The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand | How Technology Increases Oil Production

67 comments on How Technology Increases Oil Production

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George.Mobus on July 17, 2008 - 12:46pm

A student recently, and a colleague, sometime back, both brought me copies of Popular Science (or Popular Mechanics) with articles about how a new solar technology would solve all of our problems. They offered these as proof that everything would be fine. An awful lot of people read the popular media accounts of technology and believe these are the final words on the subject. It raises unrealistic expectations of what technology is, what it can do, and how it is developed.

The article points out an incredibly important issue - the law of diminishing returns. This law not only applies to marginal oil recovery per unit of energy consumed, it also applies to technology development itself. The vast majority of technological development is marginal improvement. Occasionally we get lucky and find a new physics principle (e.g. solid state electronics) that allows something like a quantum leap. But you'll note that this seems to apply to information technology more than production work. IT can be applied to production work to gain some marginal increase in efficiency (e.g. using robots to make cars). But processes that do useful work don't come under the miracle of Moore's Law (we have yet to see how nanotech machines will be applied to large-scale production work).

In the west we suffer from the innovation myth. We've seen so much innovation in one particular area - digital solid state electronics - that we transfer that observation to apply to all technology. And so, many people lack critical judgment when it comes to assessing the efficacy of technological solutions. Sadly this applies to politicos and policy makers (e.g. corn ethanol) as well as the general public. And sadly, it will be a block to a deeper understanding that would allow us to make real progress.

George

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The Dude on July 17, 2008 - 1:42pm

I bet you're thinking of A Solar Grand Plan: Scientific American. PV with storage in NG fields nationwide. Don't think many tech breakthroughs would be called for but gawd! what a monstrous amount of buildup. It's been hashed over here, do a search. And there have been a few other Grand Solar Plans proposed here, like Staniford's.

Innovation and scalability are the two things people just don't understand. What we need are short-and-sweet illustrations of the size of these hurdles. People can't grok page after page of reasoned documented arguments, they need something that they can take home, that can't be forgotten readily, like 1000 barrels a second or a cubic mile of oil.

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DaveMart on July 17, 2008 - 4:27pm

If you check the comments on the Solar Grand Plan, you will see that it was pretty thoroughly disembowelled.

Turns out they wanted to use compressed air as the storage medium, and the process they suggested would use natural gas.
That would involve more NG than is likely to be available, apart from it's global warming implications.

Solar has a big contribution to make in providing peaking power, but even at the latitude of the Mohave winter incidence is only around 25% or so of that in the summer, so that you would need a massive overbuild to provide base-load.
That passes over the fact that you would also need to have dry cooling, which is expensive as it is a water-stressed area, and ignores the fact that even providing enough storage for overnight power is not easy or cheap.

Solar thermal is also dependent on really clear skies, far more than, say, amorphous silicon, so that back up power is also needed for up to a week, even for the Mohave, as I was informed by someone in the industry.

As for schemes to power the whole country this way, let alone run Europe from transmission lines from the Sahara, they are pure science-fiction.

PV power locally produced is a far better bet, although very expensive for the moment.

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George.Mobus on July 17, 2008 - 6:56pm

Anyone catch Al Gore's speech today? I'd really like to know who his energy advisers are. Maybe the same guys who wrote that SciAm article. I did read it and at the time just shook my head.

I actually designed and built solar energy systems back in the 80's. HUD sponsored demo projects and a few private projects. In fact that is how I got into computers - designing some of the first µ-processor based controllers for solar collection. I got out of the business when I realized that it probably took more total energy to make the glass, aluminum, copper, and urethane insulation, manufacture and deliver the collectors than the systems ever delivered to point of use. For the home owner - energy savings. For the nation - net energy loss.

In Gore's speech he emphasized the connectedness of energy, climate, and economics which was good. But in most of the proposed solutions I fail to see whole systems thinking being displayed. I also realize that the vast majority of people simply do not intuit the second law of thermodynamics. They don't grok ERoEI, or any of the real physical constraints that dictate energy engineering.

Scale and rate of construction of whole systems. I wonder what it will take to get people to think this way?

George

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