Louisiana - The Aftermath - Open Thread
Posted by Gail the Actuary on September 4, 2008 - 9:15am
Topic: Miscellaneous
Tags: hurricane gustav, louisiana, natural gas, oil [list all tags]
Hurricane Gustav is now past, and we are finally starting to discover what the damage really is. One of the big problems is electricity. There are other issues, including those about infrastructure, that we are only discovering. Let us know what you are finding out.
Darkness and Frustration Replace Fear
The state's power grid sustained massive damage from Hurricane Gustav, officials say, and it could be weeks before all of it is repaired. Frustrated motorists poured back into the state hoping to return home, only to be turned back at checkpoints on all the major highways. Many grew frustrated as they roamed the state like gypsies or sat in motels they could scarcely afford, their cash running low and no way to get more.
"No power, no tissue, no phone, and the lady just came to collect the rent," said elementary school teacher Shondrelle Paul, who with her 11-month-old baby and sister were holed up at the Budget Inn in Gonzales, La. "Money is getting thin."
Across the state, more than 1 million people were without electricity, which meant gas stations were unable to pump fuel, ATMs could not dispense money and restaurants could not open to feed people still unable to return home. Communication was made difficult by spotty cellular and Internet service.
Dozens of hospitals were still running on generator power, several without air conditioning, and there were fears that hundreds of patients might have to be evacuated in the next few days. Only one hospital in New Orleans had the capacity to provide dialysis — though all but one were up and running — and two in the Alexandria area were running low on drinking water.
Entergy Warns of Precarious Power Island Situation in Southeastern Louisiana
Thirteen of the 14 transmission lines serving the New Orleans metropolitan area are out of service due to the storm. This creates a situation where the New Orleans metropolitan area and a corridor along the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge have become essentially an island, no longer electrically connected to the rest of the Entergy system and the electricity grid for the eastern United States. This "island" is south of Lake Pontchartrain and includes Orleans, Jefferson, St. Bernard, St. James, St. John the Baptist, St. Charles and upper Plaquemines parishes, which are sometimes referred to as the "river" parishes. Entergy's Waterford 1, Nine Mile Point and Little Gypsy plants are now supplying all power to this zone because all transmission lines leading to and from there are out of service.
"Restoration organizers are assessing how to best tie and synchronize the area back into the Entergy system. This will be a very delicate operation requiring close coordination among generation, transmission, distribution and other Entergy functions," Taylor said. "The greatest risk at this time is that generation in the islanded area could trip offline before Entergy is able to tie back to the Entergy system. If the islanded generation goes offline, all power in the 'island' zone could be lost.
Gustav evacuees kept at bay as impatience, safety collide
NEW ORLEANS -- The road home for the estimated 2 million Hurricane Gustav evacuees was slow going Tuesday, as those trying to filter into the coast were greeted by police checkpoints and National Guardsmen who told them it was too dangerous to return.
Though the storm largely spared New Orleans and Louisiana, hard-hit neighborhoods still had no power, and roads were blocked by trees. With only a handful of communities allowing re-entry, thousands grew frustrated in shelters, sitting on uncomfortable cots and wondering why buses wouldn't come and drive them back.
Gustav Takes a Toll on Already Poor Economy
During Hurricane Katrina, the economy was at its peak, "That showed how incredibly resilient and flexible the economy was in 2005," said Rich Yamarone, Director of Economic Research at Argus Research.
Analysts are concerned that this storm could lead the country to the inevitable recession, "It's another blow to an economy that can't afford to take these punches. It could push us a lot closer to a recession," said Yamarone.
WSJ: Oil Falls on Minimal Storm Pain
A spokeswoman for the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, the only U.S. port capable of handling very large crude tankers, said it can restart operations "fairly quickly" in the wake of the hurricane, though the offshore port hasn't yet been examined. A U.S. Coast Guard said flyover inspection found no visible damage to the facility.
Traders said the closure of hedge fund operator Ospraie Management's largest fund may have been a factor behind crude's tumble in recent weeks. The Ospraie Fund fell 27% in August due to bets on oil, natural gas and structured products, The Wall Street Journal reported, and the fund has been selling off its holdings over the past three weeks.
