For the gift of Fracking. So, what do you suppose the world will look like if we keep this up for the next hundred years or so?
Archive for June, 2010
Thanks, Halliburton
Posted by wastedenergy on June 30, 2010
Posted in Air, Solid Waste, Water and Soil | Tagged: all fracked up, natural gas, san juan basin | Leave a Comment »
Intermittency Revisited Part II: Intermittency Is Fine
Posted by wastedenergy on June 29, 2010
So, let’s assume a worst case scenario for what will happen when we are forced to take that fossil fuel stick out of our arm, one way or another. There will be a large buildup of technologies to take advantage of renewable resources, to be sure. That much is inevitable. But let us assume that what the critics say is true, and there really are times when we will be unable to balance supply of electricity precisely against “demand.” Even with high voltage direct current transmission lines, the wind stops blowing across an entire continent, including offshore, and suddenly we are left without power.
What we have here is not a situation without precedent. Think hard, back to your childhood. Remember what you did after a big storm or whatever happened and suddenly you and your family were left without electricity for a few hours, maybe even a few days. What did you do? If you were like me, this is what you did: you dealt with it. You spent time with your family, went for walks, played board games, played with your pets, talked to each other. In other words, you relearned that long-lost concept of “community.”
It was not so bad then, and if we have to deal with it in the future, it still will not be so bad. Being without electricity, or even being without a car, is not nearly as catastrophic as some make it out to be, those known in the community that actively discusses energy as “doomers.” They believe that without constant access to all of our technology, our civilization will completely fall apart. Some also believe that even a small decline in the availability of today’s highest-quality energy resource, petroleum, will trigger unmanageable financial difficulties, a collapse of credit, and sooner rather than later, a crash in many or all of the technologies upon which people have come to rely. These prophets of doom seem to think they have a window into the future to which others, the vast majority of people, are not privy. Now, granted, there is a grain of truth to what they are saying, in the sense that business-as-usual cannot continue, certainly not indefinitely. But there is a great fallacy in assuming that business-as-usual is a prerequisite for civilization. At best they get the endgame picture wrong. They forget that there was a time before fossil fuels, that we might become self-aware in our predicament, that we might change course, that we might reform our financial systems and our energy production systems to compensate for the loss of high-quality fuels drilled from the depths. They forget that coal and oil also had to grow from an initial point of zero, in the process dismissing the viability of renewable energy sources. And at worst, their analysis causes us to foreclose our future and submit to the inevitability of some kind of new stone age, abandoning our efforts to create meaningful substitutes that can keep us alive, reasonably prosperous, and happy.
I think we can survive without electricity, even for multiple days at a time. Even under such extreme circumstances as widespread blackouts, and even under the most extremely pessimistic supply scenarios for both renewables and conventional energy sources, we can keep enough backup power to run our essential infrastructure, like hospitals and wastewater treatment plants, especially as we learn to run them in a more energy-efficient manner. And as for our infrastructure, we have the technology, and we CAN rebuild it. We can summon the political will and remain realistic in our expectations of the technology. We can teach each other to stop wasting energy, even very large quantities of it. The attitude that some doomers display demonstrates the old adage that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. We should not be cowed into submission by the scale of the problem, but rather use it as a rallying point to demand that our leaders wake up to the world around them. For if there is one thing that doomers and cornucopians have in common, it is that they both have their heads in the sand.
“Nope, no sunlight here!”
Posted in Energy Consumption | Tagged: blackouts, efficiency, solar ostrich, who cares, wind | Leave a Comment »
Intermittency Revisited
Posted by wastedenergy on June 27, 2010
One of the most common claims made by renewable energy skeptics, primarily those who are unfamiliar with the technical details of how utility power supply is managed, is that the most scaleable renewable energy sources, wind and solar energy, will never be able to replace fossil fuels because their power output is “intermittent,” presumably in contrast to the supposed constant output of coal and nuclear plants or the controllable output of gas plants currently employed to serve peak demand. Does this claim hold up upon closer inspection?
In a word, no.
There are several reasons that the variable output of wind and solar energy systems is not as big a deal as detractors of these technologies claim. For one thing, peak solar availability happens to coincide with peak electricity demand. Wind variability can be addressed through geographic dispersion as well as through utilizing higher quality winds for higher capacity factors, especially offshore. While you will need some source of power at any given moment to ensure that a flick of a switch turns on the lights, it is fallacious to jump from there to the conclusion that the grid relies on any given plant to operate 24/7/365 for its reliability. As I and other observers have pointed out previously, it never has and does not today. Wind farms integrated into the grid are reliable; one wind turbine is not and does not need to be. Grid operators are able to adapt today to considerable intermittence in demand; dealing with variable output from renewables, which can be reliably forecast, is not really any more challenging and probably considerably less challenging than dealing with, say, the sudden forced outage of a coal or nuclear plant and its thousands of megawatts of output all at once. Suffice to say, no power plant of any type has a 100% capacity factor and all types go down for both planned and unplanned outages. Because of the inherent intermittency of all energy sources, including “base loading” sources like coal and nuclear, we have already built considerable redundancy into our electric generating system. This redundancy, which acts as a sort of “reliability insurance” for the grid, comes in the form of backup power, spinning reserve, and energy storage, the last of which already exists at utility scales and is not a myth, contrary to popular belief. As we move from fossil fuels to renewables to power the electric grid, having all of these systems already in place will ease the transition.
