WastedEnergy

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Archive for May, 2010

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Taking that Junk…and Packing it in the Trunk!

Posted by wastedenergy on May 28, 2010

Davy Jones’ Foot Locker, I mean…

WE will be going on hiatus for a few days to get a few days of R&R in the capital of the world. We’ll be road tripping early tomorrow morning and even have a piece of tonight’s quesadilla left over to bring along as a wedge against Peak Hunger.

In the meantime, here’s a nice bit of original artistry from over on TOD, which - if you’ve been following me here or are just someone interested in energy - you probably know by now.  I hope you enjoy this little piece of ”dark humor” (I’ll have something like my own version soon).  Ahh, how times have changed.  They have, by the way.  Thanks to eutrophication, overfishing, and of course, other oil spills, many parts of the Gulf of Mexico may be less resilient today than they were in the 1970′s…

Don’t go far…we’ll be right back!  And in the meantime, if you’re already here, and while we’re on the topic of wedges, why not go ahead and check out a few interesting pieces you might have missed?

Posted in Basics and Site Administration | Leave a Comment »

WHOOSH

Posted by wastedenergy on May 27, 2010

It went right over their heads…or did it?

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Forever in PIRGatory

Posted by wastedenergy on May 27, 2010

In case you thought fossil fuel companies were the only moneyed interests making fact-free statements in order to garner the public’s support for their activities, you might want to take a look at what certain “environmental” groups have had to say in recent years.  Actually, first things first: have a look at what an actual scientist (and dozens of his colleagues) has to say about some of the things they have to say.

Although NYPIRG enjoys a favorable reputation — the news media frequently cite the group’s views on environmental and consumer issues — an examination of its record proves the group to be a significant public liability. In 1997, prompted by my research into five NYPIRG studies,1 fifty-eight of my fellow science professors issued a statement citing NYPIRG for scientific research misconduct.2 NYPIRG earned this censure through its consistent use of dishonest methodology: the group selectively reported or altered data and ignored scientific control, thereby reporting conclusions that were arbitrarily chosen rather than analytically derived.3 About a year later, proving that leopards don’t change their spots, NYPIRG issued a statement on lead poisoning that the New York City Council on Health Priorities, an affiliate of the American Council on Science and Health, characterized as “misleading to the public and unscientific in its basis.”4

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Posted in Solid Waste | Tagged: , , , , | 3 Comments »

Head Shot

Posted by wastedenergy on May 25, 2010

Tomorrow BP is going to finally try to kill this blasted oil well for good.  About time, for sure: for the first month or so, it seemed like all they were trying to do was collect 5,000 barrels per day of what was spilling out into the Gulf of Mexico (so they could keep selling it to us fiends), as if that would somehow stop the other 65,000.  But will it even work?  We all know what Yoda says about “trying,” after all…

Probably not, BP CEO Tony ‘the Tanker’ Hayward has already warned us.  Here is a company we know likes to hedge its bets, considering that if that whole oil thing doesn’t work out, they may already be set to go into the advertising business.  But in any case, they are prepared to “try” their hardest to finally get this thing under control by, essentially, plugging it from the top.  The actual procedure, though, is a little bit more complicated than the above description might make it sound.  Here is what one of my favorite energy websites, TheOilDrum (TOD), had to say about the “top kill” to be attempted tomorrow:

This involved
* cutting off the choke and kill line connectors
* Cutting the bolts on a flange
* Removing the clamp
* Removing the pipe flange end
* Buffing and cleaning the pipe end
* Preparing to attach the new jumper lines. (This had to be done for each feed line)
* A special hydraulic connector attached to the 150-ft jumper cables was used to latch onto the old inlets. This is slow work (as the video shows) and as a result this part of the work has taken seven days. (The jumper shown in the video was attached on the 16th and chained down into position on the 17th.)

If BP is truly up to the task (and based on what we have seen from them so far, I have my doubts), this could be the end of the eruption, although not before an enormous, essentially immeasurable level of destruction has already taken place from the vast and, just as important, rapid and concentrated, eruption of light crude, methane and tar that has already made its way up into the ocean and is now quickly but surely making its way around the Florida Keys, southward towards Cuba, and very possibly up into the Gulf Stream to reach the eastern shores of Florida and the rest of the Atlantic Coast.