Note: A lot of good links have been posted on previous open threads about Gustav and its aftereffects. This is a link to yesterday's post.
So all the oil unloading facilities in LA have been shut in now for nearly a week. Is it logical to presume that would cause a glut in the world oil market, eg. tankers already at sea and heading for the gulf now looking around for another port, anywhere near, to unload at any price?
Interesting thought. Where does the oil that can't be refined in the US go?
I would imagine that they would divert to Houston or the US Atlantic Coast in the first instance, with other options being the refinery on the USVI ( a big products supplier to the US ), Rotterdam, or refiners in Europe.
I suspect that products will be a bigger issue than crude over the next couple of weeks.
Except that, if it was a supertanker, it would not be able to offload at either Houston or the US Atlantic coast directly.
The TOPS project is a couple years out, at least. That would at least provide some redundancy, and/or something else to wring our hands over during hurricane season.
Europe is an unlikely destination - the current oversupply in the North Sea has caused the Brent curve to move in an even steeper contango than WTI, with the prompt contracts trading well below WTI levels. If they can't unload, VLCCs will just slow down - the steep contango means that suppliers have nothing to gain by getting crude into ports fast. Remember, every barrel of crude stored for a month earns you $1.40.
That is as bad as it can be, because if there another storm headed in the same place, a lot of people will be hard to convince, or will afford to get out of the way this time!
It seems to me that as oil resources become more scarce, it will be harder and harder to rebuild after storms. Electric lines will probably just stay down after hurricanes in some places, as it becomes more difficult to obtain replacement parts and fuel for vehicles. There may be electricity in some "islands", because of what can be generated locally, but it won't be as universal as today.
Replacement parts is really the essential issue. What proportion of replacement electrical infrastructure is made in this country? Do we have big enough stockpiles so that transmission can be re-established in a few weeks time? What happens if we have to start sourcing new parts from China?
When oil resources become more scarce, every company will have to look long and hard at their supply chains. It will be a matter of survival. It doesn't make sense to maintain global supply chains across continents when fuel is rare and expensive unless there is no local option. Companies will seek to minimize transportation distances. This means there will be market opportunities to develop a local industry for about everything but resources that must be imported.
Also utilities can use EVs for their maintenance fleet. They are sitting on the power source and the infrastructure to be maintained will be within range.
How about the frequency of the storms? Can the utilities amortize the grid infrastructure in the average number of years between storms? Getting capital for repairs could prove a challenge.
I don't think so.
The largest container ships are extremely efficient. If you're using just a tea spoon or two of fuel-oil to move a t-shirt half-way around the world it's going to keep making sense to economize on the cost of labour, the cost of irrigation, economy of scale and other factors instead. Oil would have to cost ~15 000-30 000$/barrel for the cost of fuel to add 1$ to the cost of shipping a t-shirt half-way around the world.
Trains and ships don't even have to use oil. Trains can just as easily be electrified(and they are across large parts of Europe). Large container ships can use a small nuclear reactor just as easily as icebreakers, submarines or aircraft carriers can. Likely candidates are pebble bed reactors like those currently being developed in South Africa and China or self-regulating reactors like Hyperion Power Generation's uranium-hydride reactor with no moving parts(currently being commercialized. Proliferation proof, small enough to be mass produced and moved by rail, truck or ship to anywhere they might be needed. 70 MW thermal, ~25 MWe if you attach a steam cycle heat engine and generator to it).
I think long distance trucking and airfreight is going to hurt first; if you don't live close to a rail station or a port it's going to show in your grocery bills. The last few tens of kilometers could perhaps eventually be handled by battery operated vehicles(e.g. something like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f1AlrG8gVU) and/or something like a dual-use electrified tram system where tramcars capable of hauling container(s) share the rail with regular trams.
The container ships might be efficient but something doesn't jibe with what you're saying about how high oil would have to go to make a difference.
Back when oil was $30/barrel more, Jeff Rubin said shipping a container of goods was 9% more expensive (link).
At $200 oil the "tarrif" would be 15%.
