Drumbeat: October 22, 2012
Posted by Leanan on October 22, 2012 - 10:12am
“The country has stumbled into a windfall on the backs of these entrepreneurs,” said Edward Hirs, a finance professor at the University of Houston who contributed to a report that estimated that the nation’s economy benefited by more than $100 billion last year alone from the lower gas prices.But while the gas rush has benefited most Americans, it’s been a money loser so far for many of the gas exploration companies and their tens of thousands of investors.
The drillers punched so many holes and extracted so much gas through hydraulic fracturing that they have driven the price of natural gas to near-record lows. And because of the intricate financial deals and leasing arrangements that many of them struck during the boom, they were unable to pull their foot off the accelerator fast enough to avoid a crash in the price of natural gas, which is down more than 60 percent since the summer of 2008.
Although the bankers made a lot of money from the deal making and a handful of energy companies made fortunes by exiting at the market’s peak, most of the industry has been bloodied — forced to sell assets, take huge write-offs and shift as many drill rigs as possible from gas exploration to oil, whose price has held up much better.
Oil Advances; Keystone Pipeline Set to Start
Oil advanced from a two-week low in New York on speculation last week’s losses were excessive. TransCanada Corp. planned to start its Keystone pipeline today after a second delay.Futures climbed as much as 0.8 percent after falling the most in more than two weeks on Oct. 19. Prices also advanced after the White House denied a New York Times report that administration officials agreed to one-on-one talks with Iran’s government over its nuclear program. TransCanada originally planned to resume operations Oct. 20 on the line that runs from Alberta to the main U.S. oil-storage hub in Cushing, Oklahoma.
Gas prices drop as demand tapers off
The average price for a gallon of regular gasoline in the United States fell more than 8 cents during the past two weeks, weighed down by the drop in crude oil prices and low seasonal demand, according to a widely followed survey released on Sunday....Lundberg said further declines in retail gas prices are expected if the cost of crude oil does not rise substantially. She added that in California, gasoline prices could have a "dramatic crash" after refinery problems caused a spike two weeks ago.
Thanksgiving 2012: Cheaper Gas, Higher Airfares
Finally… Gas prices are coming down in most parts of the country and the near future looks brighter for motorists. “I think it’s good news for folks that are traveling on Halloween but particularly good news for Thanksgiving time,” says Tom Kloza with The Oil Price Information Service. He says gas will drop by about 35 cents a gallon by Thanksgiving, and other analysts agree. “Supply is expected to begin increasing, coupled with an expected drop in demand which we’re already seeing. Equals lower prices,” says Patrick DeHaan, a senior petroleum analyst at Gasbuddy.com. “We should see relatively smooth sailing with the national average in the low to perhaps the mid $3 a gallon range.” The Energy Department’s weekly survey is expected to show another drop when the numbers are released today. However, AAA says gas prices remain 25 cents above year-ago prices, and 39 cents below the record high set back in July 2008.
OPEC rivalries to hamper agreement over top post
DUBAI/LONDON (Reuters) - OPEC is likely to find reaching a consensus difficult in talks this week on selecting its new secretary general, delegates to the producer group said, due to rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran over its top administrative post.
US policy uncertainty delays LNG supply growth: BG Group
SINGAPORE: Uncertainty about the volume of gas exports the United States will allow could be delaying gas development elsewhere in the world and may contribute to a supply crunch in Asia, a senior executive of British gas company BG Group said on Monday.A shale gas boom in the United States has sparked plans for a large liquefied natural gas (LNG) export industry, but fears that exports could feed energy prices have spurred a strong lobby to limit gas exports.
Rosneft Buys BP’s TNK-BP Stake for $26 Billion in Cash, Shares
OAO Rosneft (ROSN) agreed to buy BP Plc’s half of the TNK-BP venture for about $26 billion in cash and shares in the biggest acquisition by a Russian company.BP will sell its 50 percent stake in Russia’s third-largest oil producer for $17.1 billion in cash and 12.8 percent of Rosneft’s shares, according to a statement today. BP will reinvest $4.8 billion in the government’s shares of Rosneft, leaving it with $12.3 billion in cash, 19.75 percent of the state-backed company and two board seats.
Putin blesses full takeover of TNK-BP by Rosneft
NOVO-OGARYOVO, Russia (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday blessed a full takeover by state oil major Rosneft of Anglo-Russian oil venture TNK-BP , calling it a good deal at a good price.
CHANGING partners in Russia can be a fraught affair, to which the tribulations of Anna Karenina are as good a guide as any. But sometimes there is no choice. BP’s relationship with a group of oligarchs who owned half of TNK-BP, the company’s Russian joint venture, had broken down so completely that it was only a matter of time before one side or the other was forced to quit. In the event both seem to be getting out, to be replaced by the firm at the root of the trouble between them, Rosneft, Russia’s state-controlled oil giant.
Malawi oil: A blessing or a curse?
A discovery would turn one of the world's poorest countries into a multi-billion dollar economy, but who would benefit?
Saudi refinery eyes Europe diesel exports
A new refinery in Saudi Arabia, that is a joint venture of Saudi Aramco and France's Total, is likely to start diesel exports from the second quarter of next year and is targeting the European market, industry sources said yesterday.
Iran cuts Turkmen gas imports by 52 percent
Imports of natural gas from Turkmenistan into Iran have decreased by 52 percent over the first half of the current Iranian year compared to the same period last year, which began on March 20, National Iranian Gas Company's managing director Javad Owji said, IRNA reported on Oct.22.
White House Says No Agreement Reached on Talks With Iran
The White House hasn’t agreed to direct one-on-one talks with Iran’s government over its nuclear program, even as it remains open to such negotiations, National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor said.
Instability grips Libya a year after Gaddafi's fall
BENGHAZI/TRIPOLI (Reuters) - Insecurity blights Libya, where militias still call the shots a year after they toppled Muammar Gaddafi, keeping foreign investors wary and clouding the oil-producing country's future.Last month's attack on the U.S. consulate in the eastern city of Benghazi, in which U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans died, underlined the fragility of a state struggling to emerge from the legacy of Gaddafi's 42-year rule.