Share of annual new installed power generating capacity in the U.S. by technology type. If wind turbines can’t be relied upon, how come people seem to keep buying so many of them these days?
But even to the extent that dispersed renewables (wind and solar) give variable aggregate output when integrated into the grid, such variation is far from impossible to manage. We will still have gas-fired peaking plants and other fueled plants for some time; they won’t suddenly disappear just because supply of a fuel begins to decline. There is no reason we cannot continue using these plants for load balancing for the time being, and under a scenario of intensive renewables deployment, these plants will be run far less and consume far less fossil fuel than if the renewables were not in place. As supply issues and greenhouse gas emission constraints become important factors in energy policy, we will use more pumped-storage hydropower for load balancing to replace peaker plants, upgrading our existing hydro plants to produce more output and installing pumping capabilities as well as building seawater-based pumped-storage systems. All of this technology is already proven today.
And finally, lest we forget, there actually are renewables that provide base-loading or on-demand power, which, granted are not as scaleable as wind or solar, but which are improving by leaps and bounds as well. The available range of resources for renewable resources such as geothermal and pumped-storage hydro is increasing dramatically due to both the rising price of conventional energy technologies and due to technological advances such as advanced geothermal drilling techniques and development of underground aquifer- and ocean-based pumped-storage. More and more geographic areas are bound to begin taking advantage of the base loading renewables that complement wind and solar energy: hydropower, geothermal, and of course, my personal favorite.
Posted in Energy Production | Tagged: solar, wind | 4 Comments »
Closer Than We Think
Posted by wastedenergy on June 26, 2010
Back in 1960, nobody could have imagined our atmosphere would retain so much radiation that we’d be able to use our own sun as that giant thermonuclear pump.
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
Wild Blue Yonder
Posted by wastedenergy on June 25, 2010
Over the past two months and change, we have seen what happens when overconfidence and a rush to generate quick profits takes precedence over practical considerations, particularly in projects involving new technology in hostile environments. The saga of Deepwater Horizon has now been told far and wide and is likely to shape the fortunes of the offshore oil and gas drilling industry for years to come. What has received far less attention (read: virtually none at all) is the deepwater disappointment turned up by BP’s “other” big rig in the Gulf. As it turns out, there is plenty of oil down there, but we seem to be having a bit of difficulty actually getting it out of the ground and into tankers and pipelines. So, let’s head down and see what’s happening just a few short miles further off the coast…
Welcome to Thunder Horse PDQ, the world’s largest semi-submersible offshore drilling platform at a gross weight of 60,000 tons, moored in over 6200 feet of water 150 miles from New Orleans in the Mississippi Canyon region of the Gulf of Mexico. Originally named Crazy Horse, the field over which the platform sits was discovered in 1999 and is estimated to contain several billion barrels of crude oil (the name of the field was later changed to Thunder Horse out of respect for the descendents of the actual Crazy Horse, who was in fact a real person). Cornucopians hailed the field’s discovery as the herald of the latest and greatest efforts to head off an oil supply crunch in the United States, where domestic production peaked in 1971 and which has become increasingly reliant on imports ever since. The size of the find made it the largest oil discovery in U.S. territory since the Prudhoe Bay field was discovered on Alaska’s North Slope in the 1970′s and the first “supergiant” oilfield discovery since that time.
Main Thunder Horse production platform listing after being struck by Hurricane Dennis in 2005
Fast-forward to 2010. The main producing structure at Thunder Horse, pictured above, was designed for a maximum production of 250,000 barrels of oil, along with 200 million cubic feet of natural gas, per day, with the expectation that production rates close to these numbers could be sustained for decades. However, production from this, the largest drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico, reached a much lower peak of just 170,000 barrels of oil per day in January 2009, just a few months after the field initially came online. What is even more startling than the platform’s failure to reach its production capacity is the speed at which the peak was reached and its fierce decline thereafter. The usual post-peak decline rate for onshore and shallow-water oilfields is around 8% per year, and observers initially had little reason to suspect this field and others in ultra-deep waters would be much different. However, by December 2009, production had fallen to a mere 61,000 barrels per day before the platform went offline for maintenance, showing a decline of over 50% in just one year.
While the dramatic underperformance of Thunder Horse has largely escaped the notice of mainstream press outlets, it shows that deepwater drilling is very likely not all it has been cracked up to be, even when things go swimmingly. The story has understandably received far less attention than the blowout of the nearby Macondo well in April and subsequent seafloor gusher of some 40,000-80,000 barrels of oil per day. But it underscores the point that the U.S. has banked its energy future on a technology wherein substantial uncertainties still remain not only regarding environmental impacts, but also the ability of wells to produce anywhere near predicted levels. Other deepwater fields have experienced similar rapid peaks and declines, and Thunder Horse, rather than being an exception to the rule of steady production, is merely the most prominent example of an underperforming field. Even if deepwater wells could produce at capacity for a sustained period, a huge number of wells would be needed to offset declines from much larger fields discovered far earlier, such as Saudi Arabia’s ultra-supergiant Ghawar field, estimated to produce some 2 to 5 million barrels per day (official production figures are kept secret by the Saudi government). By comparison, observers have estimated that the Macondo well, had it been completed successfully and come online as planned, would have petered out after producing only some 200 million barrels, or enough to supply the world with oil for a couple of days. Instead it will now take years, possibly decades, for the Gulf of Mexico to recover from the ongoing spill – assuming it recovers at all. And in the case of Thunder Horse, production has continued to fall even as many new wells have come online. It is little wonder that BP has chosen not to report on this field and deferred its official statements until the end of this year, although the production numbers so far are readily available thanks to the company’s required reporting to the U.S. Minerals Management Service.