Also, the ships have slowed down as oil has gotten more expensive. The market seems to think it makes a difference.
Solar and kite power also reduce costs considerably.
Here's how I derived my estimate:
Bigger is more efficient and high oil price will drive ships as big as can be accomodated. I base my estimate on the numbers from Emma Maersk(and by extension its sister ships; over 10 of which are either completed or in construction).
It can carry 11 000 20-foot containers, 14 MT each. An empty 20-foot container weighs 2.2 MT. 11 000*(14 - 2.2) tonnes = 130 000 MT of goods.
It has an 80 MW wärtsilä engine as main propulsion with an efficiency of 52% and 5x6 MW caterpillar 8M32 engines(couldn't find the efficiency numbers so I used 38% fuel efficiency, which I estimated from a smaller 5 MW marine propulsion engine on caterpillars website). Maximum fuel consumption is 80 MW/0.52 + 30 MW/0.38 = 233 MW.
It has a top speed of 29.3 mph and a cruising speed of 21 mph. To sustain the top speed it will presumably use all engine cranked up to maximum, consuming the full 233 MW.
29.3 mph is 13.1 m/s. Fuel intensity per km is 233 GW/(13.1*10^-3 km/s) = 17.8 GJ/km.
Dividing through by mass we get fuel intensity per weight: (17.8 GJ/km)/(130 000*10^3 kg) = 135 J/(km*kg). To get a feel for how efficient that is; moving a 1 litre carton of juice 1 km costs as much energy as your body consumes in ~1.5 seconds while you asleep.
Right, but you're not going to ship things at maximum speed because drag goes as the cube of speed and as a result mileage will be proportional to the square of speed(ignoring slight variation in energy efficiency for the time being.). At 21 mph, which is the cruising speed of Emma Maersk, fuel intensity will instead be ~135 J/(km*kg)*(21/29.3)^2 = 69 J/(kg*km). Average engine efficiency including the caterpillars is 48%, with caterpillar auxilliaries turned off it is 52%; adjusting for this we get: ~69 J/(km*kg)*0.48/0.52 = 64 J/(km*kg).
As you mention below, slowing down is a common way to mitigate fuel costs. Slowing down a little bit to ~18-19 mph would bump that number down to 50 J/(km*kg).
The top of that fuel intensity range will be avoided when oil is expensive, so I took 50-100 J(km*kg) as a reasonable estime of fuel intensity for current technology.
A t-shirt weighs about 200 grams and half the earth's circumference is 20 000 km. Using the above fuel intensity that comes out to 0.2-0.4 MJ thermal energy, which is 6-11 ml of oil, which comes to 1-2 tea spoons.
However shipping delays will occur with the use of only giant container ships, which will impact the economics of container shipping.
Alan
What is the fuel usage per trip? This ships are huge and so are the engines. They are also pretty much Pacific Ocean going as they will not fit into any of the world's canals. The Pacific is huge. What is the cost in fuel one way to make the trip from China to the U.S. West Coast. At what point will the transport cost overwhelm the labor saving?
Here is one engine specification
A Panamax II (open 2014) can take container ships 2 m narrower than Emma Maersk, but 10 m longer (exact dimensions from memory). Draft depends upon the density of the containers. Worst case, unload 500 containers, rail them across Panama and reload on other side (little oil required).
The Emma Maersk class can pass through the Suez Canal today, even before increasing the draft (as planned for oil supertankers).
Alan
Please read this reference.
The cost of transportation appears to be already a pain for some business models. Of course if a low cost alternative not dependent on oil is deployed this assessment may change. Until then, the cost and risk associated with oil in a post peak world are part of the supply chain.
Low-value, bulky goods are the first to feel the strain, as you would expect.
-Should probably read low 'margin' bulk goods...
I wonder where cheap cars fit?
Nick.
There is a legitimate point here, although I think it cuts oppositely to S's intent.
There is a huge vested interest in keeping things globalized. In particular, in agriculture it is undoubtedly very hard to build up localized production that can compete with industrial agriculture, even with increase costs, including transportation. So the development of localized (and less mechanized) agriculture will be delayed -- at the cost of eventual tragedy.