I cannot compete with the level of technical analysis on this subject that goes on over on TOD, so instead I will offer philosophy.

The most common responses to the disaster seem to be dismay, disgust, and perhaps most commonly, resignation.  “Well, it’s certainly terrible, but it seems inevitable because we have just gotta have oil.  We can’t live without it.”  Really?  We did for millions of years.  I think we can manage.  As I see it, dismay, disgust, and even outrage are entirely appropriate responses.  Resignation to business as usual is not.  We need real responsibility here, and not just for BP, the largest culprits.  Unlike in a truly natural disaster, we are all guilty in at least some sense.

These sorts of events are not going away anytime soon.

So here is another kind of “top kill,” which I will offer in response to those who neglect or deny their personal duty to work for real alternatives.  I call it a “brain shot”; it consists of smacking sense into people, and it is the only cure I know for the epidemic of ignorance that must be responsible for those who think the appropriate response to a human-made disaster of this magnitude and for which each of us bears at least some responsibility is to fritter away time watching television and going about business as usual.

Collective responsibility must be cause for collective action, not collective denial, neglect, or resignation.  What is the answer to our oil dependence as a society?  I do not have any single solution to this problem.  It will be more complicated to address than our addiction to fossil fuels for electric power generation, for instance, which can actually be solved fairly easily through deployment of renewable energy technologies in combination with viable, scalable energy storage and load balancing systems such as pumped-storage hydroelectricity.  Substitute fuels alone, such as ethanol made from natural gas, will not do the trick; we need some combination of re-localization of our economies, mass transit, renewable and next-generation fuels, and a rethinking of global mass consumption culture.

We might even need a little bit of good old-fashioned crunch time to solve the problem…after all, what could be better for drilling the idea into people’s heads that you can’t drill your way out of a hole?

As Albert Einstein put it so aptly: we cannot solve problems with the same type of thinking we used when we created them.  So, will the “top kill” work?  Probably not, suggests the available evidence, although for the sake of the Gulf and its residents both human and wild, we can hope so.  Will it work to solve the root cause of the problem, the one that created this symptom in the first place?  The answer to that one we know for sure: no, we need a much better – and even deeper – shot to the head.

Unlike a regular volcano, this disaster would have been entirely preventable…if we knew how to use our heads.

Posted in Energy Consumption, Water and Soil | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Ten Things I Hate – And Ten Things I Love – About Washington, DC

Posted by wastedenergy on May 25, 2010

It’s always good to count one’s blessings.  And as we learn from other local blogs like Greater Greater Washington, there are many things for which to be thankful and appreciate about living in the Washington, DC area.  However, as the authors of GGW aptly point out, there are also a number of ways we could make our home even greater too!  So without any further ado:

Ten Things I Hate:

10. Pedestrian walk signals that suddenly drop from 30 seconds of crossing time down to 3 – even when pedestrians are about to enter the crosswalk.  Just one more sign of how traffic engineers believe only cars matter, and pedestrians are nothing but an obstacle…

9. Drivers who don’t watch where they are going, especially those who ignore pedestrian cross signals when they have a green light (or sometimes even a red).  Lots of folks around here seem to be lost in their own little worlds, which is not good when you are driving around two tons of steel…

8. Jumbo Slice.  It might be good for absorbing the kind of swill people love to down late at night in Adams Morgan, or possibly mopping the floor, but not much else (especially the next morning).

7. The Red Line.  Need I say more?

6. Litter all over the gutters and in Rock Creek.

5. People who assume I have money to hand out to them just because I’m white(-looking).

4. Tea Partyists who use our fair city as a stomping ground for their thoughtless protests without seeming to notice our official license plate slogan: Taxation Without Representation!  These sorts really need to pick up a history book sometime and learn what the original Boston Tea Party was about (and maybe a little bit about the cleanup effort afterwards, too).

3. Georgetown types – there was a movement afoot a few years ago for this part of town, which refused a subway line, to secede from the District of Columbia.  Can we bring that back?  Pretty please?

2. Lobbyists, far too many of ‘em (and I mean the oil and gas type).

1. The way we handle our trash.  Or rather, the way we DON’T – we send it to landfills in southern Virginia!  Meanwhile, waste-to-energy plants are humming away in the background doing their thing in Arlington, Fairfax, and Montgomery Counties, while we still use a coal-fired power plant build in 1908 – 1908!!! – to heat and cool the Capitol. 