Taken together, the stories of Macondo and Thunder Horse paint a grim picture of the outlook for deepwater oil production. When things go right, the outcome is often disappointing; when things go wrong, the outcome is disaster. It is entirely justified to question whether such small gains in production are remotely worth the now-all-too-obvious risks. Those who would argue against the pursuit of efficiency, curtailment of unnecessary consumption, and alternative energy technologies particularly to replace oil-dependent transportation platforms, must realize that such a business-as-usual scenario may very well entail no business at all, whether for communities reliant on fishing and tourism for income or for the oil companies themselves.
Posted in Energy Production | Tagged: deepwater drilling, Macondo, peak oil, Thunder Horse | 1 Comment »
Nuclear Bombs
Posted by wastedenergy on June 22, 2010
Something I find endlessly amusing is the number of Libertarian types who have positioned themselves in energy discussions as staunch advocates of nuclear power. While support for such a high-technology energy production system jibes well with their general techno-optimist outlook, the supporters of nuclear power have ignored time and again the considerable evidence that nuclear energy cannot stand on its own in a free market and requires some form of state ownership of the electrical system. In a pure market system, there is little reason to use anything other than coal power, or whatever energy source has the lowest levelized costs per megawatt-hour – decidedly not nuclear power. Today, there are essentially no serious observers of the energy markets who believe that nuclear power can compete with its alternatives absent some sort of subsidy or incentive.
The 2005 Energy Policy Act provided support for the immense capital cost of constructing new nuclear plants, in the form of subsidized loan guarantees to provide 80% debt financing for the construction of new facilities. Only 20% of the cost of new nuclear plants would be borne by private equity investors. And has this incentive proven successful in attracting investors to nuclear power, in sparking a revival of the U.S. nuclear power industry, whose most recently completed plant was originally ordered in 1973? In a word, no: even the 80% loan guarantees have proven insufficient to overcome the aversion of private investors to the immense financial risks, in the form of vast cost overruns and delays, associated with building nuclear plants. Meanwhile, wind and other renewables have managed to capture about half the market for new installed capacity, even as “advanced nuclear” power happens to benefit from the same incentives as renewables under EPAct. The only places where nuclear energy thrives are those where state control over markets is effectively able to crowd out alternatives or where authorities have dictated high prices for carbon emissions – hardly a strong case for the technology standing on its own in a free market. Even high carbon prices do nothing to make nuclear energy competitive with the renewable energy sources with which it would compete in a carbon-constrained market, e.g. wind power, efficiency, or base-loading renewables like biomass or geothermal.
An excellent and well-cited paper by Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute showed in 2009 that nuclear power is not economical compared to a full-on wind/solar build and crowds other potential options off the table thanks to its exorbitant capital costs. Another analysis by the Congressional Budget Office recently showed that nuclear energy cannot compete with conventional coal- or gas-fired technologies either, at least not without a considerable price on carbon on the order of $45/ton. This paper also shows that it will take a monumental (and expensive) effort to even maintain the current output of nuclear power at roughly 7% of global primary energy supply, and that it likely would not even be possible to expand beyond that even if nuclear did become cost-competitive, thanks to bottlenecks in the supply chain and skilled engineering/design positions and the exceedingly long lead time for planning and construction. So even if we wanted to go for a full-on nuclear build, we couldn’t – at least not for the next 10-15 years. Even France, whose (state-owned) utility has gone the route of the full nuclear build experienced a 3.5-fold increase in the real capital costs of building new plants between 1970 and 2000. And while Areva and nuclear power supporters like to point out that France sells excess nuclear power to its neighbors, the part they do not mention is that the reason they do this (at bargain-basement rates) is that nuclear is difficult to ramp up and down according to demand and they need a way to shed power from their almost entirely base-loading (80% nuclear) system at night when that power is not needed. France also buys (much more expensive) power from Spain and Germany’s wind farms during the summer and afternoon peak periods when their nuclear capacity is not enough to meet demand. There are other areas where the steady output of nuclear power is a sign of its its shortcomings rather than its virtues: in some instances, utilities may force power generated by wind and other renewables to be “spilled” (i.e. wasted rather than sold into the grid) because at times of high availability, the energy made available by such facilities exceeds demand when added onto production from nuclear plants, and it would be expensive and create additional operational safety risks to ramp nuclear output up and down with demand.
