has missed -- the use of extremely cold temperatures to modify the property of the materials in order to make this seeming violation of physics work.
i've been following eestor for years now and i don't think they've done it, but i do find the mention of ultra cold temperatures used in manufacturing very, very, very interesting. is the low temperature something that would have been done in weir's previous career in hard drives?
as others have said, r. weir is either one of the boldest liars out there or he's an extremely shrewd inventor.

We still, of course, don't even have a demonstration unit released, and there's plenty of good reason to be skeptical. But if they're liars, they're certainly keeping their mouths awfully closed, an awfully long time. It's entirely possible that there were design problems they assumed they could skate past that have proven more problematic than they first thought. It may not ever work, but that is not the same thing as a scam.

Well, It's Something: Polywell Review Panel Gives Thumbs-Up

2008-12-16T19:57:00.000-08:00

From Alan Boyle's Cosmic Log blog, the panel reviewing the results of Dr. Nebel's recent Polywell work:

An EMC2 team headed by Los Alamos researcher Richard Nebel (who's on leave from his federal lab job) picked up the baton from Bussard and tried to duplicate the results. The team has turned in its final report, and it's been double-checked by a peer-review panel, Nebel told me today. Although he couldn't go into the details, he said the verdict was positive.
"There's nothing in there that suggests this will not work," Nebel said. "That's a very different statement from saying that it will work."
By and large, the EMC2 results fit Bussard's theoretical predictions, Nebel said. That could mean Polywell fusion would actually lead to a power-generating reaction. But based on the 10-month, shoestring-budget experiment, the team can't rule out the possibility that a different phenomenon is causing the observed effects.
"If you want to say something absolutely, you have to say there's no other explanation," Nebel said. The review board agreed with that conservative assessment, he said.
The good news, from Nebel's standpoint, is that the WB-7 experiment hasn't ruled out the possibility that Polywell fusion could actually serve as a low-cost, long-term energy solution. "If this thing was absolutely dead in the water, we would have found out," he said.

Polywell Gets Another Crack?

2008-10-30T12:06:00.000-07:00

A couple contracts would make it appear that the Navy has decided to pursue Robert Bussard's Polywell design. M. Simon has more at Power And Control.

Update: Apparently stay-alive funding until the Navy decides what to do.

Administrivia: Fixing Archive Links

2008-10-20T17:26:00.001-07:00

Archive link pages on the sidebar are s-l-o-w-l-y getting fixed. I know, I haven't posted in months, but that much less impetus to fix it ... there have been a couple stories about EEStor that have interested me recently, but I'm actively ignoring this blog, mostly.

Purdue Panel Finds Misconduct By Taleyarkhan

2008-07-19T11:57:00.000-07:00

Well, this isn't good:

The Purdue committee, which includes representatives from other schools, said that in a follow-up paper published in 2006 in Physical Review Letters, Taleyarkhan falsely claimed that his 2002 work had been independently confirmed.
The panel also found that in a pair of 2005 papers, Taleyarkhan added another person as an author even though that researcher did not substantially contribute.
...
"From small beginnings there developed a tangled web of wishful thinking, scientific misjudgment, institutional lapses and human failings," the committee wrote. "Each strand could have been resolved separately, but knitting them together produced a crisis."

Lockheed Mumbles Something About EEStor

2008-01-22T17:59:00.000-08:00

Lockheed Martin supposedly has signed an agreement with EEStor to deliver products, though the former company won't admit to having seen even so much as a prototype. Delivery is supposed to be at the end of the year. More: the article says that the ZENN car company is expecting production modules by mid-year. We'll see.

R.A. Nebel On Plasma Calculations

2008-01-17T22:45:00.000-08:00

R.A. Nebel writes in the comments section of the MSNBC thread:

In general, some types of plasma theories work pretty well and others not so well. Plasma theories work pretty well for calculating equilibria and global stability. Transport calculations and kinetic calculations are considerably more suspect. The thing that raises the red flags about the collisionality calculations is that when you look at the Chacon work he sees a big difference between square potential wells (as assumed by Nevins) and parabolic potential wells. I would not have expected that result, and that tells me that none of these results are truly "generic". I think this issue has to be resolved experimentally. That's not to imply that these calculations have no value. What they do tell you is that collisions on the boundary are beneficial (they remove angular momentum) while collisions in the core can be a problem. This, of course, was known by Bussard and Krall a long time ago. It's also possible to affect these collision rates by techniques like gas puffing into the boundary (i.e. introducing neutrals).
Also, I would like to thank M Simon, TallDave and their fellow bloggers for their continued interest in this technology. We appreciate that a great deal, but as you might imagine we have been a little too busy to communicate very much with the on-line people.

It makes you wonder just how much could be accomplished with computers, or how little.

First Plasma In Los Alamos

2008-01-10T23:23:00.000-08:00

It's really hard what to know what to say about this (MSNBC). I hope for the best. It's not nearly enough. It may never be. I keep my fingers crossed.

Update 1/11: Corrected the title to reflect reality (s/Fusion/Plasma/).

A Useful BS Detector Kit

2008-01-04T10:26:00.000-08:00

In the absence of useful and/or hopeful news, I stumbled onto a thread a few days ago at talk-polywell.org in which the topic of discussion was alleged ultraconductors, discovered and named by one Dr. Leonid Grigorov, Ph.D., Dc.S, formerly of the Polymer Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences. This led to the discovery that the company in the U.S. hyperbolically claiming to be on the verge of commercializing this remarkable discovery is also one and the same as Magnetic Power, Inc., another of the zero-point energy loons. One of the useful things I did find, however, was a post in the Skeptics Society Forum detailing a useful BS detector kit, proffered by someone who claimed to work for venture capital. As a service to my reader(s?), I reproduce it forthwith:

I spent a lot of years in and around the venture capital industry. We developed our own baloney detection kits, tuned to use business plans and web sites to protect us from garbage businesses.

Here are some questions, cribbed from that kit:
1) Give me an authentic provenance to the idea. Show me the small steps others have made leading up to it.
2) Does it already have legitimate VC funding? (Military money is notoriously dumb, so it doesn't count.)
3) To whom does the principal give his or her time? (I would be much happier to see the AAAS than the American Antigravity folks: see http://groups.yahoo.com/group/americana ... message/64.)
4) Show me a credible reference client with a real application.
5) If you can't show me a reference client, show me a working prototype. If it's on the verge of being commercialized, it must be working somewhere ... in a house, in a car, in a flashlight, in an iPod. Show me! You have to know I will bring a plague of experts to bear on this prototype, so it had better be GOOD.
6) What is the history of ideas of the principals? What else are they involved in? (Zero Point Energy and energy from magnets are very, very bad signs. http://www.zpenergy.com/modules.php?nam ... e&sid=1357)
7) Look at the language. Is the development always "on the verge" of being ready? Is the "establishment" always "wrong", and the principal always right? Do they make the "Chinese market" logical fallacy? (Read "Art of the Start" ... not enough space here.) Watch out for firms that miss "whopper deadlines" (http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/000045.html) by a mile.
8) Show me peer-reviewed papers and presentations at mainstream scientific conferences by the principals. Better yet, show me serious scientists who respond to these papers. Papers by other people on collateral topics don't count. A paper on ZPE is not the same as a paper outlining an industrial process to capture it.
9) Give me reproducibility. I won't look at a company with "secret processes"; if you can't show me how someone else can do it, I won't even get up from my desk.
10) Give me competitors. If one person can do it, so can someone else. If one person is working on it now, you can bet two or three others are, too. You are defined by the quality of your cometitors, so the competitors had better look good to the baloney kit. If you compete with Boeing (even in a minor way), I am impressed. If you compete with Johann Bessler, I am much less impressed.

R-Squared's Top Energy Stories

2007-12-24T16:16:00.000-08:00

Of course, my favorite on the list is number 10:

10. US Navy funds Bussard Fusion

I think you have to include the US Navy funding Bussard Fusion in there:

http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?F=3139619&C=navwar

Bussard died a couple months ago. I had really given up on fusion, but his work actually appears to have a reasonable change to work. Hopefully with more funding his team will be able to make it work.

Yes, Dr. Bussard's work will be carried on. First step is to construct WB-7 and replicate the results achieved with WB-6. Hopefully by the end of April 2008. If that works, then on to WB-8, and then an actual power generating plant.

Number 25 is also pretty interesting:

25. Cooper Pairs in insulators

http://www.aip.org/pnu/2007/split/849-1.html

One of the AIP's top stories of the year, this discovery may well help us reach a better understanding of superconductivity and insulators both. Superconductivity is of course a holy grail in energy research, and while this discovery doesn't directly lead to a room temp superconductor, it does add to the fundamental knowledge of material in the solid state.

Read the whole thing. It's good stuff.

Interesting Bussard Obit In The New Mexican

2007-12-23T14:04:00.000-08:00

From the comments in a prior post, Power And Control points to an obituary of Robert Bussard in The New Mexican.

March to May. It's no overstatement to say, as M. Simon does, that "Civilization depends on it."

First Product Rolls Off Nanosolar Manufacturing Line

2007-12-21T14:39:00.000-08:00

News.com has the news of Nanosolar producing their first product ever, which would be a big piece of news right there. (Also at the Nanosolar Blog.) They claim $0.99/watt, which would be an unheard of price for solar. I've had my doubts about the company for a long time considering the hoopla, but if they're actually starting to deliver, well, hooray.

Congress Garrotes ITER

2007-12-19T08:16:00.001-08:00

Zero dollar budget. Sometimes, you just don't know what to say. (Via IEC Fusion Technology.)

BASF Patent For Barium Titanate Ultracapacitor

2007-12-12T14:19:00.000-08:00

I wish I could recall where I saw this, but it sure is interesting. In addition to EEStor, BASF has filed for a patent on a barium titanate ultracapacitor design, number 7,023,687 filed on April 4, 2006. It will be interesting to see which, if any, of these competing designs ever make it to market. The more I read of EEStor (or, perhaps more accurately, the less I read, for they're notoriously quiet and quietly slipping behind schedule), the less inclined I am to believe they'll ever deliver a working product.

Update 12/17: A lot of interesting and heated discussion at Clean Break about this, including an anonymous commenter who claims that energy stored is proportional to ½cV for non-linear dielectrics (which barium titanate supposedly is) rather than ½cV² for linear dielectrics. One sign — and I agree — we should look for is an actual lab measurement of the properties they believe they can meet. Supposedly this is done in WIPO patent WO/2006/026136. Judging by the tone and arguments raised, it appears the same Anonymous (who may have been a former Maxwell Corp. employee) has been busy recently on Boing Boing as well.

Tad Patzek Joins The Doomers

2007-12-11T13:43:00.000-08:00

Here (PDF):

I argue that with the current set of objective constraints a continuous stable solution to human life cannot exist in the near-future, unless we all rapidly implement much more limited ways of using the Earth’s resources, while reducing the global populations of cars, trucks, livestock and, eventually, also humans.

You first, Tad.