The power of dinosaurs is alive and well in this town.

But now, it’s best not to get down on everything, so here are Ten Things I Love:

10. It is an eminently walkable and bikeable city (at least until the traffic engineers get their way).  It is quite easy to get from one place to another, and if you need to cover any serious distance – well, that’s why transit was invented!

9. (Most of) our transit system.  For those times when you need to get somewhere but don’t want to deal with the stress and hassle of driving around a car (who does, really?) – you can just relax with a good book!  And even though we might have ghost trains from time to time, it does a pretty good job of getting you from Point A to Point B, and probably faster than if you were sitting in DC traffic.

8. Real farmers markets (check out DuPont Circle on Sunday sometime) and an overall strong – and growing - organic and other “real food” culture.

7. Our awesome buses.  Essentially everything from the past two years is a hybrid, and looks totally baller to boot.

6. Petworth and everything about it, except maybe the shootings, and all the illegal dumping.

5. Awesome free museums, especially Natural History.  Locals often don’t do enough to take advantage of these (not to mention the Library of Congress).

4. You’re never far from a hole-in-the-wall Salvadoran food joint.  Nom nom nom!

3. The dense concentration of smart people in the area, more than you can find almost anyplace else in the world.  You can learn a lot here just from talking with the person sitting next to you (or serving you) at any given bar or coffee shop.

2. Amsterdam Falafel!  Contrary to what some hipsters who love to rag on everything nice might have you believe, it’s not overrated at all: falafel is all about the texture, and this place has the best in town, hands down.

1. Lots of young and hip (and even attractive) folks seem to have materialized out of the ether around here recently.  Some have called this the “Obama Effect,” which I think may be accurate, considering things were definitely different when I first moved here back in 2007!

What are you waiting for – hop on board the Party Bus!

Posted in Urban Planning | Tagged: , , , , | 1 Comment »

Hello Nasty

Posted by wastedenergy on May 24, 2010

So, mainstream media, where you been?  It’s time to get that funky stuff out the dungeon…and by that, I mean trash, of course.  Anyway, here is my Song for The Man: we need to do more to take advantage of America’s own energy source.  Everyone knows how much we love to consume, and now that you’ve got what you want, you want more.  So how do we get more?  By burning the rest, of course…

The Reciprocating Grate: nobody can do it like Mixmaster can!

I say, it’s time we start Disco Breakin’ from the habit of piling up our solid waste in landfills, which, while less polluting than they were a few decades ago, still do release a fair bit of methane and can get expensive once local capacity is used up and we start making The Move to long hauling waste to remote landfills.  And while this energy source may not be crazy sniffable, it is more reliable for base loading power generation, not to mention industrial process and residential and business district heating (and cooling) than those ill peripherals, wind and solar energy.  Unlike intermittent energy sources, which require some form of backup generating capacity or energy storage, increasing the costs of power generation and technical challenges of system reliability, this one is a Sure Shot.  Now, I don’t mean to suggest that other renewables aren’t useful too, but base loading renewables?  Those are a rare breed…and what could be more reliable than trash?  It’s a good way to Electrify the grid, and what more could you really want?

For those who are not quite comfortable with the idea of burning trash, let me introduce you to the Subsurface Landfill Fire.  Unlike a waste-to-energy plant, a landfill comes with only a cover layer of soil to filter fumes from burning garbage, and not a whole lot else.  Inhale this stuff, and it might be a long time before you’re Sneaking Out the Hospital.  And try as we might, it’s not always possible to keep every hot load out of landfills: people have a Nasty habit of tossing out their lit cigarette butts, hot grill charcoals, and other still-burning wastes together with the other combustibles, and it is often just a matter of time before some of that ends up in a landfill.  Once a subsurface fire starts, it can spread quickly and becomes expensive and difficult to manage, much more so than a fire in a WTE waste storage bunker that can be handled by the facility’s emergency sprinkler systems.  In fact, these fires can burn for years or even decades at a time.  So WTE haters, let’s try to negotiate, shall we?  Don’t make me put shame in your game…

Landfill Fires: we be gettin’ stupid in your area…

So here I am with the master plan: let’s invest in this clean energy infrastructure, which produces more substantial offsets of climate change pollution emissions than any other energy source per megawatt of installed capacity, which has a capacity factor as high as 95%, and which produces an order of magnitude more useful energy than the next best method of handling trash.