A common argument supporters make in favor of nuclear power and against renewables such as wind is that these sources cannot provide ”base loading” capacity because of their natural variability. However, such a view ignores a key fact: the grid does not depend, and has never depended, for its reliability on the ability of any one plant to produce power 24/7/365. Read that sentence again if you need. If it did, we’d have widespread grid failures all the time because 500-MW nuclear plants can shut down suddenly and without warning, which requires a lot more standby power than if a few turbines on a wind farm stop turning. In other words, utilities already must maintain spinning reserve, backup power, and energy storage – those things that critics like to point out are required for wind and other intermittent renewables. These systems are, in fact, already required: for instance, the U.S. has around 30 GW of pumped-storage hydro capacity and is building more, not because of the emering wind market but just to firm up conventional plants. Reliability is a property of all plants on the grid taken together rather than a simplistic “one plant serving one load” model, which is why wind, for instance, can and does provide reliable power. System operators have learned to simply treat variations in available wind power the same way they are accustomed to treating fluctuating demand: by using the same merit order dispatch system used to balance production with demand today. The largest difference in a system based largely on renewables is that unlike unscheduled shutdowns of coal and nuclear plants, variability in weather patterns that result in reduced availability of wind or solar power can be forecast – and adapted to – more easily than can the sudden shutdown of hundreds of megawatts all at once.
In any case, the numbers behind the case for nuclear just don’t add up, whether compared to conventional, fossil-fueled generation alternatives or to the renewable energy sources such as wind, geothermal, and biomass that are emerging as the largest part of today’s power markets. The requirements for nuclear energy are antithetical to the goals of free-market supporters: repressive state control over the electric system and subsidies to hide the real costs of building and operating nuclear plants. In the real world, as opposed to the ideological fantasy world in which most nuclear energy backers seem to reside, that translates into limited funds for alternative energy being diverted, leaving real and cost-competitive alternatives with no option but to run for cover and wait out the nuclear assault on a viable energy future.
So why do governments continue to provide support for maintaining and in some cases even expanding the nuclear energy sector, even in spite of mountains of evidence showing that its economics simply do not work? The same reason they always have: nuclear power provides the necessary haze of ambiguity that allows states to build the fuel enrichment and processing infrastructure needed for nuclear weapons, while maintaining state control over the energy system to support nuclear power itself provides an effective means of quite literally keeping power out of the hands of the people.
Nuclear bombed as early as the 1960′s…so can we stop worrying and love its alternatives now?
Posted in Energy Production | Tagged: economics, nuclear, subsidies, wind | Leave a Comment »
The Ring of Power
Posted by wastedenergy on June 17, 2010
So it seems things have approached full circle. The public has long been blind(ed by the powers that be) to the consequences of unfettered subservience to both the power and the constraints of the fuel that had exploded and ignited a growth spree as the world’s population of humans zoomed upward to seven billion, nearly tripling in less than fifty years. The consequences, though, had recently become too monumental to deny or effectively hide any longer, as BP stock dropped just about as fast as a Wall Street trader’s jaw the day he saw a thousand points evaporate from the Dow thanks to a “computer glitch.”
The fuel to which I am referring, of course, is money. What, you didn’t think the modern economy was powered by oil or other fossil fuels, did you? These industries certainly embody considerable force exerted upon the collective choices of humanity, but they are just one part of the game of money in politics that paves the road on which we all travel. Automobiles are far from alone: if you like self-perpetuating money-powered machines of dominance that demean and destroy humanity, try these guys on for size. How do you like that spike since the Reagan years got started? In any case, while there may be a case to be made for the Calorie as humanity’s universal unit of currency, today it is money that talks and buys influence. Or was all that changing, as it became evident that accumulation of what amounted to a stand-in for real wealth could no longer materialize endlessly more and more for the Earth’s inhabitants to consume out of the ether and caused more than a few problems of its own with its pyramid schemes of money insuring money traded for money backed ultimately by nothing?
You can put me out on the streets, put me out with no shoes on my feet, but put me out, put me out, put me out of misery!
To get back to fossil fuels: it might surprise you to learn that the general lack of support for science in the public interest extends well beyond fossil-fuel-funded payouts to sow doubt about the fundamental workings of climate change and supply depletion, into the Public Interest Research Group itself and the public agency into which it and like-minded organizations feed whose mission is to “balance” the public’s interest against the interests of money in industry’s endless profit game, the U.S. Excusing Polluters Agency (EPA). But despite what so-called “experts” employed by nonprofits and government agencies might tell you, more than a few “scientists” have signed onto statements endorsing stated political positions and ignored newer and better research or refused to conduct it themselves. You can thank these Planeteers for the one-size-fits-all Mandatory Greenhouse Gas Reporting Rule, which treats a 100,000 ton-of-CO2 –per-year waste-to-energy plant that generates primarily renewable electricity the same as a 3-million-ton-per-year coal-fired behemoth and imposes the same monitoring requirements and costs on both. You can also thank them for setting fuel economy standards for automakers that allow, for instance, a sale of a hybrid to cancel out the sale of a gas guzzling pickup truck or sport utility vehicle, or for allowing an E-85-capable light truck that burns only 4 gallons of ethanol per year to count as a low-carbon vehicle.