Petronas Rejection Casts Doubt on Cnooc $15.1 Billion Bid
Canada’s rejection of a bid by Malaysia’s state oil company for Progress Energy Resources Corp. casts doubt on Beijing-based Cnooc Ltd.’s $15.1-billion takeover of Nexen Inc. and raises questions about the openness of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government to foreign investment.
Romney and Obama Ignore Coal’s Dark Side
How can we “continue to burn clean coal,” when we’ve never done so before?
Sierra Club Fight Over Radioactive Waste Heats Up
The Sierra Club is suing Waste Control Specialists over its radioactive-waste site near Andrews, Tex. The company says the site is safe, and the county now is getting involved to end the legal claims.
Rising Energy Costs May Usher in U.S. Freight Rail Revival
Rail built America in the 19th century and now it may be poised for a massive resurgence in the 21st century as high fuel prices make it competitive again.
Fueling the Fleet, Navy Looks to the Seas
Scientists at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory are developing a process to extract carbon dioxide (CO2) and produce hydrogen gas (H2) from seawater, subsequently catalytically converting the CO2 and H2 into jet fuel by a gas-to-liquids process.
The big question mark over gasoline from air
Last week, Air Fuel Synthesis (AFS), a company in Stockton, UK, revealed the first successful demonstration of an idea that dates back to the oil crisis of the 1970s: that carbon, hydrogen and oxygen can be plucked from carbon dioxide and water in air to be converted into methanol and then morphed into gasoline.However, amidst the headlines, some media coverage overlooked the key point: the energy efficiency of the process has yet to be demonstrated. This matters because the technique uses electricity for key stages. It should not require more energy input than is gleaned from burning the fuel it produces.
Obama's alternative energy bankruptcies
So just how many federally-funded energy companies have failed?Of the companies that received significant funding from the Department of Energy, a total of five have gone bankrupt, according to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. The five bankruptcies occurred in two DOE programs, which in total funded 63 firms. The other 58 are still in business. That's a failure rate of about 8%.
At One With His Trowel (Sort Of)
The dirty, squishy part of our straw bale house construction project is in full swing. Last month a dump truck poured a pile of reject sand next to the house. Reject is the dirt left over at a gravel pit, and its name says a lot about how valuable it is to gravel manufacturers.
Freelancer growth giving rise to 'slasher' careers
America isn't just the "land of the free" any more. We’re rapidly becoming the land of the freelancer.In an increasingly virtual work world, an estimated one-third of U.S. workers — more than 42 million men and women — no longer report to traditional 9-to-5 jobs. Instead they belong to a growing freelance segment of the labor force, an often skilled class of career jugglers and independents who create mosaic incomes from contract gigs, projects, part-time jobs, temp work, moonlighting and consulting. This freelance nation fills the gaps that corporate America no longer wishes to cover with full-time salaried employees.
Pesticides could be the culprit in bee drop-off
Pesticides kill bumblebees and make colonies vital for pollination likely to fail, a study has found. Scientists have been baffled by the plummeting numbers of bees, mainly in North America and Europe, in recent years.
Thirst for groundwater caused fatal earthquake
On 11 May 2011, nine people were killed and dozens injured by a magnitude 5.1 earthquake near Lorca in southern Spain. Now it seems that the earthquake was triggered by human activity. What's more, it may have been shallower, and thus more destructive, than if it had happened following a slow, natural build-up of stress.
Is Maine experiencing more ‘extreme’ precipitation?
ELLSWORTH, Maine — According to a Maine-based environmental advocacy group, there is evidence that Maine has been experiencing warmer temperatures and more “extreme precipitation” events in recent years.
The public benefit in saving beaches?
Do we fight or flee?Rising tides have taken homes in some areas. Replenished sand simply has been washed away by the waves.
Millions of dollars are at stake. Replenishing sand is expensive. Buying out beach homes is expensive too.
A basic question is one of fairness: Who should pay?
Rice Agriculture Accelerates Global Warming: More Greenhouse Gas Per Grain of Rice
"Our results show that rice agriculture becomes less climate friendly as our atmosphere continues to change. This is important, because rice paddies are one of the largest human sources of methane, and rice is the world's second-most produced staple crop," said Dr Kees Jan van Groenigen, Research Fellow at the Botany Department at the School of Natural Sciences, Trinity College Dublin, and lead author of the study.
Adapting suburbia to face up to climate change
Over 80% of people in England live in suburbs and they will experience warmer, drier summers and wetter winters in the future. By working with local authorities and residents the SNACC project recommends effective and practical adaptation measures for different types of English suburbs.
Localised sunshade could stop Arctic melting
If we have to hack the planet, we could at least do it with some finesse. Some of the problems with geoengineering could be fixed by targeting specific regions of the planet, rather than cooling everywhere equally.
Antarctica losing 190 million tonnes of ice a day, study finds
Antarctica is shedding an average of 190 million tonnes of ice every day, according to a landmark study that used satellites to "weigh" the vast land mass.Although parts of east Antarctica are growing, glaciers in west Antarctica are melting faster, leading to a net loss of ice across the continent, according to the study published in the journal Nature.
Drumbeat: October 22, 2012
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Food for thought:
What do these voters know about the World and U.S. energy situation and other Limits To Growth issues?
If they were told, would they care?
Is this a representative sample of U.S. voting citizens?
How can people be exposed to the facts of 'Energy and our Future' and understand our predicaments?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/49480284/displaymode/1247/?beginSlide=1
That was scary...
But I would be willing to discuss fiscal matters with the surfer-lady...
If they were told, would they care?
Nope - but if a situation presented itself that would have to be adapted to they would.
"...if a situation presented itself that would have to be adapted to they would..."
...adapt, or care?
Adapt 100%. I recalled talking with a friend when gas prices hit $6 in LA - she said if she had to she would take the bike to a Metro line to commute from the westside to downtown on a daily basis. In that time frame daily traffic was going down considerably. Not something she wanted to do but had to do out of economic need.
Interesting enough she now does take metro for her daily commute, the newly built Expo line runs near her place.
I think she would now very much care if the light rail lines faced service cuts. Caring is connected to what hits someone personally. I think its true of all of us to some extent.
