The Oil Drum

261 comments on DrumBeat: July 10, 2007

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Laurence Aurbach on July 10, 2007 - 5:23pm

That's all very true. We have the electricity to make the shift, but it's available at night. So it's actually electricity storage that is an obstacle.

Rail uses a small fraction of U.S. energy -- a total of 659 trillion BTU, or 0.66 % of U.S. energy consumption (see Table 2.4).

About 10% of all U.S. rail is electrified, which means the other 90 percent can make the 250%-300% efficiency gains from electrification that Alan mentions. At best, present rail energy use could be reduced to 264 trillion BTU, or 0.26% of U.S. energy consumption.

[EDIT] (659 * 0.1) + ((659 * 0.9) / 3) = 264

The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory report says we can add 3.1 quads of (mostly) nighttime load to the existing grid. That means we could increase the energy consumption of rail by something like 900% using existing grid capacity (assuming use of a storage scheme like pumped hydro which has a 78% efficiency ratio in the U.S.).

[EDIT] Increasing the energy consumption of rail by 900%, combined with a 200%-300% efficiency gain from electrification, would enable a 18-27 fold increase in the work accomplished by rail, using existing grid capacity.

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AlanfromBigEasy on July 10, 2007 - 7:24pm

Unfortunately, the vast majority of that electrical generation not "used" at night is natural gas fired; some of it inefficient single cycle NG turbines.

We do not have the NG to fire these plants 17 or 20 hours/day.

The demands placed by switching 90% of current inter-city truck ton-miles on electrified rail, plus as much Urban Rail as we could build and finish in a half dozen years equal about one or two years growth in electrical demand. A recession plus higher prices could free up that much and more.

However EVs much larger and with greater ranges than GEMs http://www.gemcar.com would pose a problem. I wonder if NG fuel cars might not be a better choice for several reasons for at least a decade.

One reason is not to crash the electrical grid for other purposes than recharging EVs. A decade of wind turbine + HV DC lines + pumped storage construction could satisfy the EV demand (I think) with minimal NG use by the grid.

I have a larger picture in mind, but which path to take "depends" on several variables.

In all cases, installing tankless NG hot water heaters to replace older NG water heaters and more insulation are VERY GOOD things.

Best Hopes,

Alan

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Dryki on July 10, 2007 - 10:57pm

I'm more and more suspicious of any proposal that depends on switching where switching involves much in the way of rebuilding. Because if it takes something like 25 barrels of oil to build a prius and then maybe a barrel a month to run it the barrels to convert will themselves be too much. All of society will be trying to invest oil now to reduce future demand for oil. [I know because I'm doing that personally.]

It won't be only one sector of society, eg automobiles, but it will be the grid, food, industry - all at the same time. The recognition of peak oil is going to drive any entity willing to prepare into a spend-it-while-you-have-it mode. Sort of a pre-hurricane rush to the store.

Duct tape!

cfm in Gray, ME

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GreyZone on July 11, 2007 - 5:27am

The flaw in many of these reports is that they report energy usage as oil consumption when in fact most of the steps either can or even already are not done in oil. What such reports should honestly say is barrels of oil equivalent in energy, but they do not.

For example, there is a large myth on this website that most mining can only be done with fossil fueled machinery. This is simply not true as almost all underground mining is done electrically which means that above ground mining could be if necessary. And the manufacture of an automobile in the assembly line is very electrically oriented, not fossil fuel oriented.

This is precisely why we could change how we live. Fossil fuels are not how many people portray them. We have many other energy sources that are close enough in cost that we could use those instead. The problem is not can we do this but rather will we do this?

Ghawar Is Dying
The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. - Dr. Albert Bartlett