Another IEC Fusion Company: Fusion Power Generation

2007-12-11T13:16:00.000-08:00

A couple of Columbia grads are having a go at IEC fusion under the name Fusion Power Generation, and they're looking for funding. (Aren't we all?) Alex Klein used to work at EMC2; the meat of his approach can be found on their Q & A page:

9. What is different about our approach?
- By adding a particular type of magnetic field to a traditional spherical IEC machine, using a shaped electromagnet which doubles as the accelerating cathode, we are able to dramatically lower the losses of energetic ions that limit the efficiency of traditional designs.
- The magnetic field confines electrons to the reaction region at the center of the machine; electrons enter via secondary emission from the electromagnet itself. The electrons bulk-neutralize the positive charge of the ions, and allow the ions to converge to very high densities at the center: the density can be increased by a factor of 10,000 or more over conventional IEC devices.
- The magnetic field also creates space charge lenses at the openings of the electromagnet so-called magnetic mirrors, which in turn serve to continually refocus beams of ions as they pass in and out of the core. The focusing action can be made to exactly counteract the effect of Coulomb collisions between particles, and ions can re-circulate on stable orbits thousands of times through the device without colliding with a material structure, preventing the loss of energy that limits the efficiency of conventional machines. In this way the density will be greatly increased while the input power to the device will be reduced over conventional IEC machines.
- Both effects will help solve the problems that have limited previous IEC experiments' performance.
- With higher densities, electrons and ions can arrange themselves in alternating layers of positive and negative charge, forming "virtual electrodes" that can result in yet higher densities of ions at the center of the machine, and a trapped ion population that never intersects any material structure. Evidence for this effect has previously been observed in operating IEC machine.
- The addition of a small radio frequency modulation of the cathode voltage will drive trapped ions to converge simultaneously at megahertz rates in the very center of the machine at high energies, provided a harmonic electric potential can be maintained inside the cathode, an effect called POPS (Periodically Oscillating Plasma Sphere) that has been documented in previous IEC experiments.
- Pulsed operation will potentially raise the fusion rate still further.
- We have plans to extract ions which have developed non-ideal orbits at low energy, thus substantially increasing the energy confinement time and further raising efficiency.

Good luck, guys. (Hat tip: jumartinez at talk-polywell.org.)

Followup: Global Resource Corp.

2007-11-02T13:59:00.000-07:00

With respect to an earlier story about Global Resource Corp., a company that claimed to have a means to convert plastic to crude oil: here's a post from a broker who seems to have lost his appetite for that company. Reading GRC's most recent 10-K should give you pause to consider; the chain of companies runs from EmailMortgage.com to Advance Medical Technologies Inc. to Carbon Recovery Corporation to the current configuration; and all of these have interlocking boards with no outsiders on them. Eww.

An "Earthquake" At The IEA

2007-10-31T20:39:00.000-07:00

I don't like writing about oil much, but this amounts to the IEA hitting the panic button. Years too late, but ...

LONDON: The rapidly growing appetite for fossil fuels in China and India is likely to help keep oil prices high for the foreseeable future - threatening a global economic slowdown, a top energy expert said Wednesday.
The unusually stark warning by Fatih Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Agency, about the impact of Asia's emerging giants comes as the agency prepares to issue its influential annual report next week, which will focus on China and India.
In preparing the report, Birol said he had experienced "an earthquake" in his thinking.
"China plus India are going to dominate growth in the oil markets," Birol said during an interview at an oil industry conference. During the past 18 months, he noted, more than two-thirds of the growth in global oil demand came from China and India alone.
Demand for oil in China, he added, would eventually equal the entire supply from Saudi Arabia.
Partly as a result, he added, the annual report would predict that oil prices, now at about $93 a barrel, could remain at levels much higher than thought possible in the past. This, he said, heightened the risk of a serious global economic slowdown.
"We may see very high prices that will come to a level where the wheels may fall off," Birol said. "I definitely believe that if prices stay at these levels, there will be a slowdown of the global economy."

Navy Funds EMC2 Efforts

2007-10-30T16:01:00.000-07:00

Via Power And Control, the Navy is funding EMC2 Corp. to find out whether Bussard's claims about the WB-6 unit were correct, to the tune of $2M. The Defense News article's physics are a bit off, though:

Bussard received nearly $2 million under a U.S. Navy contract in August to continue work on an inertial electrostatic confinement reactor he had developed. The reactor uses magnetic fields to confine electrons, whose negative charge causes protons and Boron 11 atoms to fuse. The fusion sets off a chain of reactions that produces electricity.

The electrons actually get in the way of the process (see brehmsstrahlung radiation).

New (To Me) Blog: Energy From Thorium

2007-10-22T15:25:00.000-07:00

Now on the sidebar.

What To Do With Those Neutrons? Part 2, Neutron Effects

2007-10-16T21:11:00.000-07:00

Interesting citation here indicating that "[f]ew previous studies have shown measurable effects on the mechanical properties of HY-80 steel if irradiation levels are below 1x10¹⁷n/cm²." Nevertheless, it it would be useful to see what kind of radioactive changes the neutrons might induce in said steel. Using the wise-uranium.org calculator, for fast neutrons bombarding 1 kg stainless for a year, we get the following (slightly reformatted):

Neutron flux = 647.0e9  per cm2s
Irradiation = 1 a;  Delay = 0 h 
 
    Original      Reaction      Activation       Half-
    Nuclide                     & Decay (~>)     Life
                                Products

710.0 g Iron:
          Fe-54    (n,3n) ->           Fe-52    (8.275 h)
                                    ~> Mn-52m   (21.40 m)
                                    ~> Mn-52    (5.592 d)
          Fe-54    (n,p)  ->           Mn-54    (312.7 d)
          Fe-54    (n,t)  ->           Mn-52    (5.592 d)
          Fe-54    (n,A)  ->           Cr-51    (27.70 d)
          Fe-56    (n,2n) ->           Fe-55    (2.700 a)
          Fe-56    (n,p)  ->           Mn-56    (2.578 h)
          Fe-56    (n,t)  ->           Mn-54    (312.7 d)
          Fe-57    (n,3n) ->           Fe-55    (2.700 a)
          Fe-57    (n,p)  ->           Mn-57    (1.470 m)
          Fe-58    (n,t)  ->           Mn-56    (2.578 h)

190.0 g Chromium:
          Cr-50    (n,2n) ->           Cr-49    (42.09 m)
                                    ~> V-49     (330.0 d)
          Cr-50    (n,t)  ->           V-48     (15.97 d)
          Cr-52    (n,2n) ->           Cr-51    (27.70 d)
          Cr-52    (n,p)  ->           V-52     (3.750 m)
          Cr-53    (n,3n) ->           Cr-51    (27.70 d)
          Cr-54    (n,t)  ->           V-52     (3.750 m)
          Cr-54    (n,A)  ->           Ti-51    (5.750 m)

100.0 g Nickel:
          Ni-58    (n,2n) ->           Ni-57    (1.503 d)
                                    ~> Co-57    (270.9 d)
 
          Ni-58    (n,3n) ->           Ni-56    (6.099 d)
                                    ~> Co-56    (78.77 d)
          Ni-58    (n,p)  ->           Co-58    (70.81 d)
          Ni-58    (n,t)  ->           Co-56    (78.77 d)
          Ni-58    (n,A)  ->           Fe-55    (2.700 a)
          Ni-60    (n,2n) ->           Ni-59    (75.00e3 a)
          Ni-60    (n,p)  ->           Co-60    (5.271 a)
          Ni-60    (n,t)  ->           Co-58    (70.81 d)
          Ni-61    (n,3n) ->           Ni-59    (75.00e3 a)
          Ni-61    (n,p)  ->           Co-61    (1.650 h)
          Ni-62    (n,t)  ->           Co-60    (5.271 a)
          Ni-62    (n,A)  ->           Fe-59    (44.64 d)
          Ni-64    (n,2n) ->           Ni-63    (100.1 a)

There's a fair number of short-lived isotopes there, which usually means you'll end up with a mess of radioactivity. I'm still working on calculating all the decay products.

A very cranky, opinionated look at this was on talk-polywell, but I missed it earlier.

Update 10/18: Back to our 1 GW reference case, this means radiated power from fast neutrons (just the ¹¹B + α reaction) ends up as

7.3x10¹⁷ neutrons/s * 2.7x10⁶ MeV/neutron * 1.602x10^-19 J/eV = 316 kW

M. Simon suggested that a 500 MW Polywell device would throw off 5 kW of neutrons. I'm not sure how he derives that figure, but I'll ask.

Robert Bussard Passes

2007-10-12T14:49:00.000-07:00

Via Slashdot. Also at New Energy And Fuel and Power And Control. I'm speechless.

What To Do With Those Neutrons?

2007-10-11T09:08:00.000-07:00

One problem bugging me about so-called aneutronic fusion is the large numbers of neutrons it actually would produce in practice. To illustrate this, let's go back to an earlier post I wrote about a hypothetical 1GW commercial fusion reactor. Remembering that 1 GW = 1 GJ/s

1 GJ/s / (8.6x10⁶ eV/reaction * 1.602x10^-19 J/eV) = 7.3x10²⁰ reactions/s

Per Wikipedia, 0.1% of all fusion reactions would end up creating a neutron anyway from the ¹¹B + α side reaction. (Update 10/17: This ends up being a 2.7 MeV neutron, well over the threshold of a fast neutron, at 1 MeV.) This means that 7.3x10¹⁷ neutrons/s will be generated from the most widely discussed "aneutronic" fuel out there! That's a simply enormous number. Contrast this with reported background radiation at 2,420m above sea level of 65±3 neutrons/cm²*h. (I'm still trying to come up with a neutron flux figure for a commercial fission reactor.) But assuming a completed ICF device is something like 3m (rounding up a bit) in approximate diameter, and that neutrons are sprayed uniformly (this may not be a good assumption), that means you now have to deal with

4*π*(3m)²*1x10⁴cm²/m²*7.3x10¹⁷n/s = 6.46x10¹¹ n/cm²*s

In a fission reactor, you can use regular water to moderate those neutrons. But what do you do with a fusion reactor?

Coming soon in part 2: how this will affect the parts of the fusor itself thanks to this neutron activation calculator.

Update 10/15: A much better nuclide decay calculator at BNL.gov. "Nuclear Wallet Cards Search" seems almost designed to be impenetrable to Google.

New Sidebar Links, And The Determinism Of Pessimism

2007-10-01T16:29:00.000-07:00

Three new sidebar links (and some culling of older ones, which I didn't document): IEC Fusion Technology, itself an offshoot of Power And Control, which I linked to about a month ago; and Talk-Polywell, which mostly is a bunch of guys praying Robert Bussard is right and Todd Rider is wrong.

On this subject, FuturePundit recently ran a piece about the former chairman of Shell, Lord Oxburgh, admitting peak oil production will occur within the next 20 years. What was interesting was the ensuing comments section, and in particular, Paul Dietz' comments about Bussard's reactor:

It cannot prevent electron-ion interactions. Let me run you through the argument to illustrate the two horns of the dilemma.
Polywell has a putative central interaction region where the ions are energetic and are to undergo nuclear reactions. This interaction region CANNOT exclude electrons. If it did (assuming it even could), the space charge of the ions would limit the ion density to a low value, preventing anywhere close to practical (let alone the promised 100 MW!) power levels.
So, there are electrons in this region. There are two possibilities: the electrons have energies approaching those of the ions ('hot' electrons) or the electrons are significantly less energetic ('cold' electrons).
In the first case, bremsstrahlung power exceeds fusion power.
In the second case, the rate of energy transfer from the ions to the electrons greatly exceeds fusion power. This power would have to be recovered and reinjected with extremely high efficiency. Rider's thesis, IIRC, showed that if the electron temperature were half that of the ions, the recirculating power would exceed the fusion power by a couple of orders of magnitude.
These two cases overlap; in the intermediate energy case both occur.