Trash Combustion: tell me party people, is that so wrong? 

And unlike White Castle fries, they come in more than one size:

Olmsted County, MN WTE Expansion under construction: whether it’s 200 tons per day or 3,000, combustion can keep your Body Movin’!

Posted in Energy Production, Solid Waste | Tagged: | 2 Comments »

The Dark Side

Posted by wastedenergy on May 24, 2010

We hold these truths to be self-evident: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  And thus begins the story of what is known as “the curse of free energy.”  What could offer absolute power more directly than the ancient blood of a mighty star, captured and buried in enormous reservoirs for eons in porous rock formations miles below the surface of a blue planet teeming with life.  Slowly but surely, tiny slivers pushed themselves up through fractures in the Earth’s crust, augmented by natural water drive to offer themselves to those tempted to supplant energy sources thousands of years old with its awesome, unimaginably dense heating power, a totalized system based upon the combustion of fossil fuels, and nothing else, even to construct a mythology to support just such a system, the religion of endless growth in oil production…

Hai!

Snap forward to May 1988.  We stand at the northern edge of Haradh, the southernmost portion of Saudi Arabia’s mighty Ghawar oilfield, the greatest ever discovered in the history of the Galaxy.  The story of Ghawar is a microcosm embodying the history of the entire oil industry, with the transition to production of ever more technically difficult resources and the emergence of technical problems to be solved and an ever-more-complex support infrastructure designed to delay its collapse.  But soon enough, the collapse begins nevertheless.  Haradh, mothballed for nearly a decade to allow reservoir pressure to rebuild in its low-permeability rock, begins to show promise once more.  As 3-dimensional seismic pings reveal ever more detailed data points to model the complex geology and hydrology of Ghawar, super-permeable zones are mapped, those same fractures that once allowed the lightest and most easily recoverable oil to flow to the surface.  In Haradh, the most challenging region of Ghawar, it turns out that many of these fractures are physically supported by high reservoir pressure itself, and as production recommences in this Spring of 1988, a sudden collapse in pressure causes the fractures to suddenly collapse in a human-induced earthquake, making addictional oil recovery in the future even more difficult.  We have written the story of our own collapse in the most physical possible sense…

Meanwhile, in North Uthmaniya, another region of Ghawar and once home to great reserves of easily recoverable light crude, the same seismic modeling technology begins to reveal mighty impermeable and insoluble mats of thick tar blocking the injected waterflood that was once thought to be sweeping oil away from the field’s fringes and toward producing wells.  And nothing can dissolve them: benzene, toluene, steam flooding…nothing works.  And the new and improved horizontal well completions that have become standard industry practice turn out to be more vulnerable to water infiltration from the same high-permeability geologic zones that once carried oil so easily, especially when reservoirs are flooded with water, which all too often simply stays in place where injected, or worse, bypasses the oil it was supposed to be pushing forward and proceeds directly to the wellhead.  It turns out that some of the technological improvements we thought were helping were actually making our job more difficult all along and stand poised to speed the oilfield’s post-peak collapse.  And the rocks, it turns out, prefer to carry water, our true lifeblood, rather than oil…

Hmm, tar mats…where else have we seen those?

Posted in Energy Consumption, The Ether | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

The Money Hole

Posted by wastedenergy on May 23, 2010

Remember that hole in the ozone layer?  You don’t have to: it’s still here, which goes to show that just because a problem stopped getting attention from the mainstream media, that doesn’t mean it actually disappeared.

But the crippled ozone layer is another topic for another day.  Today we’ll discuss another hole that involves a lot of radiation getting under our skin, which, as usual, goes hand-in-hand with politicians’ willful ignorance of facts.  And this time, it’s not just a physical hole we’ve created, but a financial one as well.  Let’s kick this one off with a the classic intergenerational hot potato, which supporters of nuclear power love to ignore or deny exists: the problem of waste disposal.  It is not just high-level waste, i.e. spent fuel, that must be properly managed as solid waste.  Decommissioned plants themselves also present a problem, which explains why no full-size nuclear power plants have yet been decommissioned.  The on-again-off-again solution that has been proposed for long-term waste disposal, as opposed to “temporary” on-site waste storage that has been used for the entire history of the nuclear power industry, is of course the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada, which government and industry geologists tell us can safely hold large quantities of waste for millions of years.  Can we trust them?