Fortunately, these guys aren’t the only fools on Planet Gaia with ideas for how to move forward with changes that would actually benefit humans and quite possibly their animal friends as well. And since these are public agencies, it might be possible for us, the public, to correct them where they are wrong and set the record straight on what science has to say about, for instance, both the causes and (both economically and environmentally) effective ways of mitigating anthropogenic climate change. Here’s what a few real experts have been saying lately about the real powers that be, and what they might just have in store for us in the coming century, assuming we stop letting politicians get us drunk on ethanol and move on to the real viable technologies that can protect the world from…well, at least the worst parts of the comedown after a fossil fuel binge, if not the whole thing. First, though, fair warning to those who might fear the influence of money in politics: some of these ideas might yet turn out to be (or already are) quite profitable!
So what are we waiting for? Let’s get our heads out of the tar sand and come up with some viable alternatives that can help transition us off unsustainable energy sources, shall we? And I mean to do so without having to transition back to beasts of burden. I summon the power of…
Earth: Electrified Rail
If you need something hauled over land, whether you are trying to get your own rear across town or move a piece of junk across the country, it’s hard to beat the efficiency of a train. In the United States, we sorely lack a high-speed passenger rail network for regional travel, something that exists in virtually every other part of the industrialized world. The U.S. also depends on trucking for long-distance freight hauling far more than Europe or Japan, and the freight rail network in the U.S. is almost entirely diesel-based, while Europe and Japan have connected most of their rail networks to the electric grid and use electricity to power transportation of both people and goods. The advantage of rail electrification is the same as that of using non-petroleum automotive fuels: it helps to decouple the cost of transportation, and the embedded transportation costs of goods, from the volatile price of oil. In theory, an electric-powered rail network could almost entirely replace the current petroleum-dependent highway transportation system and would synergize with the replacement of the existing electric generating capacity with renewable energy sources. Electric rail transit and hauling are also more energy-efficient than trucking and automobile transport, and often cheaper. While a world with extensive electric rail would likely still depend on trucks for short-haul transportation and automobiles for personal transportation in remote locations, it could also displace the vast majority of fuel consumption (urban commutes, long-distance passenger travel and freight hauling) such that it might even be possible to decouple the rest of the automotive transport sector from petroleum dependency via electrification and use of alternative fuels.
There’s a reason knowledgeable investors like Warren Buffett are getting behind rail transport, and electric rail in particular, as the wave of the future.
No need to use diesel power for freight: there’s room for some junk in that trunk.
Next up, we have…
Water: Upgraded Hydropower
Hydroelectricity already provides some 5-10% of all primary energy to humanity, but it has the potential to provide more, and perhaps more importantly, it provides two important services that few or no other renewable energy sources can, both of which bring reliability to the grid: baseload power and energy storage for load balancing. Hydroelectric infrastructure is already widely implemented in many parts of the world, and it can provide nearly the entire electric demand for an area with rapid elevation changes and abundant water resources, e.g. South America or the Pacific Northwest. It is possible to open and close portals and effectively increase or decrease flow to the turbines at any point so long as sufficient head exists in a hydroelectric reservoir. Much of the global hydroelectric infrastructure today is aged, and significant potential exists for upgrading and retrofitting existing reservoirs to produce more electricity, directly replacing aged coal-fired generating stations for baseload power. Such upgrades can often be done at minimal cost if the upgrade merely involves adding more turbines and generators to existing infrastructure. Reservoirs of sufficient capacity can also be built for large-scale energy storage capacity via pumped-storage hydropower, wherein off-peak or excess electricity is purchased and used to pump water upward back into the reservoir. Such systems can also be built using seawater.
Did someone say “aging critical infrastructure?”
OK, we’ve got earth, water, what’s next…
Wind: …Wind Power?
Here in these United States, we happen to have a lot of wind. I know this one is going to WHOOSH right over the heads of those who like to make absurdly out-of-context claims about impacts on wildlife and all that jazz, but the facts also say that it is in fact capable of spinning a fan in reverse to generate power, and that it comes pretty cheap these days. In any case, if you live in the Midwest, a Rocky Mountain state, or along the East Coast, the process goes more or less like so: Step 1 – Build wind turbine. Step 2 – ??? Step 3 – you know the drill. Now rinse, and repeat…a LOT.
Do I have to spell it out for you?
Fire: Kicking it Up a Notch
There has been a good deal of hubbub over “biofuels” in the media over the last several years, from observers like Tom Friedman jumping to demonize any and all uses of a tree for energy as a rape of our poor virgin planet, to rightly deserved skepticism of the value of cornstarch ethanol and other conventional biofuels, particularly when one considers the large quantity of land and resources required to be diverted for production of such a small quantity of fuel. One result of the problems with heavily subsidized, expensive and inefficient “first-generation biofuels” has been a rush for bio-energy developers to issue press releases proclaiming that they hold the key to “next-generation cellulosic biofuels.” Don’t hold your breath. One of the unfortunate truths about the U.S. Department of Ethanol (DOE) is that its biomass program has endlessly promoted such fuels and subsidized research for cellulosic ethanol (at a cost of $30 per gallon) while ignoring the simplest and most cost-effective uses of biomass: as a reliable, renewable source of base loading power, and to provide heating power for homes, businesses, and industries. In combination with energy conservation and uprating hydroelectric power, and especially with a strong commitment to utilizing waste biomass materials as an energy source, it would be feasible to replace a significant portion of our existing coal-fired electric generating capacity, which represents half of all electricity generated in the U.S., with renewable resources. In combination with wind power’s continued expansion, there might be enough electricity available through renewable resources alone to head off the worst effects of fossil fuel depletion and prevent a total collapse of services essential to survival.