Because as oil and NG costs go up, along with everything dependent on them, industrial and globalized agriculture will collapse, and we will be left in a far more precarious state than had we not begun localizing earlier. But all the subsidizing goes the other way, towards sustaining the ultimately unsustainable, never in the direction that we must eventually move.
Nobody will grow bananas in Vermont and Brazilian iron mines won't move to a Pittsburgh suburb. Some business models can be unglobalized and others can't.
It doesn't matter. Reducing oil dependencies doesn't need to be an all or nothing affair. What is needed is to reduce usage enough to meet the constraints of supply. A long continuing trend of unglobalizing what makes sense will help for a long while.
For agriculture an hybrid model may prove workable. There are markets around where I live selling local products. It doesn't mean industrial agriculture has stopped. Both models coexist. But increased reliance on local products still saves some oil.
I don't think maintaining centralized farming indefinetely is going to turn out to be that difficult if(and only if) we can fix the food distribution system; that's the major source of oil consumption in food production and I've seen nothing that will allow long distance trucking to continue. There are wild-cards like EESTOR; I'd love to believe it's true but that just seems like a bunch of hot air too me.
---
Farm machinery is a relatively small consumer of oil. Things have probably improved since 1996, but here's a corn ethanol energy balance study with good data on the energy inputs to farming corn: http://www.usda.gov/oce/reports/energy/aer-814.pdf
Here's the relevant 9-state averages:
Diesel Gallons/acre 8.6
Gasoline Gallons/acre 3.09
LPG Gallons/acre 6.36
Electricity kWh/acre 77.13
Natural gas Cubic ft/acre 200
If you're wondering why there's such a diverse distribution of energy sources when diesel is used for most farm equipment, it's because much of this energy went into drying and processing the corn(some states even used diesel fuel for drying corn; I suspect this practice has ended). At some point, waste heat from a power plant, solar concentrators or natural gas from anaerobic digestion of corn cobs or some other source will make more sense than continuing to use the above. The most difficult part is replacing the diesel for the vehicles, which cannot be tied directly to the grid; pessimistically that's about 10 gallons of diesel per acre, probably much less with no-till and the most efficient farming machinery available today.
10 gallons of diesel allows you to plant and harvest ~140 bushels of corn; that's 3.5 metric tonnes.
Fertilizer is a far bigger energy input and the greatest of these is nitrogen. All you're doing with the natural gas is to steam reform it and use the water gas shift reaction to get more hydrogen gas: total reaction is CH4 + 2*H2O = 4*H2 + C02.
The low-hanging fruit is to substitute methane with coal and do the same trick; you'll get 2*H2 per carbon atom(and a little bit extra since coal isn't pure carbon). It's not as cheap as stranded natural gas, emits more CO2 and heavy metal pollution, but it puts a reasonable cap on the price of fertilizer. This is off the shelf tech and is in use for hydrogen gas production right now.
There are potentially more interesting methods of producing hydrogen. You can produce methane from left over biomass in an anaerobic digester. Not all materials are suitable, but according to http://www.chpcentermw.org/pdfs/061211JasperIN/Sievertsen.pdf if corn stover is digested toghether with manure you can recover as much as 50-75% of the heating value of corn stover as methane. The co-products are nutrient rich liquid that is usable on-farm and nutrient rich compost-like solids useful as fertilizer.
Pyrolysis of biomass is another way to produce some hydrogen gas. Economics will depend on how valuable the coproducts are and how much of the mineral fertilizer can be recaptured in the char fraction. Different kinds of char are being investigated for improving soil fertility(seems to have been born out of the realization that the amazonians used low temperature wood char to make dark, fertilze soils called "terra preta"), as a bonus char is a way to sequester carbon for a long period of time in a stable form. You also get something called pyrolysis oil, which is quite corrosive and not a good substitute for petrolueum in vehicles, but contains interesting and potentially valuable chemicals that could be isolated and is just fine as heating oil(could be used for drying corn).