Siemens Exits Solar, Desertec in Green Portfolio Setback
PV has killed CSP, therefore, this is a understandable decision esp. when we consider that Siemens is an important player in the field of wind power, i.e still has a profitable leg in the renewable market.
Indeed. CSP is kinda neat in that it can provide some power after the sun has gone down due to the storage of energy in a thermal form. But the price of PV panels has dropped so heavily that it is really hard for CSP to compete. The "storage" for PV can be the natural gas or coal you don't burn during the day at standard power plant.
CSP may make a come-back many years from now when fossil fuel costs go up and we need some more sources to help with the intermittency of PV solar and win.
Thank God that this should drive a stake through the heart of this perfectly barmy way to waste other people's money.
The last I heard their 'cunning plan' was supposed to cost around half a trillion dollars, and might or might not be capable of supplying around 15% of Europe's energy at some time in the future, providing they got all the breaks in technology.
No wonder when they actually sat down and started costing the engineering they pulled out.
You confuse here some aspects of Desertec:
1) It was planned that Desertec provides at the beginning electricity for the local economies which still have a large demand. There is no reason why this should not be done with PV instaed of CSP, sorry.
2) The 400 billion EUR were not for 15% of the European electricity demand but for the whole project.
3) The expert group (Sachverständigenrat für Umweltfragen) of the German government and other experts are quite confident that a good mixture of domestic production and import of around 15% of the demand gives the most promising economic solution in Germany for the more realistic demand scenarios (700 TWh for Germany, electric heating with heat pumps and complete electrification of transport). Here, imports could come either from the Maghreb/Arabia or as reimports from Scandinavia.
'The power generated would be transported over high-voltage DC lines across the Mediterranean Sea to Europe, where it would supply 15% of the energy demand. The project is still 10-15 years from going online, but that’s why major players are getting started now.
Companies like Siemens, Deutsche Bank, energy companies RWE and E.on, as well as the German insurer Munich Re are all interested in getting involved despite the financial crisis. All of the companies claim that this is how they are fighting back against climate change, and that in order to avoid an energy crisis in 2050 they have to start building now. To build the 100 GWs worth of solar power a total of €400bn investment is needed.'
http://inhabitat.com/worlds-largest-solar-project-sahara-desert/
No doubt however there are other versions of this Heath-Robinson fantasy.
It is delivering power to Europe in any substantial quantity that I am critiquing, not using solar in sunny climates to supply local demand which peaks with sunshine.
Trying to use solar by hook or by crook in places where it is not sunny is what is daft.
It is about money and politics, do you think Siemens et al. eran mony by charity ? Most of the elctricity would be used in Africa, a part goes to Europe and sometimes energy from Europe would go to Africa, so what?
If production in Africa and transmission is cheaper than production in Europe, what is your problem? At the moment many Europens countries import more than 50% of their primary energy, if this is reduced to 15% and leads to economic growth in Africa, what is the problem, except that we are talking about renewable and not nuclear?????
You appear to be changing your position from the original case you sought to argue, which referred to Desertec being mainly about local power, without providing references.
However, the list of problems with shipping power to Europe is huge, as Siemens decision indicates.
For a start at present the only practical way of doing it at any conceivable cost is using thermal, and that is what they planned, if we can stick to their plans, not other pipedreams.
To say that thermal solar presents problems due to water use in a highly water stressed environment is putting it mildly.
Then there is the awkward fact that Europe's energy demand peaks in winter, and even at the latitude of Cairo sunshine is a lot weaker in the winter than the summer.
So once more you are providing power when it is least needed, and not helping at all when it is.
So to pay for the massive and ecologically disruptive transmission lines, then in practise the initial trials actually planned to use natural gas in winter, as an overbuild of solar would be even more disastrously uneconomic.
Now you could make up for the fact that the sun does not shine at night by using molten salt storage or some such, but again to keep costs even within the already ruinous levels projected, if you are using natural gas anyway to make up for winter demand, the practical way is to use NG for that too.
You end up with a system which is basically burning natural gas, with some input from solar, just enough to raise costs to ludicrous levels.
Now that natural gas would be burnt not terribly efficiently, as the waste heat would be thrown away.
It is far more energetically efficient to ship the natural gas to Europe directly, and use it there to generate electricity in a combined heat and power set up, so that the use of solar in fact adds not a thing to the energetic efficiency and actually reduces it for your 400 billion Euros.
There are also detailed engineering issues, such as that if you are using the same turbines for solar and natural gas, they are optimised for neither, which also has efficiency penalties.
...huge...
...the only practical way...
...any conceivable cost...
...To say that ... is putting it mildly...
...massive and ecologically disruptive...
...disastrously uneconomic...
...ruinous...
...ludicrous levels...
Can you please reduce the hyperbole, and provide some actual numbers and references?
You missed a big one:
"Then there is the awkward fact that Europe's energy demand peaks in winter, and even at the latitude of Cairo sunshine is a lot weaker in the winter than the summer.
So once more you are providing power when it is least needed, and not helping at all when it is."
"at all"? Really now.
Exactly.
Sometimes one needs to remember the axiom, "I don't have to join every argument I'm invited to.."
The reason why I refer to the solar as 'absolutely useless' is because the aim is to run a grid.
To do that at some affordable cost you have to provide power when it is needed.
I will use approximate figures for the UK rather than Germany to illustrate the point, since I am more familiar with them.
They track well enough with German figures.
The low point in UK demand is during the day in the summer, at around 20GW or so.
That rises in the winter, peaking at something like 65GW on a winter evening, when gas use also peaks.
The problem is if that you cover the summer demand with solar, as is pretty well the case for Germany, then everything else needs to be switched off.
That means that the only practical way of doing that is by using coal and gas for the rest, as leaving nuclear aside, if you went to geothermal for instance, you would not have a market for it's power in the daytimes in summer.
Any baseload which is low in CO2 is going to be high in capital costs.
Having a power source which is only trivially available when load is highest destroys any sensible way of running the grid.
If the people who have put solar on their roofs were paying the true costs they would have to pay for the full costs of extra load on the grid when it can least spare it, which would cost a fortune, whilst the power they fed in in the summer would be almost worthless.
So what has occurred is that the true costs to the grid are hidden by mandates and subsidies.