Re-reading Todd Rider's doctoral thesis "Fundamental limitations on fusion systems not in equilibrium" (note to self: link off the Polywell Wikipedia page — the damn thing keeps moving), it seems a complex net of impossibilities. Want to use a magnetic trap to keep electrons away from the ions? Then you induce synchrotron radiation. And then there's the thermalization problem, which, as far as I can understand it, means the ions will need so much energy to keep them inside the device that, unless you're very very efficient about getting them back in, you'll lose them to the outside of the box before they have a chance to fuse.

Rider, of course, seems to have gone on to become a biomedical researcher, a choice maybe not surprising considering the hopelessness invested in his doctoral dissertation. Maybe he's right, but I do have to ask a hopefully useful question: what was the role of his thesis advisor was in drawing those conclusions? Overseeing Rider's project was Lawrence Lidsky, a long-time MIT fusion researcher who wrote a seminal 1983 paper entitled, "The Trouble With Fusion". Despairing of ever surmounting the engineering challenges, he gave up on fusion altogether, and one wonders just how much that colored Rider's research and paper.

Contradicting Rider: "Maxwell Don't Live Here" claims to have a bunch of answers to why IEC fusion could actually work, bolstered by some recent research at MIT.

EEStor's Ultracapacitor That Isn't (Just Yet?)

2007-09-13T11:07:00.000-07:00

I'll start with this January, 2007 piece at MIT's Technology Review that breathlessly announced EEStor's ultracapacitor; there was recently an AP piece about U.S. Patent 7,033,406, which claimed to cover the thing. The big advance claimed is a huge increase in permittivity even in cold weather and at high voltages, something others in the field say has not been done with years of research invested. Now it looks like they're delaying product shipment until 2008. Hm...

Salt Water As Fuel?

2007-09-11T15:24:00.001-07:00

Oncology researcher John Kanzius pointed a microwave at salt water and got a whole mess of hydrogen:

Mr. Kanzius' discovery was an accident.
He developed the RF generator as a novel cancer treatment. His research in targeting cancer cells with metallic nanoparticles then destroying them with radio-frequency is proceeding at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and at the University of Texas' MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
Manuscripts updating the cancer research are in preparation for publication in coming months, Mr. Kanzius said.
While Mr. Kanzius was demonstrating how his generator heated nanoparticles, someone noted condensation inside the test tube and suggested he try using his equipment to desalinate water.
So, Mr. Kanzius said, he put sea water in a test tube, then trained his machine on it, producing an unexpected spark. In time he and laboratory owners struck a match and ignited the water, which continued burning as long as it remained in the radio-frequency field.
During several trials, heat from burning hydrogen grew hot enough to melt the test tube, he said. Dr. Roy's tests on the machine last week provided further evidence that the process is releasing and burning hydrogen from the water. Tests on different water solutions and concentrations produced various temperatures and flame colors.

Almost certainly this is an energetic dead end; you don't get something for nothing in this universe, and what I suspect they'll find is that energy in from the microwave source equals energy out in H₂ and O₂ gas.

More On Thorium Fission Reactors

2007-09-11T09:26:00.000-07:00

New Energy And Fuel (that's two links in two days!) has an interesting article that links to a piece at Accelerating Future discussing a potential energy source with some promise, thorium fission reactors. Thorium's benefits as an energy source over uranium are manifold: it's more plentiful and thus should be expected to be cheap when mined in quantity, and absent a source of neutrons, won't go supercritical on its own. Of course, that's also a significant drawback, as the real problem with thorium is that its decay chain doesn't produce neutrons, and so the reaction has to be constantly pumped. Nevertheless, an interesting idea.

Bussard Gets Another Round Of Funding?

2007-09-10T18:09:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure what to make of this thread at talk-polywell.org citing an August 23 post at Power And Control indicating that Robert Bussard's inertial containment Polywell fusion device has been funded; that post itself points to a lengthier New Energy And Fuel post with more details. I'm hopeful but Bussard has himself confessed to misleading people before for the purpose of getting more money for other projects he feels promising. Nevertheless, since this is his pony (and there's talk he's in failing health), it's pretty certain he's going to ride this one. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Pointing And Laughing Time: Electron Power Systems

2007-09-03T09:35:00.000-07:00

Not for real. Check out also the creation timestamp on the page (05/05/2003 07:49:52 AM) versus the current date at the top of the page, generated thanks to your local clock on your client. Sneaky. At least they're cheap scamsters: they only want $2 million for their seed money...

No Immediate Miracles: Nanosolar Executive Shakeup

2007-07-24T19:58:00.000-07:00

Kinda old, but I stumbled across this one: looks like chief scientist Chris Eberspacher has bailed, something CEO Martin Roscheisen has tried to downplay.

Plastics To Oil, Via Microwave

2007-07-02T23:31:00.000-07:00

Via Slashdot, a New Scientist ($) piece about Global Resource Corp., which appears to have perfected and commercialized a process for converting plastic back into the oil (and gas, and other hydrocarbons) from which it came. The website is full of the usual broad promises ("we now possess the technology that will free America from foreign oil imports"), but as with the folks at Changing World Technology, it might make for an interesting means to clean up auto fluff and some of the other debris in landfills.

Hugo Chavez: Give Up Your "Extra" Possessions

2007-06-12T13:09:00.000-07:00

Hugo Chavez orders his followers to give up their "extra" possessions, leading me to wonder who gets to decide what is "extra".

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez told his supporters to give away possessions they do not need such as an extra refrigerator because he only wants true socialists to be members of a new single party he is forming.
"Whoever has a fridge they do not need, put it out in the village square. Whoever has a truck, a fan or a cooker they do not need, give something away. Let's not be selfish. I demand you do it," Chavez said at a milk producing cooperative, in remarks released on Monday.
Chavez, who calls capitalism an evil, said he would donate $250,000 of his own money and added, "Let's see who follows the example."
The anti-U.S. president who calls Cuban leader Fidel Castro his mentor denies he is turning the OPEC nation of avid consumers into another communist state as his critics say.
But since coming to power in 1999, Chavez has proposed increasingly radical steps to drive Venezuela toward a socialist state and, after a landslide re-election late last year, he declared himself for the first time a communist.

This is just old-style totalitarianism, and it will end the same way. Venezuela has oil (for now), and the means therefore to cover over his mistakes. But it can't go on indefinitely.

Another Sidebar Update: R-Squared

2007-05-15T08:01:00.000-07:00

I'm still around and reading, so while this blog is largely dormant in terms of new content, I'm still maintaining the blogroll on the right. It's hardly a new blog, but Robert Rapier's R-Squared Energy Blog has some insightful contents, including yesterday's guest post about the unfortunate and serious problems with algal biodiesel being any sort of near-term cavalry to rescue us from our energy straits. We appear to agree on the side effects of peak oil: industrial civilization will not collapse, sorry James Kunstler. He also seems to have the same problem with primitivist trolls that I have had earler. (You'll have to scroll down, as his blogging template doesn't [yet] get page anchors right.)

On a related note, Rapier shows up in the comments of this Wall Street Journal Energy Roundup post relaying a fascinating and all-too-sadly-mundane report at The Oil Drum indicating that the Saudis may have inadvertently published data showing that their biggest field, Ghawar, has hit peak production and has been sliding downhill since 2004.

Congress Investigates Taleyarkhan

2007-05-11T16:44:00.000-07:00

I knew that Rusi Taleyarkhan's claims of vindication were overwrought. Purdue University is pursuing a new investigation:

Three months after it cleared him of research misconduct, Purdue University has begun a new inquiry into a professor who claims to have generated nuclear fusion in a desktop experiment, the university acknowledged yesterday.
The new inquiry goes beyond the focus of an earlier one, which looked at whether the professor, Rusi P. Taleyarkhan, improperly omitted himself as an author on two scientific papers. For the first time, a committee is examining whether the underlying research might have been fraudulent.
Meanwhile, details of the earlier inquiry have emerged in a report by a Congressional subcommittee that reviewed Purdue’s actions. Although the earlier inquiry cleared Dr. Taleyarkhan of misconduct, it described “what might be characterized most favorably as severe lack of judgment” and said he had “abused his privilege as senior scientist,” according to the report from the Congressional subcommittee.
Dr. Taleyarkhan said last night in an e-mail message that the subcommittee’s report represents “a gross travesty of justice.” He asked, “Where are the Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons of the Asian community during this episode that has caused this biased and openly one-sided smear campaign?”

If other groups not associated with Taleyarkhan had been able to reproduce his work, we wouldn't be reading about this in the New York Times. The congressional subcommittee produced a memo that called the Purdue investigation inadequate, saying "the inquiry was not thorough and that the inquiry committee appeared to ignore the university’s definition of research misconduct", something I thought when I looked at how narrow its scope was.

Yay! Oil For Everybody!

2007-04-30T08:11:00.001-07:00

The SEC may be thinking about changing the way reserves are booked ($), according to the Wall Street Journal. Given the Bush Administration's proclivities, I have to wonder what kind of shenanigans are about to go on.

Updated SEC standards could mean that billions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas may finally make it onto balance sheets, sparking a revaluation of the sector.
Despite several major reviews and updated industry guidelines approved by the international Society of Petroleum Engineers, the World Petroleum Council and the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, the SEC has maintained the same reserve booking standards since the late 1970s.
But after nearly a decade of lobbying the SEC to modernize, to little avail, the industry may be beginning to see some changes, though insiders say a complete renovation of the rules may be too much to hope for yet.
One indication the Commission may be starting to budge from its hard and fast stance on rules is a recently posted notice on its Web site for applicants for a new, 12- to 18-month "Academic Petroleum Engineering Fellowship." Applying engineers must have "significant experience in petroleum reservoir engineering with expertise in petroleum reserve estimation" and "be familiar with modern analytical reservoir assessment methods."

One wonders whether this is a reaction to the Iraq war by pragmatists buried deep in the government; that oil isn't going to see daylight for a long, long time, and the war is lost, whether or not the lunatics in the White House want to admit it or not. Best to pull the wool over the shareholders' eyes one last time, maybe. Perhaps I'm being too cynical, especially without reading the proposed changes (which haven't even been made yet — all this reports is a "help wanted" ad attached to speculation). But a happy ending doesn't seem likely.

It's Only In The Lab, But... Recycling CO2

2007-04-26T18:18:00.000-07:00

Via Slashdot, a demonstration of CO₂ capture from the air. One interesting link from the comments in the Slashdot thread: UCSD researcher Clifford Kubiak has made gasoline out of CO₂. Kubiak figures actual commercial applications are ten years away. Recycle, reuse, re-something-or-other.

Bussard Wins More Funding (Or Not)

2007-04-23T13:26:00.001-07:00

The Navy has agreed to continue funding Robert Bussard's ICF fusion device. But that's the extent of the good news, as apparently it's much less than the $200M Bussard says he needs to really get the ball rolling; nonetheless, it's a start... or maybe not. This may well be just a false alarm.