If we are to clear our forests in order to grow energy crops, we might do well to consider the energy value of those forests themselves, and the value in conserving them so that they can be harvested sustainably to continually support our energy needs. And someone please tell Mr. Friedman: they grow back.
Earth to Congress and DOE: It’s “Burn, Baby, Burn,” not “Distill, Baby, Distill.”
And last but, though diminutive, not least:
Monkey Power: Kicking the Habit
So what can you, yourself, do to finally make good on our (and our politicians’) collective promise to ourselves to get off oil and other fossil fuels? For one thing, we can use a whole lot less of them. Over the long run it is probably a good idea to figure out alternatives to virtually all our uses of oil, but in the short run personal transportation is the biggest part of the problem. But not all people can or will get by without automobiles, and so we need to have something better than the gasoline-powered behemoths we use today (and probably some alternative to asphalt roads) if we are going to keep cars as an important part of our transportation system, particularly in rural areas where fewer rail lines exist and transit services are less available. So we have the alternative being promoted to replace, or at least begin to phase out, the gasoline powered internal combustion engine: electric vehicles. Here we have a pair of problems: gasoline is too expensive and polluting to remain reliant on it, but electric vehicles suffer performance deficits or drastically elevated costs compared to conventional automobiles and lack both the charging infrastructure and the renewable energy production to back such a system.
Is there a solution to the above dilemma? Well, perhaps the first option is to attack the ICE-versus-electric question from the side. Why not a little bit of both? Specifically, if electric vehicles are unable to compete with ICE-powered vehicles in today’s market, absent some external cost being imposed on gasoline or the price being raised somehow, but gas prices are still high enough to hit consumers in the part of the wallet where it hurts most (specifically, the price of groceries), why not work to improve upon the low efficiency of conventional automobiles, including trucks? Between the low conversion efficiency of internal combustion engines, particularly conventional gasoline spark-ignition engines as compared to compression-ignition diesel, and the sheer bulk of most automobiles, some 98% of the heating value of gasoline is wasted moving a single driver in an car. We can make a good start by (substantially) reducing unnecessary weight from automobiles, using more cars and trucks with energy storage systems to capture lost energy from the wheels in braking or going downhill, and making our vehicles more aerodynamic.
There are all kinds of ways to use fewer fossil fuels that require no sacrifice, save money, and demand nothing more than a little mindfulness, like remembering to turn out the lights when you leave a room. If we learn to live with less, it will hurt less as peak oil burns holes both in our wallets and in the seafloor.
Eliminating wasted energy: that’s no sacrifice!
I think with all this in place, we might just be OK, for the time being at least. So with that said, I’ll hand it back over to you, the reader, to see where you fit into this puzzle. You have to make the choice. The Environmental Protection Agency won’t protect you. What will you do next?
The Power Is Yours!
Posted in Climate Change, Energy Consumption, Energy Production, Urban Planning | Tagged: biomass, conservation, critical infrastructure, electric freight, electric rail, energy, ethanol, horsepower, hybrids, hydropower, Macondo, money, peak oil, pumped-storage, uprated hydro | Leave a Comment »
Everything and the Sink: Net Energy and Society’s Ultimate Return on Investment
Posted by wastedenergy on June 11, 2010
The events transpiring in the Gulf of Mexico have turned a broad section of the public’s attention recently to some of the social, ecological, and economic costs of obtaining the energy sources around which we have built nearly everything. There is an underlying element to all of these costs, and while it does not attract the attention of major media every day, it is embedded in every aspect of society from the ecological catastrophes that can result from careless offshore drilling to the rising costs of credit, insurance, and social services that underlie a healthy, functioning economy. That element is the energy cost of energy; in other words, the quantity of energy wasted in inefficient systems of production, distribution, and consumption, and its derivative, the rate at which energy becomes unavailable to society.
The efficiency of any energy system is limited by two principal factors: the energy cost of energy, and thermodynamic efficiency of energy conversion in the various energy-utilizing machines and infrastructure that do the “useful work,” or exergy, of society. To more effectively identify the impacts of our inefficiencies and find ways of reducing waste and improving efficiency in energy use, we must account for both types of losses. This second component of energetic inefficiency, energetic losses such as the 30% electric efficiency of thermal power plants, losses in refining fuels, grid line losses, and so forth, is the easier for most newcomers to net energy discussions to understand. What has received more attention in circles of folks who follow energy supply issues closely is the question of energy return on investment, or the amount of energy (and other costs) required to procure energy sources themselves, which is also less well understood by the general public, who may have a sense that energy production itself embodies some energy but in general have little sense of its scale, particularly in relation to the quantity of energy available for other tasks or the importance of such a ratio. While our efficiency in utilizing nonrenewable energy resources has slowly but steadily increased over time, the base efficiency of these same nonrenewable resources themselves has rapidly and alarmingly declined. In combination with population growth and supply constraints, the outcome of this trend appears to be an eventual collapse in the availability of energy available to perform all tasks other than retrieving more energy supplies.