Solar has a negative net worth to the grid in northern Europe.
Aren't you generalizing a bit here? Maybe the UK temporal demand profile is that much different. Like it or not few countries are going to build much nuclear, so its largely off the table.[Personally I think thats a crying shame, but that one has been largely handed to us]. So we get some sort of combo of wind/solar/hydro/ocean(waves plus tides), and gas and coal. Gas is storable (somewhat), and the newer combined turbines can be ramped quickly, so if you can tolerate fracking, so you can develop the north European supply, that can balance out the temporal vagueries of the renewable component. I suspect a great deal of the UK winter demand peak is caused by poorly insulated structures, with a combination of insulation retrofits and heat pump you should be able to make a large dent in it. That may still be more expensive than current costs, but I think its about the best option you have a decent chance of developing. A large nuclear buildout, with regulations reduced enough to make it affordable just isn't in the cards.
Also how much of the nighttime demand is lighting? LEDs should make a big dent in the lighting demand over the next decade.
Obviously everyone who isn't already in Germany needs to study how they've gotten PV installation so cheap. Done right, PV may be too cheap not to use, so figuring out how to accommodate a lot of it is called for.
There are plenty of figures and references in my comments on this thread.
You choose not to see them.
I just finished reading all your comments and there aren't that many. And you use them to mislead people:
As is pointed out in the replies, this is only relevant for panels installed horizontally, which nobody does. If you want to know more about solar efficiency,
the Do The Math blog does a good job.
What I see is that your style of discussion is full of hyperbole and overly combative. It isn't doing anyone any good,
and surely isn't going to convince any of the experts on this board. For non-experts it just increases the confusion.
I read this board for a few reasons:
here in the Netherlands, but it is interesting nonetheless.
You are none of the above. Too much rhetorics, too little careful thought. You would convince more people if you'd drop the rhetorics and
tried to find some middle ground.
"Then there is the awkward fact that Europe's energy demand peaks in winter, and even at the latitude of Cairo sunshine is a lot weaker in the winter than the summer."
Well what do you expect them to do? Run a massive DC cable to the Southern hemisphere? The project was already very ambitious.
Precisely my point.
It is not realistic already.
Someone above asked for some actual numbers.
Well, here are the figures for solar incidence for Cairo, which is at about the latitude of the projected solar plants for Desertec:
http://www.gaisma.com/en/location/cairo.html
As can be seen, it varies from 2.84Kwh/m2/day in December, when the power is needed by Europe, to 7.73 in June, when it is not.
In any realistic appreciation of the engineering of such a system, that means that either only a fraction of the power needed can be supplied in the winter, or you have to overbuild by a factor of nearly 3 times.
That can be brought down a bit if you angle the mirrors for best collection in the summer and so on, but that can get expensive if you get too fancy on adjusting inclination.
Things aren't quite that bad, as some of the power could be used by the host country, which being hot do have maximum demand in the summer, but in that case when you look at the relative population sizes involved then the fraction of energy demand that could be supplied for Europe falls rapidly.
It is all the sort of thing which sounds wonderful until you look at it in any detail.
One location, Cairo, near the ocean is not necessarily characteristic of the entire Sahara Desert.
The insolation listed at your link refers to a horizontal surface which is not the optimal direction for pointing a solar panel in a fixed direction at 30 degrees north latitude (it should be tilted up 30 degrees from the horizontal with a south azimuth). The insolation at your link is greatest in summer because the pointing direction favors summer sunlight. Commercial solar installations are usually installed on tracking mounts which make those values useless for determining power output of a solar system. The times for dusk and dawn indicate about 10.5 hours of sunlight at the winter solstice which is about 44% of the day or 10.5 kWh/m2/day on a surface with normally incident sunlight (i.e. a dual axes tracker).
Also PV conversion efficiency increases with decreasing temperature, around 0.5% per degree C. Maximum power often occurs on sunny winter days. Shorter days, but higher average power.
Not that I think (or advocate) a large solar export from Africa, but level ground insolation gives a exaggerated impression of the seasonal variation for actual PV. Two things act to reduce the seasonality over the horizontal incidence ratio. The first is temperature, cSi getS roughly .49% more efficient per degree C cooler. That implies 10-20% depending upon climate lower summer/winter ratio. Then panels tend to be tilted southwards (for fixed mount), or most utility scale is single axis tracker today. Either option reduces the seasonality further. So yes seasonality is still going to be a very significant issue. But exaggerating it serves no legitimate purpose. Clearly natural gas can be banked into storage during the summer, and drawn down during the winter.
Right. And that's exactly what to do. But they only have to build extra heliostats. The power tower and steam plant wouldn't change. It's not optimum, but it's not the kiss of death either.
The diff. in solar resource is not as great as one might intuitively think. Have a look at
this Do The Math post, where from the NREL dataset it is shown that
I would suspect that the diff. between N. Africa and Germany is no worse than the diff. between So. Cal and Wash. St. or Alaska...
See above, where I link to a resource for solar incidence by town around the world.
As mentioned by BlueTwilight in the post above, your data is insolation on a horizontal surface, which is the wrong way to calculate the amouht of energy available for a tracking collector. Or, do you care about accuracy, given your rather biased posts...
E. Swanson
I do not know what you read, but Desertec is for Germany a project to provide 100 TWh electricity p.a. around 2050 (!) out of 600/700 TWh of demand, this is basis for all studies of the German government for 100% renewables, sorry to disappoint you. The first two decades are characterized by build-up of production capacities, transmission capacities and so on, the production is used locally, the economic and political effect was considered very important for the Maghreb countries. The people there pay of course for electricity and the 400 billion EUR are the finacial frame not the costs.
(reality check: ~100 TWh is provided by 50 GW PV or 30 GW wind power, this costs at the momnet 50 billion or 35 billion EUR, respectively).
The assumption (5 years ago) was that CSP would be the backbone of Desertec, in addition, some wind power would be installed. Within this framework Siemens was a really big player, as they had CSP know-how, production capacities, market access, cheap credit and so on.
Unfortunately for them, PV became much, much cheaper than expected and delivers now electricity in the Maghreb for less than 35% of CSP, which BTW has much more difficulties to provide the same scale effects seen for PV. So Desertec will be run with PV instead of CSP, what is your problem? Neither PV nor wind does not need water BTW. Siemens role will change but they will survive without any doubt.
