<Burgan and the other fields in Kuwait The Oil Drum Reserve Appreciation And Incremental Flows>

66 comments on Will conservation efforts have an effect?

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

| Show without comments | PDF version

Rick on November 14, 2005 - 3:17pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
What if it simply isn't possible to continue our economy in a world where fossil fuels are difficult to obtain?

This is really at the heart of the issue. The world's economy has grown, on average, for centuries, and our fossil fuel consumption has increased in lockstep with it. We can get one-time efficiencies, and be more productive. But can we, as a world economy, grow long-term without using more energy? I doubt it, but I don't think anybody really anybody knows the answer yet.

Could we continue to grow by substituting other forms of energy for oil or natural gas? Sure, if they are available in enough quantity, at an acceptable price, and in usable forms. But the physics, economics, and logistics of pulling this off are unbelievably enormous.

The problem with substitutes
If you look at any aspect of the energy problem, it looks like a house of cards. Half the homes in America heat with natural gas. No gas? Electricity is a substitute heating technology that is feasible and commercialized and ready to go--a best case substitution scenario. Call the contractor, put in a heat pump.

It works fine for one home-expensive, but otherwise quick and fairly easy. But consider scalability. If a large number of people convert, transmission lines overload. Remember the East Coast blackout? So we need to tool up to manufacture a lot of heatpumps, and rebuild the lines, and the substations, and then we need to put in more electricity.

But where do we get the electricity? Can't burn more natural gas, 'cause there isn't any more. So we need to build new power plants using other fuels or renewables of your choice, which takes years, and raises lots of other issues.

We need substitutes, but it's a process that will take decades to do. In the meantime, economies will suffer. We simply do not know how to manage a steady-state economy, or how to manage economic shrinkage in a humane way. There is a lot to learn.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.
Praedor on November 14, 2005 - 4:28pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Geothermal.  Geothermal heating of houses is the only real way to go.  Burn wood/pellets?  Everyone?  Lots of dirty chimneys dumping carbon and soot into the air.  Gas is going to get evermore expensive and NEVER come back down.  Electricity?  One of the worst ways of heating a home there is - really wasteful and merely transfers the pollution/fuel use upstream to electricity generating plants.

 

 The only valid way to properly heat AND cool a house in the coming problematic times will be, for the middle and poorer strata will passive earth - buried or partially buried housing that thermoregulates from the ground.  For those that can afford more elaborate systems is geothermal - drilling deep and laying pipe to transfer cooling/heat from the ground.  

   

I'd LOVE to go geothermal but to retrofit a house with geothermal heating/cooling is extremely expensive.  As it is, I'm rural and my house uses propane and a woodburning stove for heat.  I've been looking into solar heating, at least for water.  It is too expensive to retrofit for solar home heating as well as water heating.  


 

Passive geothermal or deep geothermal are the easiest.  You could try to sell people on it by tapping into the Lord of the Rings movies:  homes and communities built along the lines of Hobbitown.  

Comments can no longer be added to this story.
mcain6925 on November 14, 2005 - 7:12pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
The only valid way to properly heat AND cool a house in the coming problematic times will be, for the middle and poorer strata will passive earth - buried or partially buried housing that thermoregulates from the ground.

But... this is a very long-term undertaking. Roughly speaking, 50% of the US population lives in the suburbs and 25% lives in urban areas. Buried housing is impractical for much of that — there is no buried equivalent that matches the density of high-rise housing (or even three-story tall "garden" apartments), and while it might be possible in the suburbs it would require complete replacement of the existing housing stock.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.
GreyZone on November 14, 2005 - 10:46pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
My understanding is that earth sheltered housing benefits primarily from the huge thermal mass of the earth itself. It would seem then that any other building technique that can employ high thermal mass, either from the earth directly or in some other manner, might be able to achieve similar heating and cooling benefits. Such structures would also seem to be candidates for 1-3 story multi-use buildings.
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
Stoneleigh on November 14, 2005 - 7:35pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
The house I live in came with a geothermal system, but I don't use it very often because it's too expensive to run and it doesn't keep the house even vaguely warm by itself if the temperature dips below zero Celsius (which it does frequently). When I bought the house, I installed an outdoor wood-burning furnace to provide heat and also hot water in winter (I have solar thermal hot water in summer when the wood furnace isn't running). The next step is to hook the furnace up to baseboard radiators so that I can avoid using the main fan to circulate the heat round the house.

I only use the geothermal heating as back up if I'm going to be away and I don't want the pipes to freeze. For the time being (while I can still afford it) I use the system for cooling in summer when the temperature gets into the truly unbearable range. I recognize that it's a luxury though, and that I'll probably have to do without it in the future. If I was looking for a home again, I'd do as you suggest and build a hobbit-hole.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.
bigfootvegan on November 14, 2005 - 7:56pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I know not everyone could do this but its such a beautiful design, for all you budding hobbits

www.earthship.org

this house doesnt need heating!!