Deeper and deeper into the hole we go…

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Posted in Energy Production, Solid Waste | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Alien Versus Predator

Posted by wastedenergy on May 23, 2010

Take cover, we’re under attack!  Killer plants from Pluto!  Radioactive hamsters from Mars!  Is it time to bring out the big guns yet?  Or perhaps the answer is to breed some kind of genetic supermutant killer that can tear through them as fast as they come up…

Let me introduce you to a few of the core cast of this terrible thriller with its roots in the 1970′s – specifically, the 1970′s expansion of globalization driven by the World Bank and its cheerleaders in Congress, who insisted that there could be no wrong to come from a more interconnected world.  Whether they arrive in shipping crates from China or originate in Pike’s Nursery as intentional imports…we’ve got quite an invasion on our hands these days.

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Posted in Agriculture and Food, Climate Change, Water and Soil | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Jurassic Pork

Posted by wastedenergy on May 21, 2010

One of the most common myths perpetuated by dinosaurs in both industry and politics today is that renewable energy, as compared with fossil fuels, is nothing but a subsidized bubble industry that cannot compete on its own.  Such a belief could not be further from the truth, and it flies in the face of facts on the ground (and up in the air) about what renewables can and cannot do, and the sorts of energy we do and do not need today.  So without any further ado, let’s get right to the facts, which I’ll give to you straight, since I am not beholden to any political interest, and nobody is paying my way to write this article (sidebar: any potential sponsors interested?  Don’t worry, I’ll still call you out when you fail too, but I’m more than happy to take some of your money in the meantime).

“Just let the free market sort things out” is the sort of line you hear a lot from supporters of Big Oil these days, as if that didn’t include pricing currently unpaid externalities like that whole carbon thing.  Well, it is worth noting that the largest producer of oil in the world, Saudi Aramco, is a nationalized firm that produces more oil than any other country or company in the world: Exxon, eat your heart out!  And as easy as it might be to criticize Saudi Arabia for being backwards when it comes to the country’s teatment of women or its attitude toward the Jewish people, to its credit, it has actually been a responsible steward of the Jurassic-era oil resources found in larger and more extensive deposits there than anyplace else in the world – a far better steward, in fact, than the original owners of Aramco, private American businesses like Exxon and Standard Oil of California who caused permanent damage to oil reservoirs by overproducing them in the 1970′s, during the waning years before they knew control over the company would be transferred to the Saudi government.  As a result of their shenanigans, oil fields like Ghawar, which has historically produced well over half of all Saudi oil, will never be able to produce as much as they could have if those developing the fields had been responsible and closed the valves on producing wells when necessary in order to prevent the water infiltration and formation of gas caps that make this oil so much more expensive to produce today.  Where do you think the name Aramco came from?  I’ll tell you: it is shorthand for the Arabian American Oil Company.  So whenever we start to come to terms with the most serious consequences of the decline in Saudi oil production, you’ll know where to point the finger: at those short-term-profit-motivated businessmen who forced it upon us.

Older than dirt…

Speaking of dirt, I’ve got some on the coal companies too.  It’s not just subsidies (a few billion dollars a year) for research on pie-in-the-sky “clean coal” notions that sap taxpayer dollars for this energy source that is older than the hills.  You know those lovely coal trains you see criss-crossing every corner of this great nation?  Well, those run on railroads, as it turns out, and railroads are not free.  Someone has to pay for them, and that usually means you and me, the taxpayers.  Schemes to hide the costs of transporting coal through subsidies are, like coal itself, nothing new: they are almost as ancient as the industry itself.  But our legacy of enslavement to this dirty energy source did not end with the Civil War.  It continues today, as railroad owners like the Tarbutton family of Georgia lobby in favor of constructing new coal generating capacity (and against the use of renewable energy sources like biomass) in order to ensure continued government funding for railroads to transport the product to facilities like Plant Washington in Sandersburg, GA.

Who do you think paid for that railroad?  Pro Tip: not CSX.

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Posted in Climate Change, Energy Consumption | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

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