In some cases, it may be possible for energy costs in production and processing of a particular energy carrier to exceed its total output, making it an energy sink rather than source; this appears to be the case in using an energy subsidy of natural gas to distill cornstarch ethanol as a substitute liquid fuel, as well as in production of some unconventional oil sources, e.g. using low-quality but abundant (for now) energy from coal to provide electricity for use in refining shale oil. Clearly, it would be difficult if not impossible for any society of biological organisms to thrive for long in a feedback loop generated by a marginal supply of net energy, whether in the form of food scarcity as occurs in the wild or as shocks in the price and supply of energy sources to which we have become accustomed for other uses. For instance, diverting coal for use in producing shale oil in enough quantity to offset a decline in conventional supplies would increase not only the price of oil (by raising its energy and resource costs) but also the price of coal, another supply- and production-rate-constrained resource, as it would trade off with coal’s other uses such as commercial power production (sidebar: for SCII beta testers out there, the above is why you keep hearing “we require more Vespene gas”).
The question of net energy available to society immediately brings to mind further questions about how energy costs and return on investment are calculated for indirect or embedded uses of energy. For example, is it even possible to translate, say, the ecological costs of deepwater drilling to the Gulf of Mexico, into monetary terms, and where does one delimit the extent of the energy price of an environmental cleanup effort? Similarly, how does one incorporate the costs of remediation into a net energy formula for tar sands, when little evidence suggests that remediation at such a scale can presently or ever will take place? Another important example of the challenge of translating costs into the vastly different units of money and energy is infrastructure. Infrastructure, such as pipelines, highways, and the electric transmission and distribution grids, has received much attention in discussions of net energy and energy return on energy invested (EROEI), since calculating EROEI for infrastructure, such as translating the monetary cost of a nuclear plant, for instance, into energy terms, is extraordinarily difficult, yet our use of energy depends critically on such systems being in place.
The challenge in translating money and other indirect costs, such as social welfare and environmental degradation, into energy terms, helps explain why estimates for the EROEI of nuclear plants vary so widely, from those who insist that the technology is a net energy sink to those who insist that the EROEI is higher than virtually any other energy source, in the hundreds. It is almost impossible to get objective information in this area because most observers either seem to exhibit an unfaltering faith in the safety and efficacy of the technology or feel that in no way and under no circumstances could nuclear energy ever be utilized safely or reliably and that it does not even deserve consideration as an energy source. Some of the lower estimates for nuclear EROI have used a rather rough method of finding the energy value of each dollar through a gross comparison of total national or regional energy consumption with GDP. Estimates toward the higher end largely neglect the embodied energy costs of plant components in spite of the fact that these costs are substantial and ultimately quantifiable, even if the quantification may not be simple. In light of the need to somehow reconcile these viewpoints and try to make objective sense of the net energy ratio for nuclear power production, the estimate of around 4:1 or so for nuclear energy (around the same as tar sands) I have seen cited a number of times seems to make sense. But it is just as important, and just as complex a problem, to resolve the question of how much of those 4 units of energy produced by investing 1 unit into nuclear power production actually performs useful work further down the transmission and consumption line.
We can understand intuitively that losses occur all the way down the line from natural resource extraction to the final “useful work” output of a given energy source. In doing so, we see just how little of that final energy available to society does “work” (exergy). Theorists have identified a distinction between EROEI losses due to extracting and refining fuels versus EROEI losses due to thermodynamic laws. I think this is a valid distinction; for instance, the 15% loss in refining oil into gasoline is still exergy, or “useful work,” “useful” in the sense that the energy is doing the work of extracting more energy. On the other hand, the 70% loss in a coal-fired electric generating plant is an energy loss in the form of entropy, i.e. wasted energy that is an inevitable product of any heat engine other than in combined heat-and-power (CHP) plants. These concepts, as I understand them, are distinct but related, and the total losses in net energy are the result of multiplying entropic losses (or “exergetic” efficiency) with losses determined by the energy or fuel costs of obtaining energy or fuel. While entropic losses tend to decline over time through use of better and more efficient technologies, the fuel cost of obtaining fuel continually increases for nonrenewable resources, and seems to more than cancel out gains in efficiency, which are limited by immutable thermodynamic laws in ways that net energy of extraction is not.
To return to the example using nuclear-generated electricity to power a machine, say a refrigerator: many losses of both types occur along the way, from constructing the plant itself (which falls into the extraction/refining category, since it is needed to process fuel rods), fuel costs of extracting and processing nuclear fuel (E/R), thermal efficiency of the nuclear plant (thermodynamic), efficiency of the steam turbine (TD), line losses in the grid (TD) as well as the cost of constructing the grid itself (E/R), and finally the efficiency of the refrigerator itself (TD) and the cost of its raw materials and energy embodied in its production (E/R). Since there are multiple losses or inefficiencies of both types, it is understandable that the issues get conflated. It is important to understand, and be able to separate, both types of inefficiencies in their various incarnations if one wishes to do a “full cost accounting” of any energy system from production to end use. Both the energy needed to extract, produce, and transmit more energy and the inefficiencies in our transformations and uses of that energy make less net energy available to society.