It is not about shipping the power, it is about producing the power! You should read the relevant studies (>500 pages in German), then provide own hard data, at the moment you only offer your personal opinion which has been in many cases simply proven wrong by reality in the past. I will not do your homework.
Parts of the daytime production will go into methane (Germany has huge storage facilities) or will be used to replace current nighttime electricity and fossil heat in industry (steel mills, concrete production). Some of the current production procedures are only used because baseload electricity was cheap during nightime, there are absolutely no reaons why a switch to daytime is not possible, they are actually discussed.
Whether Germany can provide enough power to cover the winter demand peaks is a question of the usage of biomass and biogass -here we should shut down summer base load production, this is only a energy tax problem- and the the ability to use some of Norway's hydro power. With 70 GW on-shore wind and 50 GW off-shore wind and with the increasing number of small power plants (NG, biogas, biomass) with cogeneration of heat and electricity the 80% renewable will be no real technical problem, the last 20% will be demanding, but I as fan of good 80% solutions could live with a small rest of fossils. The 100% solution for 2050 is for me at the moment an intellectual exercise, the physical condition are there.
What the price tag is depends on the price of natural gas and other fossils around 2040-50, with moderate price increases of fossils Germany can expect around 2030 to run a clear plus with its reneables, this according to academic studies, which are interestingly not rejected by the industry.
You might ask why utilities don't install solar on a large scale if it's so damned wonderful. The answer of course is that if it doesn't cut into their peak, it's just a nuisance that robs them of an opportunity to sell power to amortise their equipment (unlike the householders with subsidised PV panels and FIT who can amortise using every watt their panels produce).
The only place I can think of where solar can cut peak loads is the US, where aircon loads are substantial. In most places peak load would occur in the evening with domestic cooking, heating and lighting.
The other way of cutting peaks is by buying back consumption, as Eskom did.
Eskom scores as consumers switch off
The fact that the large German utilities have only 4% of their capacity in renewables, when 25% of the elctricity is alredy produced by reneables, only tells you that the managers of these companies are unflexible dinosaurs, they would have got the same FITs as the consumers and small companies, who actually installed PV and wind.
They tried for years to stop the conversion to reneables and were caught by the actual developement pants down, their focus now on offshore wind is an attempt to catch up and extract more money from the government and consumer.
Directly relevant:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/22/siemens-solar-idUSL5E8LM5E0201...
Siemens in talks to sell solar business
"Due to the changed framework conditions, lower growth and strong price pressure in the solar markets, the company's expectations for its solar energy activities have not been met," Siemens said on Monday."
Queue "Another one bites the dust"
Re: The big question mark over gasoline from air
Am I missing something here? Isnt this thermodynamicly impossible?
Yes...
I would fathom that the author of the article is clueless in these matters...
As far as economics, it may well be another version of BTU arbitrage, i.e. transformning coal/NG into a pricier liquid fuel. And we know how well the poster child of BTU arbitrage is doing, Corn to Ethanol....
I would think that something like GTL or CTL would have a higher yield than goofing around with extracting carbon from the air and electrolysing water with the the electricity they produce. Now if you had a surplus of non fossil fuel electricity...
I did see a figure for the Navy's desire to make fuel from seawater plus air plus power, $6/gallon. I think that was with free electricity. They claimed the cost of delivering the fuel to a ship at sea was $8, so if all went as claimed they save more on logistics then they lose on conversion.
The claim was CO2 source is carbonic acid in seawater, which is effectively airborne CO2 acidifying the ocean. Capture from free air was reconned to be very expensive several hundred bucks per gallon. So presumably your plant needs to be on the ocean or maybe a large river.
Since the bulk of navy combat ships are part of aircraft carrier groups I assume that they will use excess generating capacity from carriers to make liquid fuel, both for aircraft and for other ships in the group. I wonder how much, if any, excess capacity there is in those reactors..
Navy, Army, Air Force - they all have the same basic aim, cut the logistics chain. Supply of fuel is killing them, they have basically a 40:1 reduction ratio - for every 1 gallon that ends up at the pointy end in the middle of nowhere, 40 is used to get it there.
As such, although the target might be $6, in reality being able to cut off the logistics chain and generate in situ is probably worth $240 a gallon.
My guess is they are thinking about those micro nuclear reactors that multiple entities are researching - ship one of those in a container to the front line, power the multiplying electronics demand AND generate fuel at the same time.
Of course, they would keep that bit quiet at the moment.
Would also make rail guns practical.
micro nuclear reactors that multiple entities are researching - ship one of those in a container to the front line,
Why does that sound like target or something you can't really leave behind.
The perfect excuse for "never retreat, never surrender". Once a forward position is occupied -or a war started, you can never end it, because your mini-nukes might fall into enemy hands. War without end. A weapon merchants heaven!
From my limited understanding (refitted) aircraft carriers often have gobs of excess (electrical) power available, so it would seem reasonable to convert that in JP6.
Rgds
WeekendPeak
When you realise that this was published in the UK's most widely read popular science magazine, that does not bode well for the future.
Its a stranded wind/PV to liquid fuel arbitrage. If they get electricity for virtually free they might be able to make money from it. Particularly if they can get a double bite at the green subsidy cherry for both sides of the arbitrage.
The basic idea is if you build wind or PV (or a combo) to a large fraction of grid demand, you end up with a significant amount of stranded power. So the idea is with the addition of this sort of conversion you can utilize most of what would otherwise be curtailed. Still I think the wind/PV owners need some compensation if they are to overbuild beyond the point where its economic without getting some value from the stranded portion.
Much better to use this excess energy to produce hydrogen - e.g. when wind strong overnight when demand low, use excess power for hydrogen creation.
Aberdeen Scotland has pilot plant for this (uses hydrogen to power busses) and there are German pilots too.
I hate it when that happens.
Is Ohio's 'secret' energy boom going bust?
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/10/22/ohio-shale-idUKL1E8LM30420121022
An informative article on the Utica play including mysterious disappearing oil windows.