Bussard finally put together a real website at emc2fusion.org, too, though it's really only a single page.

Via Slashdot.

Digging Their Own Graves

2007-04-17T07:57:00.000-07:00

Where they're going, the oil bidness doesn't need reserves ($):

Reserves are "still a valid measure, but they are harder to get a handle on than what they have been in the past," said Bruce Lanni, an analyst at A.G. Edwards who covers the largest oil companies. "It's a very important number, but you have to look beyond that."
In a conference call in January, ConocoPhillips Chief Executive Jim Mulva said the company expects reserve replacement to be "somewhat uneven" on a yearly basis, as major development projects take time to develop and resources become harder to access.
The company downgraded its 2006 reserves by 260 million barrels of oil equivalent because of technical difficulties in a Caspian oil field and North Sea fields. Conoco's 2006 reserve replacement was 300%, but that included the $35 billion acquisition of Burlington Resources. Discounting the Burlington deal, Conoco's 2006 reserve replacement would have been just 10% to 15%.

Green Car Congress has more on this based on a report from Energy Intelligence that shows global reserves just keeping up or slightly declining.

The main reason for the poor performance in growing reserves is a lack of additions to reserves from new discoveries, which account for 20% or less of additions in the last few years. The high oil prices and sharply increased upstream spending budgets of most oil companies have not yet provided any significant improvement in global additions to reserves, but more time may be needed, according to the publisher.

Thanks For The Link, WSJ

2007-03-09T07:25:00.000-08:00

Thanks for the mention, Wall Street Journal.

Kern County Fields Still A-Pumpin'

2007-03-07T21:19:00.000-08:00

... years after they were supposed to be shut down:

The Kern River oil field, discovered in 1899, was revived when Chevron engineers here started injecting high-pressured steam to pump out more oil. The field, whose production had slumped to 10,000 barrels a day in the 1960s, now has a daily output of 85,000 barrels.
In Indonesia, Chevron has applied the same technology to the giant Duri oil field, discovered in 1941, boosting production there to more than 200,000 barrels a day, up from 65,000 barrels in the mid-1980s.
And in Texas, Exxon Mobil expects to double the amount of oil it extracts from its Means field, which dates back to the 1930s. Exxon, like Chevron, will use three-dimensional imaging of the underground field and the injection of a gas — in this case, carbon dioxide — to flush out the oil.
Within the last decade, technology advances have made it possible to unlock more oil from old fields, and, at the same time, higher oil prices have made it economical for companies to go after reserves that are harder to reach. With plenty of oil still left in familiar locations, forecasts that the world’s reserves are drying out have given way to predictions that more oil can be found than ever before.

Of course, if this oil really is going to be here anytime soon, well, where is it?

Hat tip to MDMH vonPA for the word, and getting me to post the damn thing.

Administrivia: Labels

2007-02-19T14:25:00.000-08:00

The blog has been switched over to New Blogger, and thus labels are now provided for a few keywords I happen to find particularly interesting: iter, fusion, and sonofusion for now, providing a look backwards at those topics.

Taleyarkhan Back With A Pop

2007-02-19T14:09:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I'm stealing a bit of the New Scientist headline, but anyway, it looks like Rusi Taleyarkhan is claiming victory in his battle against charges of scientific fraud or incompentence, launched in 2002 by skeptics of his claims of creating sonofusion. Those charges were remade in 2006 by UCLA grad student Brian Naranjo, who suggested that the neutron flux Taleyarkhan was reading in fact came from improperly stored lab samples of californium. Purdue University investigated, and recently declared Taleyarkhan innocent in any wrongdoing. (Of course, this doesn't mean he isn't sloppy, and the neutrons did come from the californium.) The 2002 work has since been duplicated by Edward Forringer at LeTourneau University in Texas.

There's a much longer New York Times article on the subject with this additional material:

Critics of Dr. Taleyarkhan said other wording in the statement suggested that the university had disregarded concerns and accusations raised by non-Purdue scientists and instead had concentrated on one seemingly small issue: whether it was improper for the professor to have left his name off two scientific papers.
“The Purdue administration apparently narrowly focused the committee’s charge and avoided the question of whether the research was doctored,” said Kenneth S. Suslick, a chemistry professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The reason this is apparently important is because Taleyarkhan may have been playing fast and loose with credit in order to make it appear that the earlier alleged duplication of his results were fraudulent because the group that claimed to have reproduced them included, well, Taleyarkhan:

That appears to refer to a July 2005 announcement that two other Purdue scientists had also produced sonofusion. Dr. Taleyarkhan said this represented independent confirmation of his findings.
Others quickly questioned how independent the two scientists — Yiban Xu, a postdoctoral researcher, and Adam Butt, a graduate student — really were. Both were members of Dr. Taleyarkhan’s research group.
Dr. Taleyarkhan maintained that those experiments were performed in early 2004, before the two scientists joined his group, and that he had merely served as a consultant. (Mr. Butt did not join the group until May 2004 and did not participate in the taking of the data reported in the papers.)
Two scientific papers describing the results list Dr. Xu and Mr. Butt as authors, but not Dr. Taleyarkhan. Dr. Taleyarkhan is thanked in the acknowledgments.
If the scope of the inquiry was limited to whether it was unethical for Dr. Taleyarkhan to have left his name off the list of authors, “I guess I’m not overwhelmingly surprised that the committee decided ‘Not proved,’ ” Dr. Suslick said. “But that’s not the real issue.”

And old Taleyarkhan bête noir Seth Putterman returns to the scene:

In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, Dr. Suslick and Seth J. Putterman, a professor of physics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and another persistent critic of Dr. Taleyarkhan, said they had precisely repeated the 2002 experiment. They reported that they found none of the neutrons that would be the telltale sign of fusion and put the upper limit at just one-10,000th of what Dr. Taleyarkhan had reported.

Via Slashdot.

Update 3/2/07: Corrected the link to the NYT story above.

WSJ: Cheap Gas Worries Carmakers

2007-01-22T05:43:00.000-08:00

Who are you, and what have you done with Rick Wagoner?

"With the price of oil at its lowest level in 19 months, we run the risk of reverting back to our traditional energy policy," Mr. Wagoner said in a speech at the Automotive News World Congress in Dearborn, Mich., last week. "That is, relying on the lowest-cost energy available on world markets (including imported oil), without providing adequate support for developing alternative sources."

A Back-Of-The-Envelope Calculation

2006-11-29T08:12:00.000-08:00

I was reading Ron Bailey's comments on world energy which cites Daniel G. Nocera's Daedalus article in estimating global energy consumption at 102 TW in 2050. After paying the $10 for the full text, it turns out that Nocera gets his figure from the UNDP World Energy Assessment. Since a terawatt is a measure of energy per unit time (specifically, watts per second) that should come in at 3.22x10²¹ Joules, or 3.22 zetajoules, but the 2000 report suggests something more like 1.041 ZJ, which may be because of the confusion over peak versus average capacity.

Anyway, as a thought exercise, I figured it might be interesting to calculate how much boron such a scenario might be required to fuel all that consumption. From the Wikipedia entry on terrestrial fusion reactions:

8.6x10⁶ eV/atom • 6.02x10²³ atom/mol / 10.811x10^-3 kg/mol •
1.602x10^-19 J/eV = 76.7x10¹² J/kg

So that's almost eighty terajoules per kilogram of boron. Pretty sweet. Now, take a look at this:

1.041x10²¹ J / 76.7x10¹² J/kg = 13.6x10⁶ kg

or about 13,500 tonnes of boron annually. (Of course, this doesn't adjust for inefficiencies in the process; just as a guess, assume the whole process is something like 25% efficient, so consumption is more like 54 kt.) According to Roskill, the world is lately using 1.6 Mt of boron annually, which would ~~make this figure well within reach~~ hardly put a dent in world production.

Update 12/1/06: corrected for the error in Avogadro's number, which makes this look even more obscenely desirable. For a 1 GW power plant running at full capacity all year, that means

86400 s/day • 365.24 day/year • 1x10⁹ W = 31x10¹⁵ J
and
31x10¹⁵ J / 76.7x10¹² J/kg / .25 = 1.6 t

One and a half metric tonnes per year. Now I'm all full of boron-lust... can we just get to fusion... please?

Bussard Presents Another Fusion Device

2006-11-19T10:22:00.000-08:00

Via Slashdot, Robert Bussard gives a talk about his latest fusion device. He claims to have solved the Bremsstrahlung radiation problem by segregating electrons in a well of some sort while the ions react without them. Supposedly, he was successful in getting "several orders of magnitude" more fusion out of his device than previous inertial confinement fusion devices of its kind (i.e., the Farnsworth-Hirsch fusor. He's looking for $200 million in funding to build a larger device, of which the first $2-5M will be used to rebuild the machine damaged during the last test run.

GM... So, So Screwed

2006-09-28T16:14:00.000-07:00

Bob Lutz says GM needs more Hummers. If I'm a stockholder and I haven't run for the doors yet, I'm there now.

A New Way To Refine Uranium

2006-05-30T08:49:00.000-07:00

Australian scientists have come up with a way to refine uranium in a way that would conceivably halve production costs.

There are at present only two methods for sifting uranium atoms, or isotopes, to create the right mix. One, called diffusion, involves forcing uranium through filters. Being lighter, U-235 passes through more easily and is thus separated from its heavier counterpart. The second method, widely adopted in the 1970s, uses centrifuges to spin the heavier and lighter atoms apart.
Both, said Dr Goldsworthy, are "very crude. You have to repeat the process over and over," consuming enormous amounts of electricity. The spinning method requires "thousands and thousands of centrifuges".
The Lucas Heights team, working for Dr Goldsworthy's research company Silex (Separation of Isotopes by Laser Excitation), is the only one in the world developing a third technique that involves streaming uranium through lasers tuned to a frequency that only "sees" the U-235 atoms.
The lasers electrically charge the atoms, which become trapped in an electromagnetic field and drawn to a metal plate for collection. "It's absolutely cutting-edge technology, incredibly difficult to develop," Dr Goldsworthy said.
During the 1980s and '90s the US, France, Britain, Germany, South Africa and Japan attempted to develop laser-enrichment technology, but all failed. One US effort involving 500 scientists gave up after spending $2 billion.
"By world standards, we have worked on a shoestring budget," Dr Goldsworthy said, estimating the "more elegant and sophisticated" Australian concept at about $65 million.

Hat tip: Slashdot.

Or, They Could Just Make More Fuel-Efficient Cars, Part 2

2006-05-29T19:04:00.000-07:00

GM wants you to buy their SUVs, and they want to pay for your gas for a year, or at least, that part of it above $1.99/gallon. I've seen these ads and lemme tell you — they're crazy. GM can't go into the toilet fast enough.

Canada Wants Out Of Kyoto Treaty

2006-05-22T13:52:00.000-07:00

Well, duh.

One Fusion Reactor Problem Down, Only A Million Or So Left

2006-05-22T13:48:00.000-07:00

I keed, I keed. New Scientist has an article about researchers who have discovered a way of keeping fusing plasma from bursting out and damaging the reactor walls.