A pebble-bed reactor or molten-salt reactor capable of operating at 850 degrees celcius can use the thermochemical sulfur-iodine cycle to convert as much as 50% of it's thermal output into hydrogen gas from water. The waste heat is still hot enough to produce a little bit of electricity and could be used for district heating.
Instead of trying to build HVDC lines all across the continent to try and smooth out wind variations you could dump excess wind power into big electrolysers such that you manage to maintain some low level of power output from the wind turbines most of the time and you clip off the peaks with electrolysis. Very clean hydrogen that can be easily used for haber-bosch. Oxygen gas co-product that can be pressurized and sold(hospitals, welders?). Could use stranded wind-resource that nobody wants to develop(the cost of power-lines is a very big part of the economics of wind turbines).
And last but not least, if the economics work out you could produce ammonia directly from electric power, nitrogen gas and water without electrolysis and haber-bosch; this would be more efficient and could be used in the same way as electrolysis. See http://www.energy.iastate.edu/Renewable/ammonia/ammonia/2007/SSAS_Oct200... for more information.
In addition we are getting better at supplying fertilizer to plants when and where they need it; this is being driven by a desire to reduce fertilizer run-off and high fertilizer costs. We're getting better at no-till agriculture which leds to less water loss, soil and nutrient erossion.
None of these ideas may be practical for a full-scale "hydrogen economy", but ammonia production is a much smaller problem than all transportation.
As for the mineral fertilizers they are mined. The uranium available in the phosphate ore is more than enough to power the machinery required to mine the mineral fertilizers and ship them by rail to their destination(50-200 g of natural uranium per tonne of phosphate rock; if you only extract half of that it is 5 to 20 barrels of oil worth of heat with current reactors(lots of room for improved burn-up even without breeders; all reactors get some of their energy from plutonium but don't necessarily produce as much Pu-239 as they consume fissile U-235 and Pu-239), and it's fairly easy to get at with leaching(the industry shut down when uranium got too cheap but it may be revived when there's no more highly enriched uranium from russian thermonuclear "sparkplugs"). Much of the mining machinery is stationary or near stationary(drag lines, pumps, crushers, slurry pipelines, conveyors...); it either is electrified already or can easily be grid connected and powered by electricity.
Processing of the food into something you'd actually want to eat is non-trivial. The usual method in the western world has been to feed it to animals; chicken being reasonably efficient and beef being terribly inefficient; but if worst comes to worst, even polenta(corn gruel essentially) or corn bread is better than being hungry. But if you're not going to feed it to cattle you might as well grow a more efficient and appetizing food like potatos(10-20 tonnes per acre is possible in a good location!) or a more nutritious food like amaranth.
(disclaimer: I'm rather tired right now, so if something in the above seems terribly wrong, it probably is.)
Gail-
I lived on Guam, which in Typhoon Alley, and has the strongest storms on earth. Guam finally put almost all lines underground. I have called my brother during a typhoon, with winds at 190.
The question is, do we have the resources or the will to do this in the Gulf?
The great thing about NOLA is that they're getting to the PO
destination faster than everyone else.
But this is the best thing that could happen to their electric grid, if NOLA can survive it.
To rebuild after the grid has gone down means most all of the weaknesses have been taken out.
sure is painful though.
"Inertia and procrastination are powerful forces in determining human behavior. It is basic human nature to deal with non-routine problems when they become obvious, not before. Very few people will study the Peak Oil future carefully to determine how it will impact them. Denial is encouraged by pervasive public, media, government, and business ignorance of Peak Oil impacts. Indeed, those who become vocal about Peak Oil face ridicule by the vast majority of the ignorant.
The combination of these obstacles means that only those who have ample resources and knowledge of Peak Oil impacts will be able to relocate, if they act sooner rather than later. Relocation will thus resemble a trickle of the affluent, rather than a mass movement."
http://survivingpeakoil.blogspot.com/2008/09/surviving-peak-oil-obstacle...
One of the problems after Katrina that one of the refineries faced was that the water had got into their control room, and all that swichgear etc had to be replaced, and the delay, if I recall, before it came back on line was more than six months. On the other hand the utility companies are used to collaborating after disasters and work together to share facilities. Thus there were long conga lines of trucks, from a number of utilities - including out-state - that we saw going down the delta replacing poles, transformers the lot at an impressive speed.