"....In an SEC filing this May, the company said it was planning to drill a significant number of wells in Utica's "oil window" over the rest of this year, referring to an area that is expected to hold mostly oil. Three months later it said it "continues to focus on developing the wet gas and dry gas windows," with no mention of oil. Chesapeake declined to comment on the change in description."
mass - If this isn't a misprint it has to be one of most bizarre statements I’ve seen in a while: “McClendon (head of Chesapeake) himself says secrecy actually benefits his shareholders. He said in November that Chesapeake would stop reporting well-result details to investors because positive well data were driving land prices higher.” So he’ll hold back data that might run land prices up which would also cause stock price to rise. So a shareholder may sell his stock at a price lower than he might had the POSITIVE data been released. But, at the same time, an investor might be willing to pay more for CHK stock based on McClendon’s admission of “secrecy” by assuming CHK is holding back POSITIVE data when in fact they are holding back NEGATIVE data. But by admitting he’s withholding positive results he’s also admitting withholding negative results. You can’t do one without the other. IOW if they only report all wells with negative results then the implication would be the unreported wells had positive results.
He may have said he’s doing this to keep lease costs down but it’s also an admission of manipulating the company’s valuation via press releases. The SEC normally has a dim view of such activity. And if the Utica doesn’t live up to expectations and CHK stock drops when that info is eventually made public I would expect shareholder lawsuits based upon withholding critical financial data. Ohio may not require the timely release of critical data but the SEC does.
Another sociopath running a public company. Wouldn't touch this company with a thousand feet of drilling pipe.
Rock and others- how long before natural gas seriously declines in volume? I know that the depletion rates are steep but they also need the cash flow. Drilling rigs are down from last year by almost half (am i right?) so how long before gas prices rise to an economical point for operations? They are holding off from drilling on my land that my relative leased to them last year- i think they are waiting out prices. Any ideas on how long before gas prices double or become economical again? 1 year? 3?
C8 - Just some personal WAGS. I don't see NG supplies dropping very fast. Granted new wells have a steep decline but the great majority of our total NG production is from wells far down their decline path and isn't dropping too fast. Rigs drilling only for NG dropped steeply a good while back with the rigs drilling for oil jumping up pretty good. And some of those oil wells are adding to NG supplies also.
NG prices are today high enough to be economical...for some prospects. So the question is how many more wells will be drilled at $X/mcf price. Back when I was with Devon they were heavy into dry NG shale plays, especially in E. Texas. Once NG prices dropped below $6/mcf they pulled back drilling efforts fast. Except for DW GOM I don't see a lot of conventional NG potential left onshore. So while $6+/mcf might get the shale plays moving again it will have to be another very aggressive effort to add production long term.
How soon to much higher NG prices? We'll probably see some short retain price spikes during the winter but that will more likely be due to the pipeline systems limitations than anything else. But I wouldn't expect NG to reach $6+/mcf for several years at least. And price will be just as affected by demand as production IMHO.
Thanks Rock, I don't need the money now so i hope the drillers squat on the land for as long as possible, per contract, before producing. I want as high of a royalty as I can get. We have 4 years left on the lease. At least my electricity bills will be low for a while longer, posting on TOD sucks power like crazy.
I read in a recent article that there are 1000 shale gas wells drilled and fracced in the Marcellus shale just waiting for pipelines to be completed. Which should be later this year. Now to me that is a lot a money to be sunk into none producing wells, or should I say delayed producing wells, but if the story is to be believed there is a lot of gas to come online before they need to do too much more drilling.
It may explain some of Chesapeake's cash flow problems. I find it hard to believe all these wells would have had to be drilled to hold acreage, but it will take some time to work through all that spare capacity.
edit:
Not the same article I read, but along the same lines.
http://articles.philly.com/2012-10-03/business/34219187_1_gas-production...
pusher - I've read the same. I can imagine if the p/l's open up about the same time there would be a huge surge of NG to the market which could send a terrible signal to the public: huge NG resources avaialble for a long time. But as those wells go into immediate steep decline that surge will disappear in a year or two and those likely cheap prices will disappear also. So with the new p/l access comes a crash in drilling economics which will cut new NG being developed at the time when more would be needed to avoid that huge decline.
Here is a post and video on using hydrogen to assist in the creation of an EcoIsland in the Isle of Wight, in the UK:
http://fuelcellsworks.com/news/2012/10/22/hydrogen-is-the-future-of-fuel...
The island is around 150 square miles and has about 140,000 people, and they aim to make it energy self sufficient by 2020.
They are looking to use hydrogen electrolysed from water to store renewable energy to enable this.
That is around 60% efficient in producing hydrogen and compressing it.
So a kilogram of hydrogen containing around 33kwh of energy might take 60kwh or so to produce.
The Hyundai FCEV in the video is good for around 68 miles of normal driving on that so you are getting about 1 mile/kwh, a lot less than using the electricity in a battery, but OTOH this is renewable which would otherwise be wasted and you can't travel 300 miles on batteries short of the Tesla.
The claim in the video that it will be half the cost of petrol is stretching it.
60kwh at a cheap overnight rate of £0.08 is £4.80, disregarding the cost of the equipment to make it, which compares to around £5 US gallon.
The fuel cell is way more efficient than an internal combustion engine though, so maybe 34/US gallon might be right for this medium size car.
That is half the price (ish) but only because petrol is paying a tax of around 60% in the UK
Just the same, you might be talking about ball park the same prices to travel as using a petrol car, but without any point of use pollution or the range restrictions of batteries.
Another inaccuracy is that the production will not hit 10,000 a year for the Hyundai's until 2015
It's pretty nice though that the electroliser station is plug an play, so that rolling out a hydrogen infrastructure will not be the hassle opponents contend, and that they are also thinking about marine use at this early stage.
Why would EV range be an issue on a island that has the same area as a rectangle 15 miles long by 10 miles wide? If I were driving an EV with 100 mile range on such an island, range anxiety would be the last thing I would experience. Heck, even if the EV range was only 40 miles, like many DIY conversions are, think about it, how likely is it that the nearest charging point will be more than 10 miles away?
I just had a look via Google Maps and the island is only a little more than about 22 miles long from east to west for goodness sake! As a matter of fact if charging stations were built such that, they divided the island into four segments east to west and four segments north to south, just 5 locations, very few places on the island if any, would be more than 3 miles away from a charging station. Range anxiety? Give me a break!