Researchers at General Atomics, a company based in San Diego, California, US, discovered a simple way to prevent ELMs from occurring. By using a separate magnetic coil to induce small perturbations in the reactor's main magnetic field, they found they could bleed off enough of the plasma particles to prevent the ELMs from bursting out. The solution was tested at an experimental reactor based in San Diego called the DIII-D National Fusion Facility.

Now if they could only get to that pesky breakeven point...

Via Slashdot.

Bush Administration Official: Middle East Oil Supplies "Precarious" After 2008

2006-05-16T13:17:00.000-07:00

Now, isn't that interesting:

Mr. Cheney was recently sent to Central Asia and other regions to coax allies to significantly increase supplies to stabilize U.S. gasoline prices for the summer. Administration sources said Mr. Cheney has run into significant difficulties as he has found that many of the potential suppliers have become committed to China.
"We're in a race with China and so far we're losing," an administration source familiar with Mr. Cheney's trip said.
...
They said Mr. Cheney's visit to Central Asia was based on the assessment of the U.S. intelligence community that Middle East oil supplies will become increasingly precarious after 2008.

I wonder why they chose 2008.

Or, They Could Just Make More Fuel-Efficient Cars

2006-05-09T22:04:00.000-07:00

Via Green Car Congress, Ford and GM want to force California and New York to allow their hybrids in carpool lanes. Currently, carpool lanes are open in those states only to vehicles getting 45 MPG or higher — meaning Toyotas and Hondas. Both Ford and GM have hybrid SUVs that are ineligible under these states' laws.

JD Signs Off

2006-05-09T09:58:00.000-07:00

It was nice knowing you. We need more of this kind of thing.

A Couple Good Points

2006-05-09T09:48:00.000-07:00

The LP Blog has a couple good points to make on the current energy situation. First, Thomas Sowell asks whether thinking is obsolete in all the gas price hysteria:

The government collects far more in taxes on every gallon of gasoline than the oil companies collect in profits. If oil company profits are "obscene," as some politicians claim, are the government's taxes PG-13?
The very politicians who have piled tax after tax on gasoline over the years, and voted to prohibit oil drilling offshore or in Alaska, and who have made it impossible to build a single oil refinery in decades, are all over the television screens denouncing the oil companies. In other words, those who supply oil are being denounced and demonized by those who have been blocking the supply of oil.

And, they point us to this AP story in which the Hawaiian gas cap has come to a screeching halt:

"In a lot of people's minds, they thought the gas cap wasn't working," said Republican state Sen. Paul Whalen, a strong supporter of the price controls. "It was hard to generate lots of support for it because we're paying more than we ever were before."
Gas is particularly expensive in Hawaii because of high state taxes and because of the costs of transporting oil across the Pacific. Last fall, Hawaii became the only state to cap the cost of fuel to try to give some relief to motorists.

Yeah, those work so well. I was recently reading in the paper edition of the Economist that the price of gasoline would be better raised through government intervention — i.e., higher taxes. And these guys are supposed to be lowercase-l liberals?

Three From MIT Technology Review

2006-05-03T21:41:00.000-07:00

A trio of articles from MIT Technology Review:

First a piece about MIT's energy agenda:
Satisfying a possible doubling of global energy demand while supplanting fossil fuels is "perhaps the greatest single challenge facing our nation and world in the 21st century," a Massachusetts Institute of Technology panel wrote today in a draft research strategy report for the institute.
Second, an article about doubling world oil supplies.
Finally, one about using microbes to make better biofuels, and ethanol in particular.

A Stupid Idea Shot Down

2006-05-03T21:32:00.000-07:00

That $100 rebate? It's been cancelled.

Republicans denounced their own gas price rebate plan Tuesday, acknowledging that sending a $100 check to American taxpayers would do little to ease the pain of high prices or address their cause.
The quick backtracking — the Senate plan was announced with great fanfare just five days ago — reflected the discord among GOP lawmakers as they confronted the political perils of $3-a-gallon gasoline.
The rhetoric was unusually sharp for an intramural fight. At his weekly meeting with reporters, House Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) called the rebate idea "insulting" to taxpayers.
"The really insulting part of this whole proposal is the fact that somebody is offering $100 to every American family over this. This is not going to solve the problem," he said. "I don't like the proposal. And over the weekend I heard back from my constituents. They thought it was stupid."

They must be less stupid than the morons who proposed it...

What Color Is The Sky In That Little World Of Yours, Mr. Wagoner?

2006-05-03T16:30:00.000-07:00

The geniuses at GM claim the price of gasoline is temporarily high ($$), which has to amount to one of the most self-serving and delusional comments made in public by a corporate officer since the Enron bankruptcy hit.

"They are too high right now and they will come back down," Mr. Wagoner said of oil prices during a conference at the company's headquarters in Detroit that was broadcast over the Internet. He said consumer behavior isn't expected to be negatively impacted by current gas prices, which are averaging about $2.92 a gallon according to the American Automobile Association.
"We don't expect [oil] to get to a price range when it would affect behavior," Mr. Wagoner said. He said gasoline prices would conceivably need to be well in excess of $3 a gallon in order to significantly hurt consumers.

They wish! GM's TV ads have been for a couple years now laden with expensive, heavy, and gas-sucking SUVs; until they get the message that people aren't seeing the cars from them that they want to buy, GM's sales will take a pounding. Here's a hint: drop the SUV ads, and start touting your small, fuel-efficient vehicles. Do it now, or watch your company go into chapter 11.

A New Peak Oil Essay From Ron Bailey

2006-05-02T12:41:00.000-07:00

Ron Bailey, Reason's science correspondant, has come out with another, slightly more concerned version of his piece on peak oil than his 2004 essay. Bailey dismisses the notion that peak oil production will be with us anytime soon, but he does think that politically-driven shortages could have an effect, one that will ultimately backfire on the perpetrators (read: Iran). That might have been true on the upside, but on the downside of the production peak...?

The Denial Continues

2006-05-02T11:48:00.000-07:00

An amazing comment in the WSJ ($$) from Burnham Securities auto analyst David Healy:

"Perceptions are everything, and potential big-SUV buyers who last month were ready to shell out $40,000 if only they could get that new [Chevrolet] Tahoe, are now sitting home, watching a partly seasonal runup in gas prices, chewing their nails and worrying about Nigeria," Mr. Healy said.
Nevertheless, "drivers will eventually get used to the $3 sign at the pump and not miss the extra $12 a month it will take to keep the wheels rolling," he said.

Out. Of. His. Mind. GM vehicle sales: down 11%. Chrysler: down 8%. Ford: down 6.6%, but reporting the best month ever for its hybrid vehicles.

And Toyota, up 4.5%.

Nah, they won't miss that $12 a month... or more.

Bolivia Nationalizes Natural Gas Fields

2006-05-01T16:44:00.000-07:00

"The looting by the foreign companies has ended", says El Presidente Evo Morales. Sure enough. The looting by the government has just begun.

Wow, Fancy That

2006-05-01T15:38:00.000-07:00

"High Gas Prices Will Last Years, Bush Aides Say". No kidding.

Time To Cancel That New Scientist Subscription?

2006-04-27T19:39:00.000-07:00

I get really tired of the constant and seemingly political whining at New Scientist, which is why I look so skeptically at this story declaring nuclear power to be a dead option.

Until recently, it seemed the wide-scale construction of a new generation of nuclear power plants was inevitable. China is investing in nuclear, after all, as are Japan, Russia and India, so why not the west? Though Germany, Sweden, Spain and Switzerland have forsworn investment in new nuclear plants, other western nations, notably the UK, France and the US, are taking the idea seriously. In August 2005, the US government handed out a range of nuclear subsidies and incentives worth nearly $20 billion. In the UK, Prime Minister Tony Blair has commissioned an energy review with what is widely believed to have a pro-nuclear agenda, marking a move away from the position three years ago when his government said there was no case for nuclear new build. France, which already gets 78 per cent of its electricity from nuclear power, has its eye on starting construction of at least one more plant within the next decade.
In the UK and the US, the case for a nuclear renaissance is on the table mainly because the reactors now generating electricity are coming to the end of their lives. The cry is going up that this will lead to an energy gap: in a few years there won't be enough electricity to go round, and the lights will go out. That's a simplistic analysis, of course. "The idea of a 'gap' is artificial and fails to acknowledge the dynamics of the market system," says Jim Watson, an energy analyst in the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex, UK. The energy markets in these countries will tend to ensure that there will always be electricity to buy and sell, Watson points out. The cost may go up and the sources may change, but the market will quickly adjust by using more electricity derived from coal and gas, for instance.

But why would we want to get rid of nuclear power? I have yet to read of a compelling analysis that definitively points to real economic problems. Just as soon as the lights go out, look for this kind of thinking to change, especially if it's New Scientist's offices.

The Economist On Peak Oil

2006-04-27T19:32:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to avoid this blog for a while, so forgive the extended absence; but anyway, here's a long Economist piece on peak oil. The synopsis is basically that, hey, even if we do run out, things will happen.

Dispairing Of Fusion, Building ITER Anyway

2006-03-09T20:30:00.000-08:00

New Scientist excerpts a paper written by the late William Parkins, a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, which claims that fusion is 50 years away, and always will be.

"The history of this dream is as discouraging as it is expensive," wrote William Parkins, a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project during the second world war, who later became the chief scientist at US engineering firm Rockwell International.

Sadly, Parkins passed away while his lengthy paper, which makes its case on engineering grounds, was being edited. But Donald Kennedy, Science's editor considered the paper important enough to run the piece posthumously, in a condensed form, and to stand behind its conclusions personally.

...
Advocates of the technology insist it is too soon to give up, and that great progress has been made. "I was less convinced 30 years ago [that fusion could become practical] but we have made incredible progress," Miklos Porkolab, director of the Plasma Fusion Center at MIT, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, told New Scientist. "The science is going to work," he said, "and the rest is economics."

It's a good thing that the ITER folks haven't been paying attention (or maybe they should), because they've finally green-lighted the Cadarache, France site. How long before the shovels get busy?

In perhaps related news, the Z-machine has produced temperatures in excess of two billion degrees Kelvin, and producing more energy in X-rays than was input in electrical power. The researchers are busy rechecking their calculations...

So Much For That Collapse

2006-03-09T20:09:00.000-08:00

LiveScience has the scoop on a non-Jered Diamond version of the end of Easter Island, something that JD at Peak Oil Debunked got to earlier in the day. Apparently, Easter Island didn't so much collapse as never get there: the population wasn't all that big to begin with, so by the time Europeans arrived, there wasn't much to decline.

"The collapse was really a function of European disease being introduced," Lipo said. "The story that's been told about these populations going crazy and creating their own demise may just be simply an artifact of [Christian] missionaries telling stories."

You can be sure Diamond will continue to get lots of speaking engagements and book advances, though...