On the other hand if you are waiting for new parts that have to come out of Korea then you may be down for a while. (Another example I heard anecdotally about last time).
I recall that during the northeastern US/southeastern Canada blackout of some 18-24 months ago, there was some discussion about what would happen if more than a single substation had been destroyed in the cascading failure. At the time the concern was driven by the aging, deteriorating condition of the electrical grid. The large transformers (the ones that look like mini shipping containers) commonly used in substations are very expensive, and though there is still some capacity in North America to manufacture them, there are no more than a few on hand at any time. They take many months to build from scratch. The catastrophic destruction of any significant portion of the grid (no matter the precipitating cause) would create a very long-lasting crisis. If a natural disaster like hurricane, flood or earthquake is the precipitating cause and entails significant destruction of other infrastructure in addition to the electrical grid, the resulting crisis will be ramified and further prolonged.
To get a sense of the extent to which manufacturing capacity remains in the US, visit a home building products big box store and take a casual inventory of country of origin of the various products - particularly those that have 'dual use', i.e., industrial and domestic utility. The same reasons that nuts, bolts, nails, sheet metal, wire, etc. for home builders are sourced outside the US pertains equally to the reasons that drive sourcing decisions in industrial situations.
Construction has moved to the lowest cost/uncertain quality source. New homes are designed to last only 20 years till major repairs are needed.
Industrial equipment is used by the buyers for decades and quality still matters. So your analogy to Home Depot is weak.
Alan
The question was not so much one of the quality of goods sold in relation to the expected useful lifetime of those goods. It was a question of the drive to source manufacturing for lowest possible cost of production. Very high quality goods are produced outside the US at relatively very low cost of production. My point was that the same forces are at play whatever the quality or end use of the goods being produced.
The assumptions of globalization have been such that manufacturing capacity in the US has been demolished, dismantled, or allowed to fall into dereliction. The corollary assumption of cheap transportation which underlies globalization has led to a situation where there are minimal inventories on hand of virtually everything. The ability to source products of whatever quality domestically is very slight relative to the needs that would result from a major, infrastructure-destroying catastrophe.
The first time I saw it I was surprised when I was putting together my earthquake kit (since I live in California) that many lists included cash.
After a moment it dawned on me that not only would the ATMs be down, but many hotels wouldn't accept my credit card without a realtime authorization.
Of course, I would have to be lucky to actually get a hotel room after an earthquake. That's when I double checked my tent and water supply.
I'm talking about an earthquake, but floods are the most common and most damaging natural disaster in the U.S. and one doesn't have to live in California to experience them.
Good time for everyone to get their disaster kit complete...
Ever since Katrina I've totally rethought my plans about evacuating. Now I'd rather take my chances with nature (which are pretty good statistically speaking) rather then with an evacuation.
And there's a Cat 4 heading towards the gulf right now.
Don't know the track just yet but it doesn't look good.
If the thing slides between the Keys and Cuba, there'll be hell to pay.
Ike is most likely to curve northward before the Bahamas. Of course the exact timing of the northward turn is still very uncertain, but it looks like Florida or the SE coast are the likely (mainland) landfall. And significant wind shear is supposed to develop, NHC has it weakening to a cat three for this reason. But it is still possible it might go elsewhere.
Of course, a Florida landfall doesn't guarantee New Orleans will be spared. If you recall, Katrina had a Florida landfall before going into the Gulf of Mexico.
Exxon returning workers to U.S. offshore platforms
Baker Hughes CEO worried about Gustav hit
MARKET WATCH: Lack of oil, gas disruptions lowers energy prices
From the BP website:
"The Capline System is a strategic high-volume transportation resource that cost effectively links Gulf of Mexico and foreign crude supplies to key refineries throughout the Midcontinent area of the United States.
It is a 40” crude oil pipeline that spans 632 miles in length. Capline originates in St. James, Louisiana and terminates in Patoka, Illinois. It delivers to Collierville and Patoka terminals."