Alan from the islands
I agree that battery powered cars would work on the island.
The scope of the ambitions for this project are a lot bigger though, and it is to be a test bed for technologies applicable elsewhere, and considerable sums are being put in by major corporations, much the same as France is doing in Reunion.
Hydrogen is also being used as it provides a storage medium for the mix or renewables they intend to use:
'The £300m initiative aims to turn the islanders from some of the heaviest to some of the lowest energy users in Europe. It comes via Ecoisland, a small, not-for-profit partnership of local environmentalists seeking to reduce emissions by generating renewable energy, backed by a group of giant technology companies including IBM, Cable and Wireless and Toshiba who want an ambitious testbed to roll out and develop their technology ahead of other regions. Together they are confident that the island of 130,000 people can be turned into one of the world's largest "smart communities" - using possibly 40% less electricity and paying "significantly" lower bills.
The internet-based grid tested by Hayes at Cowes this week is central to the wider island plan of developing a variety of renewable energy systems. The island has some of the best tidal and solar power potential in Britain and there are plans for a waste to energy plant and an anaerobic digestor.'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/oct/22/isle-of-wight-energy
I still say hydrogen is a dreadful technology for storing energy. It is lower energy density than other fuels unless compressed to high pressures (which reduces efficiency and increases infrastructure costs). It is a very had gas to stop leaking , as it's small molecular size will permiate almost anything. The simplest technology for making it (electrolysing water) is not efficient. It requiers a total rebuild of distribution infrastructure and very expensive purpose built vehicles to burn it.
There are far better ways to store excess energy.
My thoughts exactly!
Alan from the islands
Well, IMO the renewables are a waste of money and a folly outside of equatorial areas, hydro aside, at any rate as more than bit part players, and the costs are going to catch them out as the various mechanisms by which they have been hidden and landed on the general public are caught out by wider use, but hydrogen is a useful storage mechanism.
Lots of analysis of production and infrastructure here:
http://www.npc.org/FTF-80112.html
The two most relevant ones to the present discussion:
http://www.npc.org/FTF-report-080112/H2_Analysis-080112.pdf
http://www.npc.org/FTF-report-080112/Ch7-Infrastructure-080112.pdf
How you could diss affordable wind and solar and then endorse the boondoogle/dream of hydrogen ?
Your judgment and analysis are using "unconventional" metrics - although I am not sure how you can come to such conclusions.
Alan
Affordable? Unless you look at what they actually cost at a high degree of grid penetration:
Germany:
'The country's four main grid operators said Monday that households will from January see a nearly 50 percent rise in the tax they pay to finance the switchover—from €3.6 cents to €5.3 cents ($6.7 cents) per kilowatt hour.'
http://phys.org/news/2012-10-germany-hikes-electricity-renewables.html
So that is as much as the total delivered cost of off peak power in some areas of the US - just for the surcharge.
Of course, that does not include hidden costs, such as mandates, or the looming costs of the frequency variation with wind and solar fighting to be allowed to increase it to a low of 47.5Khz.
Back up and uninterruptible power supplies will be needed not just for computers, but for a huge array of industrial equipment.
Good luck trying to run an aluminium foundry under those circumstances.
German industry is looking at two options, total grid back up with their own generating equipment, or the easy way, close down in Germany and move out.
Unfortunately as detailed on this site the German obsession with getting their power in silly ways may take down a substantial proportion of the European grid, not just Germany.
The interesting political problem is that German industrie is exempted from the ee-tax, one reason the tax grows much faster than calculated (Financial Times Deutschland), so why should industry leave, the opposite happens, an aluminium foundry already started operation again a few weeks ago.
You abviously do not understand vertical grid stability, it improved during summer with almost or even more than 50% reneables, any idea why? We will see what happens in winter, but your whining until now is again fact free.
Even the opponents of the reneables do (in contrast to you) NOT claim any longer that we will see catastrophic net instabilities, the minimum consense is that 40% renewables produce absolute no problems. BTW the stability problems last winter were caused by a limited supply of NG and the situation in France, why do they have net stability problems there with 60 nuclaer power plants, according to you France must be the heaven on earth? And with the low energy prices there should be a highly competitive Frech industry, not a 4 billion EUR deficit per month(!) with Germany.
'your whining until now is again fact free.'
You have moved on to personal attacks, which is a sure sign that your case is weak.
If grid instability is not a problem, I suggest you demonstrate that to the assortment of highly qualified engineers who think it is, here:
http://www.energyfromthorium.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3826&sid=438d...
'Even the opponents of the reneables do (in contrast to you) NOT claim any longer that we will see catastrophic net instabilities, the minimum consense is that 40% renewables produce absolute no problems.'
They don't?
In that case I can't imagine who wrote this article:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9205
Or this:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/instability-in-power-grid-co...
My comment on this is simple:
"And yet it moves"
The German grid as it exists now somehow works, with renewables piling on more and more. And Germany is still a major industrial power, despite building up renewable power. Industry may complain, but they aren't moving - just threatening. Industry using threats and economic blackmail to try to get their way politically is not news, and 90% bluff. Maybe they have to buy some batteries, tough luck.
As a civilization we will eventually have to learn to live off 100% renewables (if we continue). Germany is just getting the jump on everyone else.
The magical German ingredient is fossil fuels.
Renewables make power expensive.
It is fossil fuels which keep the grid going.
That is why Germany is building around 19 new coal power plants, to cover phasing our nasty nuclear power.
They already produce around a third more CO2 than France per capita, and now they admit they have no chance of hitting Kyoto targets.
' Microscopic particles, among the most harmful forms of air pollution, are still found at dangerous levels in Europe, although law has cut some toxins from exhaust fumes and chimneys, a European Environmental Agency (EEA) report said.
On average, air pollution is cutting human lives by roughly eight months and by about two years in the worst affected regions, such as industrial parts of eastern Europe, because it causes diseases such as lung cancer and cardiovascular problems.'
http://news.yahoo.com/breathing-european-air-shortens-lives-report-08390...
So they are building more coal plants, on the grounds that nuclear is 'too dangerous!'