and is made from recycled materials

Comments can no longer be added to this story.
bigfootvegan on November 14, 2005 - 9:10pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
mabye for the non troglodites we could use wood pellets, nice to see a "green" power station being built

http://breakingnews.iol.ie/news/story.asp?j=162495078&p=y6z495784
The CHP plant makes the sawmill site self-sufficient in electricity, saving over £1 million a year, with the surplus electricity sold to the Northern Ireland grid.
In addition it powers the largest bio fuel pellet production facility in the British Isles.
The plant produces 50,000 tonnes of high-energy fuel pellets - displacing fossil fuels and the 200,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide which would otherwise have been released into the atmosphere.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.
tom deplume on November 15, 2005 - 5:00pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
When citeing production figures you should include a time factor. Is that 50,000 tons a second or 50,000 tons per century?
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
bigfootvegan on November 15, 2005 - 5:25pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
sorry tom that was a direct quote from the article I didnt write it.
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
Bigelow on November 15, 2005 - 3:05pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
"The house I live in came with a geothermal system, but I don't use it very often because it's too expensive to run and it doesn't keep the house even vaguely warm by itself if the temperature dips below zero Celsius (which it does frequently)."

Your system was not sized properly. Can you go after the contractor?
I wanted a ground source heat pump system but municipal code precludes drilling and my lot is too small for the other trenching method.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.
Stoneleigh on November 15, 2005 - 7:48pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I don't even know when, or by whom, the geothermal system was installed as I didn't own the house then. If it was upgraded in order to be able to provide enough winter heat, presumably that would make it even more expensive to run. The thing devours electricity and I'm trying to move towards living off-grid. I could never run it with renewable energy.

Perhaps newer models are more efficient, but the cost of replacing it would be too high. Of course if my house were newer, better insulated and had a lower surface area to volume ratio, the geothermal system I already have would cost less to run and would keep my house warmer. I should have built a hobbit-hole when I had the chance!

Comments can no longer be added to this story.
Engineer-Poet on November 14, 2005 - 9:53pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
If efficiency is currently low enough, growth can continue even as raw energy use falls.  If you consider that the average automobile is 17% efficient, there's a heck of a lot of room for improvement.

Your heating scenario is overly simple.  Let me suggest another:  40% of the homes convert to heat pumps, and the other 60% swap furnaces for gas-burning cogenerators.  When the mercury falls, the homes burning gas get their heat from the cooling jackets and exhausts of the generators, while the homes with heat pumps get their electricity largely from the surplus of the cogenerators.  If the cogenerators had 30% electric efficiency and 95% overall efficiency, and the heat pumps had a CoP of 3.5, you'd multiply the effective heat by about 1.8 and cut 45% off the gas demand without any less heat.

This system works great with extra generation.  If you can supply wind up to the limits of the wires, the heat-pump users could run on it and the cogenerator users could buy the surplus at minimal rates to use as resistance heat.

The US builds what, 13 million cars a year?  We should be able to build at least that many cogenerators a year, maybe in the same engine plants.  At 13 million a year, retrofitting the gas-heated fraction of our 80 million households should be doable in just a few years.  (Other considerations would prevent it happening that fast, but I think I've made my point.)

Comments can no longer be added to this story.
Rick on November 14, 2005 - 11:56pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Cogeneration is a great technology. Put it to work in more central power plants, and with more industrial users. We'd get economies of scale, with a few big units making a lot of electricity and heat.

Your heating scenario is overly simple.  

My heating scenario could actually occur. We need vision, and hope, but we also need reality. I think our only real hope for the next decade or more is off-the-shelf solutions that fit with established habits, practices, and infrastructure.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.
Engineer-Poet on November 15, 2005 - 1:06pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
My heating scenario could actually occur.
What's so difficult about the utility promoting cogeneration in areas where loads from heat pumps are high?
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
jacquih on November 17, 2005 - 6:21am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Rick, the problem with heat pumps is that they are only applicable in certain areas of the country. Here in Baltimore is about the furthest north you can have heat pumps and still have them work decently without having to resort to electric back-up any time the temperature goes below freezing. The amount of electricity used for back-up heat is drastically more than for the normal operation of a heat pump.

From the American Housing Survey, I estimated that less than half the homes would be good candidates for heat pumps, based on the severity of winters (determined by heating degree days), but no other criteria, such as fuel availability.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.
Engineer-Poet on November 17, 2005 - 8:16pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Ground-source heat pumps work pretty much everywhere south of the permafrost zone, no?
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
jacquih on November 18, 2005 - 5:09pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
True, but they are not feasible options in many cases. The best case scenario for installing GSHP as a retrofit would be in a single family home with radiant floor heating. In town or row homes, there's not enough ground area; homes with other systems would need extensive remodeling. With many homes in colder areas located in cities, I don't see this as being a widespread option for the north. These would be useful in homes that don't receive gas service, although that appears to be a small percentage. It definitely could increase the percentage that could use HP as opposed to the cogen units, but probably not by much. In those homes where it is feasible, it provides a short payback period of 3 to 7 years. I would also strongly consider this in a new home, especially with the option to heat domestic water. Helpful links: MJD Mechanical Geothermal FAQ
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
Engineer-Poet on November 22, 2005 - 1:42pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
It was my impression that refrigerant tubes worked just as well stuck vertically down wells as they do horizontally under the turf.  That would eliminate the "insufficient land" problem, the only question is the cost.
Comments can no longer be added to this story.

66 comments on Will conservation efforts have an effect?

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

| Show without comments | PDF version