Californium, Here He Comes: Taleyarkhan Investigated

2006-03-08T07:44:00.000-08:00

Thanks to John Atkinson for passing along this New York Times story that Rusi Taleyarkhan is being investigated by Purdue University for "extremely serious" concerns about his research. In particular, Brian Naranjo, a UCLA grad student, has concluded that the reports of fusion look suspiciously like the decay products of Californium:

Instead, Mr. Naranjo said that the pattern of particles seen in the experiment much more closely matched that given off by californium, a radioactive element that is used in Dr. Taleyarkhan's laboratory. With $350,000 from the Defense Department, Seth J. Putterman, a professor of physics at U.C.L.A. and the thesis adviser to Mr. Naranjo, has tried to build a replica of Dr. Taleyarkhan's apparatus and has not seen any signs of fusion.
Dr. Putterman said he told Dr. Taleyarkhan of the calculations last week on a visit to Purdue. "He didn't have any clear answers," Dr. Putterman said. "From my perspective, his answers were not satisfactory."
Californium is present in Dr. Taleyarkhan's laboratory, stored in a closet about 15 feet from the experiment — close enough to generate the results reported in Dr. Taleyarkhan's paper if it had been stored improperly.

Update 3/8: Nature has more on this, including the actual paper (PDF) on Naranjo's UCLA website. That publication has another couple of articles on the topic, including "Is Bubble Fusion Simply Hot Air?":

In late 2003, [Purdue University factulty member Lefteri] Tsoukalas managed to lure Taleyarkhan away from his position at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, and in the spring of 2004 Taleyarkhan arrived full-time at Purdue. By this time, the team had completed several experimental runs, but had not seen any evidence for bubble fusion.
Once Taleyarkhan had arrived, lab members became increasingly concerned by his actions. Jevremovic says that he would sometimes examine the equipment and claim that it was producing positive results, referring to an oscilloscope that he had. She says that she was uncertain about how the oscilloscope fitted into the experiment so she asked him for the raw data, but never received any. "He said: 'Look, there's a peak', but there was nothing to see," she says. "I started questioning it."

It gets worse: earlier claims that others had reproduced his earlier results appear to have been published in a non-refereed journal, a special issue of Nuclear Engineering and Design that was edited by Taleyarkhan himself. Tsoukalas, who had been unable to reproduce Taleyarkhan's results but declined to publish his findings at Taleyarkhan's request, is now pressing forward with their release in Nuclear Technology. Taleyarkhan also removed lab equipment without which it was "very difficult to triple-check our results", according to Tsoukalas.

Finally, Nature has a summary article, whose concluding paragraph reads,

And the US Department of Energy, for whom Taleyarkhan was working when he first reported his claims, has abandoned its patent application relating to bubble fusion, after the patent office said it would throw it out last year (see 'A sound investment?'). .
Taken together, the overall message from many people close to this work is that there is no longer any hope that this line of publications will yield a viable fusion energy source. For some this is almost liberating: those sticking with bubble fusion are freer than ever to explore other approaches to it, or to try other kinds of studies on acoustic chambers and the behaviour of collapsing bubbles. For others it is now the end of bubble fusion. There are other kinds of science to be done.

Japanese Researchers Make Gasoline From Cattle Dung

2006-03-03T11:03:00.000-08:00

Moo:

Sakae Shibusawa, an agriculture engineering professor at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, said his team has successfully extracted 1.4 milliliters (0.042 ounces) of gasoline from every 100 grams (3.5 ounces) of cow dung by applying high pressure and heat.
"The new technology will be a boon for livestock breeders" to reduce the burden of disposing of large amounts of waste, Shibusawa said.
About 500,000 metric tons (551,155 U.S. tons) of cattle dung are produced each year in Japan, he said.

What A Difference Four Months Makes

2006-03-02T18:58:00.000-08:00

In which JD catches Matt Simmons retracting the principle selling point of Twilight In The Desert. Yow.

Why We Don't Want A Federal Energy Policy

2006-03-02T18:42:00.000-08:00

Mainly because it generates insider pork, like this mega-tax-credit for synfuel producers:

Buried in the huge budget-reconciliation bill, on which House and Senate conferees are putting the final touches right now, are a few paragraphs that accomplish an extraordinary feat. They roll back the price of a barrel of crude oil to what it sold for two years ago. They create this pretend price for the benefit of a small group of the politically well connected. You still won't be able to buy gasoline for $1.73 per gal. as you did then, instead of today's $2.28. You still won't be able to buy home heating oil for $1.60 per gal., in place of today's $2.39. But a select group of investors and companies will walk away with billions of dollars in tax subsidies, not from oil but from the marketing of a dubious concoction of synthetic fuel produced from coal and dependent on government tax credits tied to the price of oil.
From 2003 through 2005, TIME estimates, the synfuel industry raked in $9 billion in tax credits. That means the lucky few collectively cut their tax bills by that amount, which would be enough to cover a year's worth of federal taxes for 20 million Americans who make less than $20,000 a year and pay income taxes. How important is the tax credit to synfuel producers? In its latest annual report, Headwaters Inc., a Utah-based purveyor of synfuel processes and substances, says flatly, "Headwaters does not believe that production of synthetic fuel will be profitable absent the tax credits."

The essence of the thing is this: federal synfuel programs were set with a target price of $50 a barrel as the minimum these operators needed in order to break even. For years, with actual crude prices well below that seemingly-far-away threshold, the synfuel producers got year after year of tax breaks. But with oil well over $50/barrel, and looking to stay that way indefinitely, the producers have started hammering Congress to raise the threshold.

The culprits appear to be Senators Rick Santorum (R-Penn.) and Gordon Smith (R-Ore.). <Insert crack here about "the best government money can buy".>

George Olah On The Methanol Economy

2006-03-01T23:39:00.000-08:00

Getting back to something I wrote about last year, George Olah talks about the methanol economy instead of the hydrogen economy:

TR: [...] methanol is a way of storing energy, not a source of energy like gasoline. Where will the energy come from?
GO: The beauty is we can take any source of energy. Whether it's from burning fossil fuels, from atomic plants, from wind, solar, or whatever. What we are saying is it makes a lot better sense, instead of trying to store and transport energy as very volatile hydrogen gas, to convert it into a convenient liquid. And there's a fringe benefit: you really mitigate carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
TR: How do you make methanol?

GO: One approach is to produce methanol by converting still-existing huge reserves of natural gas, but in entirely different, new ways. Today, methanol is made exclusively from natural gas. Natural gas is incompletely burned, or converted, to synthesis gas, which can then be put together into methanol. Now we have developed ways to completely eliminate the use of synthesis gas.
The second approach involves carbon dioxide. We were co-inventors of the direct methanol fuel cell. This fuel cell uses methanol and produces CO2 and water. It occurred to us that maybe you could reverse the process. And, indeed, you can take carbon dioxide and water, and if you have electric power, you can chemically reduce it into methanol.
So the second leg of our methanol economy approach is to regenerate or recycle carbon dioxide initially from sources where it is present in high concentrations, like flue gases from a power plant burning natural gas. But eventually, and this won't come overnight, we could just take out carbon dioxide from air.

I really like this as an idea, simply because it means we're recycling the carbon dioxide whenever we burn fuel.

From Tar Sand To Crude

2006-03-01T22:17:00.000-08:00

MIT Technology Review has a nifty photoessay on how Albertan tar sands eventually becomes crude oil.

Jared Diamond Is A Jackass, Answering A Good Question

2006-02-27T08:24:00.000-08:00

I positively loved this post on Peak Oil Debunked regarding Jared Diamond and his cottage industry pitching disaster. In that, he's remarkably like another of Debunked author JD's bêtes noir, Matt Savinar, whose idiocy has already been commented upon.

But JD raises a really good point when he asks the useful question when he asks of folks at The Oil Drum, "Why do you link to [Savinar, From the Wilderness, dieoff.org, Richard "Olduvai" Duncan] if you guys are the moderates?" While this is pure speculation, it seems to me there are two plausible explanations:

Scratch an environmentalist and you will find a communist, or at least a guy who has a false but very, very strong sense that his simple-but-wrong solution to all problems can be made to work if only he had enough cops behind it. In practice, the two are indistinguishable.
Scratch an environmentalist and you will find a fascist. This came out recently in a comments that JD uncovered from various peakers, including Richard Heinberg, and out of the orifaces of the allegedly scholarly ASPO, when Colin Campbell let fly his idea that's almost as fun as Charlton Heston's 1973 discovery.

So, JD, why do I still have these jackasses on the sidebar? Well, as Mencken once answered a similar question, why does one go to the zoo?

More Fun With Torture

2006-02-27T07:58:00.000-08:00

A long New Yorker piece about the dishonorable Cheney gang looking to find legal ways to make thumbscrews a reality in the United States. Impeachment isn't good enough.

Just a few months ago, [former U.S. Navy general counsel Alberto J. Mora] attended a meeting in Rumsfeld’s private conference room at the Pentagon, called by Gordon England, the Deputy Defense Secretary, to discuss a proposed new directive defining the military’s detention policy. The civilian Secretaries of the Army, the Air Force, and the Navy were present, along with the highest-ranking officers of each service, and some half-dozen military lawyers. Matthew Waxman, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, had proposed making it official Pentagon policy to treat detainees in accordance with Common Article Three of the Geneva conventions, which bars cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment, as well as outrages against human dignity.Going around the huge wooden conference table, where the officials sat in double rows, England asked for a consensus on whether the Pentagon should support Waxman’s proposal.
This standard had been in effect for fifty years, and all members of the U.S. armed services were trained to follow it. One by one, the military officers argued for returning the U.S. to what they called the high ground. But two people opposed it. One was Stephen Cambone, the under-secretary of defense for intelligence; the other was [Department of Defense general counsel William J. Haynes II, Mora's former boss]. They argued that the articulated standard would limit America’s “flexibility.” It also might expose Administration officials to charges of war crimes: if Common Article Three became the standard for treatment, then it might become a crime to violate it. Their opposition was enough to scuttle the proposal.
In exasperation, according to another participant, Mora said that whether the Pentagon enshrined it as official policy or not, the Geneva conventions were already written into both U.S. and international law. Any grave breach of them, at home or abroad, was classified as a war crime. To emphasize his position, he took out a copy of the text of U.S. Code 18.2441, the War Crimes Act, which forbids the violation of Common Article Three, and read from it. The point, Mora told me, was that “it’s a statute. It exists—we’re not free to disregard it. We’re bound by it. It’s been adopted by the Congress. And we’re not the only interpreters of it. Other nations could have U.S. officials arrested.”

Point, Counterpoint In The Boston Globe

2006-02-27T07:51:00.000-08:00

Via peakoil.com, here's a pretty good summary piece on the current state of thinking about peak oil from the Boston Globe.

Francis Fukuyama Pulls The Plug On Neoconservatism

2006-02-24T12:04:00.000-08:00

Francis Fukuyama has come out against the end results of neoconservatism, in a great and wide-ranging New York Times Magazine piece that reviews the "naïve Wilsonianism" animating the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq. Samples:

The problem with neoconservatism's agenda lies not in its ends, which are as American as apple pie, but rather in the overmilitarized means by which it has sought to accomplish them. What American foreign policy needs is not a return to a narrow and cynical realism, but rather the formulation of a "realistic Wilsonianism" that better matches means to ends.