Hopefully this distinction between entropic losses and EROEI losses serves to shed light on the net energy discussion without adding too many additional terms or rendering it overly complex. If there is confusion or conflation between entropic losses and energy costs of energy, it is because these variables, though largely independent, can create a “double whammy” when their effects are multiplied. A change in one variable might also effect changes in the other; consider that the net energy loss accompanying a dramatic EROI decline in an essential industrial fuel, say fuel oil or natural gas, might make it far more difficult to produce efficient steam turbines at the scale needed, or to maintain an efficient distribution grid without significant line losses. Understanding the effects in combination sheds light on the physical basis for why we need such vast quantities of energy, in great excess of what actually gets consumed in your fridge, laptop monitor, or automobile driveshaft.
And we haven’t even begun to get into the real value, or lack thereof, created by different ways of consuming energy, a question entirely apart from our efficiency in consuming it…
Posted in Energy Consumption, Energy Production | Tagged: EROI, net energy, nuclear, peak energy | Leave a Comment »
Shots in the Dark Part II: Heads in the Tar
Posted by wastedenergy on June 10, 2010
Once more, from the top…
As BP struggled to cap its blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico, Tony Hayward struggled to cap his series of media missteps with yet another feather in his cap, and Barack Obama struggled to cap an overblown but nevertheless slow and steady leak in his job approval numbers, little mention was made of any long-term solutions to the oil crisis. No caps to manage the steadily rising price of energy to the lower and middle classes; no caps on growing demand for petroleum products; little to no effort to encourage consumers to keep the gas caps on their Escalades and build efficient urban transit and high-speed rail systems. Let the people of the Gulf starve, the pundits declared: life along the coast may end, but the Party must continue. James Cameron, however, was far from the only offering from Canada’s pit of solutions to the offshore oil crisis as he was airlifted in his limousine to the site of the sunken rig where he would test his latest invention T-99,000, the Well Terminator. Eager businessmen pointed with glee to the piles of gold they had already accumulated from extracting many now-empty barrels of Canadian syncrude from the ancient Rocky Mountain tar fields, though at great cost to the forests and lakes of the region and to the health of the planet’s already feverish climate system. With options running dry and time running short to build viable alternatives, new challenges with new rules emerged in developing ever-more-expensive and technically challenging resources offshore. Saudi Arabia and Russia, two giants that had carried the world’s oil supply for decades, began to enter production declines just as growing demand from China and India had become an important factor in world markets, and supplies from new sources in Central Asia and Africa were less forthcoming and more expensive than investors had been assured during the waning years.
With each passing day the odds appeared to increase that one day soon the oil bubble would finally rupture, and the result would be pistols at dawn…or possibly Warheads at Twilight.
Posted in Energy Production | Tagged: BP, Dr. Doom, Gulf oil spill | Leave a Comment »
Shots in the Dark Part I: Saturday Night at the Movies
Posted by wastedenergy on June 6, 2010
Phew, what a week it’s been! Quite a lot to catch up on: top hats, top kills, top domes, dome pieces, junk shots, top shots, kinky risers, junk kills, more top hats, and of course, mile-long tubes dominated the headlines in this week’s news cycle, much as they have for the past month and a half or so since BP stuck its Halliburton just a little too deep into the Mississippi Canyon and drew the ire of the ancient vengeful oil goddess Macondo. The daily and weekly reiterations of past failed attempts to soothe the goddess were enough to keep the newly fixed attentions of the rubbernecking public at bay, and therefore enough, at least together with continuing trysts with federal bureaucrats, to calm the raging consciences of BP’s senior executives. They were not enough, however, to stem the eruption of blood-red crude emanating from the deep and now arriving as a dried-up black tide daily on the marshes of Louisiana and the beaches of Florida. As thousands of Gulf Coast residents and billions of creatures prayed or cried out silently, little help appeared. Until at least one of those two wells did its job, the only relief in sight was the weekly trip down to the old cinema house. Let’s go see what’s playing tonight!
In spite of much posturing from politicians, daily repetitions of the same loose, softball half-assertions by BP Chief Operations Officer Doug ‘the Love Bug’ Suttles that “we think we might be able to capture some of the oil this time if we just put a hat over it, although we aren’t sure yet,” and CEO Tony ‘the Terrible’ Hayward’s failure to put a cork either in his company’s busted well or in his own increasingly cockamamie statements to the media demonstrating the poor man’s tragic downward spiral into self-destruction, alienation and alcoholism, on the relief front little appeared to be changing. The last and by far best hope for the Gulf rested on a series of yet more tubes, in this case a series of two even more than a mile long. Drilling a relief well, though it is the only proven method of plugging a blown-out offshore oil well at any depth, remains a far more challenging technical feat than many commentators appear to give credit for. In this regard, it is the same as essentially every part of today’s complex modern industrial oil and gas production infrastructure, even in its most basic (onshore) form, requiring a high degree of precision and often multiple attempts, which can take months to complete even after the several months it takes to drill the main shaft of the well.
That well looks like it’s just about the size of those womp rats we used to shoot back home…
Posted in Water and Soil | Tagged: BP, Deepwater Horizon, james cameron, junk shot, nuclear option, oil spill, top kill | 4 Comments »