Of course, in this Fukuyama merely retreats into ever-smaller jars; if you can't whup the terrorists, he seems to be saying, push them into power directly or indirectly and watch as they grapple with the rubber-hits-the-road details of governance:

A durable Israeli-Palestinian peace could not be built upon a corrupt, illegitimate Fatah that constantly had to worry about Hamas challenging its authority. Peace might emerge, sometime down the road, from a Palestine run by a formerly radical terrorist group that had been forced to deal with the realities of governing.
...
But the overarching lesson that emerges from these cases is that the United States does not get to decide when and where democracy comes about. By definition, outsiders can't "impose" democracy on a country that doesn't want it; demand for democracy and reform must be domestic. Democracy promotion is therefore a long-term and opportunistic process that has to await the gradual ripening of political and economic conditions to be effective.

The most charitable view of the Bush administration's views going into Iraq was that the adventure would end with a stable and democratic Iraq on friendly terms with the United States and the West generally, on perhaps hostile terms with neighbor Iran, all to the general betterment of the world oil markets. That this has not happened reveals a profound failure of imagination on the part of the Bush administration when it came time to draft the post-invasion parts of their plans.

Not Getting It On Ports

2006-02-22T13:14:00.000-08:00

"Arabs See Phobia Behind US Uproar Over Ports Deal" says the Reuters headline, but given the deaths caused by a few cartoons, who can blame anyone for this attitude? The Wall Street Journal ($$$) thinks Bush may be outmaneuvered here:

President Bush vehemently defended the transaction, summoning reporters accompanying him on Air Force One to insist it posed no security threat and to say that if legislation cleared Congress to block the deal, "I'll deal with it, with a veto." Mr. Bush, who hasn't vetoed any legislation during his presidency, said the U.S. would be sending "mixed signals" by acting when a British company faced no such objections, and he challenged lawmakers to "step up and explain why a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard."

See above, and 9/11, also, duh. Anyone expecting this to pass quietly was kidding themselves.

Back at the White House later, he added, "If there was any chance that this transaction would jeopardize the security of the United States, it would not go forward. But I also want to repeat something again, and that is: This is a company that has played by the rules, that has been cooperative with the United States, a country that's an ally in the war on terror, and it would send a terrible signal to friends and allies not to let this transaction go through."

Really? That's pretty amazing considering the party line from the Bushites now reads that the President didn't know about the deal ($$$, again) until after it had been approved! The Journal's opinion page calls the sudden opposition a "rare" marriage of left and right against him, with the New York Times coming out squarely against the deal as part of a wider pattern of choosing business interests over security, while the Washington Post declared the whole affair a "humbug":

None of the U.S. politicians huffing and puffing seem to be aware that this deal was long in the making, that it had been reported on extensively in the financial press, and that it went through normal security clearance procedures, including approval from a foreign investment committee that contains officials from the departments of Treasury, Commerce, State and Homeland Security, among other agencies. Even more disturbing is the apparent difficulty of members of Congress in distinguishing among Arab countries. We'd like to remind them, as they've apparently forgotten, that the United Arab Emirates is a U.S. ally that has cooperated extensively with U.S. security operations in the war on terrorism, that supplied troops to the U.S.-led coalition during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and that sends humanitarian aid to Iraq. U.S. troops move freely in and out of Dubai on their way to Iraq now.

Indeed, the Emirates' track record in the history of terrorism needs to be duly recorded, and while I haven't looked into this, it may indeed be a tempest in a teapot. On the other hand, the lunatic portion of the Muslim world, which is a sizeable percentage, and possibly a majority, hasn't exactly behaved itself well lately, either. In the final analysis, the taint of Islam and its all-too-easily-roused homicidal tendencies will poison deals like this one. As Roblimo said in the link above,

Muslims all over the world really ought to stop the "My way or die" crap. And those who say, "It's in the Koran. Violence against all unbelievers -- especially against Jews -- is a core part of my faith," had better watch out, because if that's your attitude you really are at war with the rest of the world.

The Trouble With Slashdot

2006-02-22T12:24:00.000-08:00

I normally love Slashdot for bringing to the fore interesting stories I would have never heard about otherwise. Despite the collective kvetching (much of it deserved, by the way) about numerous dupes in the story feed, the bottom line is that the site provides a much-needed filter on the huge volume of tech news. It's arbitrary, sure, but it's also useful.

That is, I had that opinion until I read this article about a supposed "self-contained power source" which fits the definition of a perpetual motion machine. My first reaction to this was... what the hell? And then when I found out that the contributor McOSEN was from the lunatic fringe, conspiracy-theory-believin' Open Source Energy website, that's when I lost it. What the hell, Roblimo? Can you no longer get editors capable of discerning between science and rank nutjobbery? F'r chrissakes, they take the zero-point energy loons seriously! This is not an accident, although this particular transgression has to rank as one of the worst of their most recent. It's well past time to clean house over there; who should do it?

New Power Plant Gasifies Petroleum Coke, Pumps CO2 Into Old Oil Wells

2006-02-17T09:35:00.000-08:00

A new $1 billion power plant proposed by BP in California will gasify petroleum coke, separating the hydrogen and burning that to produce electricity, while sending the resulting CO₂ into depleted oil fields to enhance productivity. Peak Oil Debunked pointed to an Oil Drum post about enhanced CO₂ recovery in Canada that, if applied to US reserves, has the potential to unleash 43 billion barrels of oil -- another Alaska!

I believe we are going to increasingly see a phenomenon which is familiar to anyone who has watched a marijuana smoker clean an old resin-encrusted pipe for a few more hits. There are incredible volumes of oil still remaining in old holes we discovered a long time ago, and pumped all the easy oil out of. So what are we going to do when we run out of new discoveries? We're going to go back to the old discoveries, and "clean the pipe".

Currently, most petroleum coke is shipped to Asia where it's used directly as a fuel. But the plant is far from a sure thing, and BP will be running feasibility studies over the next year. The critical problem I see thus far is the request for subsidies from the state; none of that, now.

Bermuda To Generate Power From Ocean Currents

2006-02-15T18:09:00.000-08:00

Bermuda will add up to 20 MW of electric power generation using undersea currents. The first 10 MW of capacity will come online in 2007, and will be supplied from equipment made by Current to Current Corporation of Massachusetts.

ITER Physicists Reply To Focus Fusion

2006-02-15T13:30:00.000-08:00

Thanks to these Froggy guys (whom I found in my referrers today) for pointing out this pesn.com reply from the ITER boys as to the feasibility of focus fusion:

From: Bill Spears
To: Sterling D. Allan
Sent: Thursday, November 10, 2005 11:46 AM
Subject: Re: comment please: Tokamak has serious competitor in Focus Fusion

Dear Sterling,

Sorry for the delay in replying. It takes time to give you a reasoned reply and not just shoot from the hip. It also takes time to read and understand detailed scientific reports to make sure you are not missing something. I asked Dr. Michiya Shimada, our Head of Physics Unit, to review the material and make a comment. After he and his people reviewed the background papers indicated in your article, he concluded:

"The plasma focus isn't going to be a rival of the tokamak unless there's some very strange physics nobody has seen before.

Using the plasma parameters quoted in their publication, the proton-boron fusion energy obtainable in a plasma focus discharge is estimated to be 0.6 x 10^-4 J, which is a fraction of a billionth of the electrical energy spent to create this plasma (~ 160 kJ). The point is that the plasma volume is very small (~ 6 x 10^-9 cm³) and the discharge duration very short (~ 1 x 10^-8 s).

The dense plasma focus has been studied extensively in the early years of fusion research. They might find it interesting to compare their results with those obtained a few decades ago to see whether anything new has really been discovered here."

I hope you find that a significantly strong counter-remark to your original article to be worth publishing also this viewpoint.

Best regards,

Bill

The FF guys respond:

From: Eric Lerner
To: Sterling D. Allan
Sent: Thursday, November 10, 2005 7:32 PM
Subject: Re: ITER response: Tokamak has serious competitor in Focus Fusion

Dr. Shimada did not read the papers carefully enough. His calculation is based on the plasma parameters that we actually achieved in our last experiments in 2001. We did not claim that those parameters are near breakeven. They were not even optimal for the current we achieved, because the radius of the anode (the inner electrode) on this device could not be changed

What the paper does demonstrate is that scaling laws that have both good theoretical foundations and experimental backing indicate that break-even parameters can be achieved with a somewhat higher current but a physically smaller device. With the parameters that we expect to reach in our next set of experiments, fusion yield per shot should be of the order of 5-20 KJ. No strange physics is needed. We are aiming for a 40-fold increase in plasmoid magnetic field and fusion yield (at fixed ion temperature) scales as B⁴. Temperature will also be higher.

Eric Lerner

I dunno. You'll have to show me you know what you're doing, guys. Also, for giggles' sake, here's a Slashdot thread on this stuff. Science by press release isn't the most compelling thing on the planet.

Ex-SEC Official Pushes For New Reserves Standards

2006-02-15T13:22:00.000-08:00

Former SEC Dallas branch office head Harold Degenhardt has called for a push to change reserves accounting rules ($$$) in the oil industry.

"Now is the time to push your efforts with the commission to having some of your questions answered," Harold Degenhardt, the former head of the Fort Worth regional office, told an energy industry gathering.
Degenhardt said the commission under new chairman Chris Cox is more sensitive to the unintended consequences of policy. While Cox probably won't radically alter agency policy, "some relief" is possible, Degenhardt told a conference sponsored by the Energy Forum, a Houston group.
...
Degenhardt said he is troubled by the SEC's lack of responsiveness to a Feb. 2005 industry-sponsored report that called on the SEC to modernize the rules for calculating reserves, a major benchmark for valuing oil and gas companies. The SEC hasn't provided a substantive response to the report, which was authored by industry consultant Cambridge Energy Research Associates.

Without taking a position on CERA's new reserves classification system (something I wrote about last February), Degenhardt said that the industry should push for more action now that the CERA report is a year old and has elicited no comment from the government.

Peak Oil, Debunked?

2006-02-14T23:02:00.000-08:00

Whether you believe it or not, Peak Oil Debunked doesn't quite live up to its name, but it is full of interesting if not always satisfying commentary about peak oil.

More On Microwaving Waste Tires Into Oil

2006-02-14T07:16:00.000-08:00

I wrote about John Dobozy and his method for microwaving scrap tires into oil last year. Checking up on him again, he's got a lovely website up under the Molectra name, although the "About" page indicates he still hasn't been able to scale up his project to a fully-functional plant as of yet.

It turns out there's some precedent. At least two companies -- Environmental Waste International of Canada, and Carbon Recovery Corporation -- have tried to make similar processes work. The latter was more recently acquired by an outfit known as RECOV Energy Corp, who in turn changed their name to General Metals Corporation, primarily a gold and silver mining company operating out of Nevada, as of January 26, 2006. So maybe there isn't a pot of gold at the end of this particular rainbow after all.

What's even more interesting to me is this 1987 Rand Corp. report on using microwaves to process oil shale, which would seem to predate all of these attempts to make this technology work on tires by at least a decade. This might be a good idea, but the lack of commercial progress on this front is discouraging.

Putterman Crystal Fusion Device Duplicated, Improved

2006-02-13T22:51:00.000-08:00

Seth Putterman's crystal fusion device has been duplicated by a Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute team that claims to have improved on it.

A research team led by Seth Putterman, professor of physics at UCLA, reported on a similar apparatus in 2005, but two important features distinguish the new device: “Our device uses two crystals instead of one, which doubles the acceleration potential,” says Jeffrey Geuther, a graduate student in nuclear engineering at Rensselaer and lead author of the paper. “And our setup does not require cooling the crystals to cryogenic temperatures — an important step that reduces both the complexity and the cost of the equipment.”
...
“Nuclear fusion has been explored as a potential source of power, but we are not looking at this as an energy source right now,” Danon says. Rather, the most immediate application may come in the form of a battery-operated, portable neutron generator. Such a device could be used to detect explosives or to scan luggage at airports, and it could also be an important tool for a wide range of laboratory experiments.
The concept could also lead to a portable x-ray generator, according to Danon. “There is already a commercial portable pyroelectric x-ray product available, but it does not produce enough energy to provide the 50,000 electron volts needed for medical imaging,” he says. “Our device is capable of producing about 200,000 electron volts, which could meet these requirements and could also be enough to penetrate several millimeters of steel.”

Hat tip: Slashdot.

The Side Effects Of Canadian Tar Sands

2006-02-13T22:09:00.000-08:00

One of the more interesting things about the Canadian tar sands is that it's a petri dish for investigating techniques for dealing with heavy oil, something that came up in another Wall Street Journal article ($$$, sorry):

One of the heaviest types of oil is bitumen, a tar-like crude found mixed with grit in Alberta's oil sands. While oil sands are found in many countries, Canada's deposits stand out because they are the biggest, consisting of an estimated 1.7 trillion barrels of oil in place, though the amount recoverable depends on further technology improvements and whether oil prices justify the expense of a project. Alberta has become the world's proving ground for emerging technology for extracting and handling ultra-heavy crude at lower cost.
Canadian and international energy companies are prepared to pour as much as 100 billion Canadian dollars (US$86.7 billion) into oil-sands development over the next 10 years, if all the announced projects are built. Canada's top oil-industry research investors spent a total of C$272 million on research and development in 2004, according to Research Infosource Inc., of Toronto.

I wrote last month about the possibility of using some of these techniques in other circumstances, and the Journal surmises as much given the relatively small amounts of money the Chinese are committing to their tar sands projects, and the fact that the pipeline-to-the-Pacific that's been proposed as the primary transport mechanism is unlikely to be completed any time soon, if ever.

Peter Zeihan, chief analyst for global economic issues at private-intelligence firm Stratfor, Washington, D.C., believes China isn't likely to seek significant new oil supplies from Canada, partly because of logistics. "There's a reason why the pipelines run south and east from Alberta, not west," he said. More likely, he reckons, China will build pipelines to import more oil from its Asian neighbor Kazakhstan, and that it will invest heavily in new technology for producing and processing its own untapped oil resources.

The Other Kind Of Optimist, Part 2

2006-02-13T22:00:00.000-08:00

Hey, for only $99 you can get yer copy of this Newsmax report that tells us all how $40/barrel oil is about to make a big comeback. I wrote about one such back in May of last year based on a post in Disinterested Party, who to his credit went on to write followups in June, two in October, and most recently in January, all of which call for lower oil prices. $61/barrel oil made news because it had been so high for so long.

Obviously I'm still bullish on oil -- an expression that seems to be at odds with my actual feeling regarding this -- especially considering the wildly differing views as to Chinese production. Deffeyes, of course, is so certain he's right that now he's changed his specialty to that of "historian". We'll see who's right, but my money's on Deffeyes.

Update: I wonder if Disinterested Party's analysis includes declines in Mexico's Cantarell field ($$$, again).

The worst two scenarios suggest a drastic decline in output to 875,000 barrels a day by the end of 2007 and to just 520,000 a day by the end of 2008. If such projections turn out to be correct, Mexico's overall oil exports would decline by about one million barrels a day -- equal to about 63% of its daily crude exports to the U.S. -- from its current 1.8 million.

I wrote about this last year; one wonders how the Journal gets away with calling this an "exclusive" when the knowledge has been available for almost a year.

What We Have Here Is A Failure To Communicate

2006-02-13T21:20:00.000-08:00

Apropos of the Charles Groat interview I found earlier, I have to wonder what moron is in charge of coming up with the price estimates for oil over at GM and Ford. I actually subscribed to the Wall Street Journal earlier in the week, and lo and behold but here's their review following the Chicago Auto Show ($$$, of course) which has some whoppers:

The large-SUV market is about to experience a near-total renaissance, right on the heels of its disastrous 2005 sales collapse. General Motors is rolling out its new generation of large Chevrolet, GMC, and Cadillac SUVs. The new Cadillac Escalade, with its 400-horsepower engine and its chrome-jeweled exterior, was the star of a glitzy Super Bowl ad. And GM executives are talking up the early sales results for the new Chevrolet Tahoe.
That's to be expected from GM, since large SUVs are the money-losing No. 1 auto maker's primary new product this year. If they sell, GM stands a chance of significantly narrowing its automotive losses. If they don't, GM is in big trouble.

Well, look for that to be "big trouble", good buddy...

But overshadowed in GM's Big SUV hoopla is the fact that Ford is also launching a restyled and expanded lineup of large SUVs this year. Of special significance are new, extra-long versions of the Ford Expedition and Lincoln Navigator large utilities, designed to give Ford dealers what they have long wished for: "extended length" large SUVs to compete with GM's plus-sized Chevy Suburban and Cadillac Escalade ESV.

Are they for real? Does nobody pay attention to what the sales of Toyota hybrids are doing? At least the author of this piece, Joseph B. White, isn't entirely without a clue:

How much oil could we avoid burning if gasoline were $3 a gallon and consumers had an economic incentive to buy small cars that got 30 to 40 miles per gallon, or better, using ethanol, diesel or hybrid technology? Right now, it seems unlikely we'll get to find out. In the absence of a clear direction from policy makers or consumers, auto makers will hedge all bets, expanding the range of small, fuel-efficient subcompacts aimed at young buyers, and investing more in plus-sized rides such as the extended-length Navigator L at the same time.

This is obviously crazy. It's the a massive failure to misread the future direction of the market that essentially amounts to wishcasting by Ford and GM, and after this summer, I bet both come tumbling down.

Former USGS Head Charles Groat On Peak Oil

2006-02-10T07:18:00.000-08:00

The USGS has been taken out behind the shed numerous times for all manner of crimes by peak oil mavens, not least of which is their complicity in overstating reserves. The most recent culprit behind this, Charles Groat, gave an interview at AAPG Explorer in which he said

“The doomsayers say we’re running out of oil,” he noted, “but just from the undiscovered resource assessments the Survey has done nationally and internationally, even with the oil that’s known now the reserve growth has amounted to a lot more than the new discoveries.”

Huh? Isn't that the very definition of the problem?

“We haven’t even applied reserve growth numbers to some of the big fields in other parts of the world,” Groat said.

I'm sure Kuwait will be glad to hear about that...

“It’s finite, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to run out next year, or 10 years or even in the next 50 years.”

Um... uh... running out of things to say...

G8 Looks At One Of Their Members In Fear

2006-02-09T19:40:00.000-08:00

Should the G8 become the G7 again? It seems that way, given that their finance ministers will be looking at energy security when they meet in Moscow next week. Between Iranian oil and Russian natural gas, the Europeans are concerned:

Higher oil prices have increased oil protectionism, analysts said.
"There was an assumption in the past that high prices would lead to increased investment and more oil," said Antoine Halff.
"But high prices have instead fostered resources nationalism, and there has been a drive by countries not to open up to investment, but instead to preserve resources and claim a higher share of revenue."

So, how's that work, again? Is the EU getting nervous? Oh, my, yes:

The European Union and the United States should cooperate more closely on energy issues, the president of the EU executive Commission said on Thursday.
"In today's world, if the energy security of either one of us is impaired, it affects the other. I believe this situation calls for a transformation in our cooperation on energy issues," Jose Manuel Barroso said in a speech at Washington's Georgetown University where he was receiving an honorary degree.
"Just as it is ridiculous to have 25 separate energy policies in the European Union, so it would fly in the face of common sense for the transatlantic partnership to pull in different directions in this critical area," Barroso said, according to excerpts of his speech released in Brussels.

The Russians have done themselves no favors by baring their teeth at the rest of Europe, shutting off gas, if indirectly, to their Western customers, and before that with the Yukos fiasco. It's fairly clear now that the G8 has one member too many, one that nobody else trusts anymore.

Ethanol From Candy

2006-02-09T13:48:00.000-08:00

... or what have you:

Since 2003, Xethanol has operated two Iowa plants that can cheaply distill a gasoline additive called ethanol from bizarre sources such as stale butterscotch candy. When technicians mix the sweets with a special form of yeast, fermentation results, producing ethanol. (Typically producers of ethanol derive the clean-burning, high-octane fuel from corn.) Big oil companies then combine it with unleaded gasoline to reduce the cost of gas and the air pollution it causes.

Xethanol claims they will be profitable this year, the first time since their founding in 2000, but that's in part because of federal subsidies. Geesh.

Exxon: President's Energy Goals "Not Feasible"

2006-02-09T13:42:00.000-08:00

Multiply this times peak oil and it's Kunstlerville.

The United States will rely on foreign imports of oil for the foreseeable future to feed its energy needs and should stop trying to become energy independent, a top Exxon Mobil Corp. executive said Tuesday.
"Realistically, it is simply not feasible in any time period relevant to our discussion today," Exxon Mobil Senior Vice President Stuart McGill said, referring to what he called the "misperception" that the United States can achieve energy independence.

Let's hope he's wrong, eh?

Followup: Nanosolar

2006-02-08T20:24:00.000-08:00

Remember this? Well, I'm still waiting. So is everyone else, apparently.

Belated: Missouri TDP Plant Allowed To Restart

2006-02-08T20:20:00.000-08:00

The thermal depolymerization plant in Carthage, MO has been allowed to restart despite horrible smells eminating therefrom. The problems have been traced to a faulty gasket that has since been replaced.

Titania Nanotubes May Make Better Solar Cells, Hydrogen Generators

2006-02-08T12:31:00.000-08:00

No, not the character from Love's Labour Lost, but a titania nanotube might just make solar energy cost-efficient. I know, tell me if you've heard this one before. Meantime, back at Penn State, researchers are working on titania nanotubes to split hydrogen from water using only sunlight.

More Contempt For Amendment I

2006-02-03T13:21:00.000-08:00

The Bush administration, which wouldn't know the First Amendment from first base, has issued a statement condemning the recent publication of a cartoon Muslims found offensive because it depicts Mohammed. That by itself is blasphemy, according to the imams, but worse, they portrayed him as a fellow with a bomb in his bonnet.

I could go on about the meaning of freedom of the press including the right to be offensive, especially to the Muslim mob; surprisingly enough, I agree wholehartedly with this New Republic Online article, to a limited extent, which rightly castigates Bill Clinton for his wrongheaded support of the outraged Muslims. If the West has accomplished anything since the days of the Praetorian Guard, it is this: nobody's idea of piety should be taken as law over empirical fact. That the Muslims still can't grasp this -- when was the last time you heard of a Nobel laureate in the sciences from Cairo? -- is testamony to their blinkered worldview. But that men such as Clinton, and Bush's henchmen, both of whom ought to know better, should issue condemnations for the works of such wits is preposterous.

Update: More on this at Reason, whose Tim Cavanaugh has published his usually clear-headed commentary.