Here is a list of coal-fired power projects in Germany:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_geplanter_Kohlekraftwerke_in_Deutschland
There are sixteen power stations remaining on this list (it was longer a few months ago -- one of the listed ones has been completed, the others are off the drawing board altogether).
Of the sixteen, four are no longer on the table (i.e postponed indefinitely).
Of the remaining eleven projects, five are upgrades at the sites of existing power stations (all of which will be closing down old units and will become better able to load-follow, thus enabling deeper penetration of intermittent renewables), not new power stations at all.
Of the remaining six, four are not yet under construction, and two of those have very long planning horizons.
The last one (at Datteln near Dortmund) has had its operating licence revoked on a technicality since the change of state government, despite construction having commenced. The old power station across the canal will be closed at the end of this year. Note that the same Green minority government has allowed other upgrades at larger power stations in the state to go ahead : opposition has not been so fierce, precisely because those other projects would not cause an increase in total emissions. Another change of government could probably work around the invalid planning grant.
Really there are only SIX new coal-fired power stations planned in Germany, only four of which have any chance of opening before 2020, namely Datteln (if a new government were to brave public protests), Wilhelmshafen, Stade and Lünen.
So long as there is plenty of Russian natural gas, Germany doesn't have an energy problem. Nord Stream is expanding and Poland and Ukraine are being bypassed.
Renewables make power expensive.
Do you have any proof that this is the case VS fossil fuel being underpriced?
Not necessarily! What if most people end up not needing 'The Grid' ?
Then again why would you accept Deutsche Bank's word?
It is fortunate indeed that Germany does not get cold and dark in the winter.
You ain't gonna store solar in batteries to cover seasonal variation.
The solution from the 'renewables everywhere' crowd is always the same, just add another layer of complexity and cost, sticking one silly idea on top of another to see if they will work in combination.
Then they end up burning fossil fuels instead, and pretend that everything will get better after whatever technological breakthrough they fancy comes about.
I'm old fashioned.
I think you use solar where it is sunny.
I've been a supporter of solar power for the last 40 years, and at last we are reaching the point where, particularly in off-grid areas of the tropics, it is becoming economic.
That support makes it even more frustrating when it is treated as a cure-all, and put in places where it is never going to make sense as long as the earth is round.
The most economic use of solar in Germany would be to take them off their roofs and give them away to India.
Fossil fuels are used with reduced efficiency as they have to dance around solar and wind.
Covering good German land, or rooftops for that matter with solar, is a complete waste of 130 billion Euros or so.
Perhaps, all I'm saying is Deutsche Bank's report seems to conclude otherwise.
http://www.dbcca.com/dbcca/EN/_media/German_FIT_for_PV.pdf
Thanks for the link, which I will study in more detail tomorrow.
Perhaps it is worth pointing out that DB were also firm believers in the Euro, and that has not worked out too well for many of the countries which so happily signed up.
You think it is not sunny in the Sahara Desert in winter because you do not interpret insolation data nor orientate solar panels correctly. One can use solar systems at the North and South Poles where it is dark for half of a year to reduce the cost of transporting fuel to a remote location.
And Aswan is a better place to put solar than Cairo. Several hundred km further south (increased winter insolation) and drier climate.
Alan
It is my understanding that German wind peaks in the winter. A complementary offset to solar.
Add a bit more pumped storage (a recent agreement between Germany & Austria to co-develop more).
Alan
Might be interesting to note that this "tax" is calculated from the difference between FIT and selling price at the EEX (energy exchange). The revenue was €4.95 billion in 2012 and will be €2.54 billion in 2013. How so? Whenever renewable energy is available in larger quantities, the price at the EEX drops, thus higher difference to the FIT, thus higher "tax". This is the largest share of the increase. Sadly, the reduced price does not show up on my bill so far.
Hydrogen has a nasty pair of properties that, almost by themselves, make it a bad choice for extensive usage. Because of the small molecular size it is almost impossible to preven leakage. It also has one of the highest ranges of flamability of any gas. So, in short, it will probably leak a lot and if it leaks it is much more likely to ignite.
One amongst a host of safety tests conducted by a large number of organisations also including the DOE and Daimler, in this case Hyundai:
http://www.fch-ju.eu/sites/default/files/documents/ga2010/sae-hoon_kim.pdf
Note that in the fire test the petrol tank exploded after 40 minutes, the hydrogen tank's pressure release valve opened after 22 minutes and vented a flame upwards, as hydrogen is lighter than air, instead of pooling around the unfortunate occupants as petrol does in the frequent combustion engine fires.
Is hydrogen perfectly safe?
No, just safer than petrol.
There are real difficulties piping hydrogen.
Difficulties should not automatically be assumed to be showstoppers though, and piping hydrogen works in practise as well as theory:
http://fuelcellsworks.com/news/2012/10/18/air-products%E2%80%99-californ...
No, just safer than petrol.
I don't believe that Petrol leaks are a threat to the ozone but widespread Hydrogen production could very well consume upper atmosphere O3 by making water not to mention raise the O2 levels in the atmosphere over a long time.
Now, what level of O2 is needed to change to make stuff burst into flames? Meh, who cares its in the Future! http://www.highdefdigest.com/blog/futurama-holiday-special-2010/
What is the basis for this (inobvious to me) claims? I can imagine widespread H2 leaks might cause extra stratospheric H2O -assuming the H2 reaches the stratosphere unoxidized. Human burning of fuel will never be an important global source of water.
Now raising the O2 content of the atmosphere, that one is quite the feat.
https://www.google.com/search?q=hydrogen+power+ozone+depletion
Now if there is a mass separation of water into gas and a %age of the Hydrogen escapes the gravity well of Earth, over time the O2 levels would rise. Rather obvious.
That would take a very very long time. It would probably require something like Fusion energy. Cutting the leakage rate would help.
That would take a very very long time.
Really?
You have went from Huh? to the above position. How did you decide 'a very long time'?
I'm guessing that somewhere back when fossil sunshine - in the form of fossil fuels - was 1st being used someone asked 'hey, what will the added CO2 do?'
Alas, the feature of the user page was lost on TOD but there was an excellent link to the SCRAP metal value of a Hydrogen storage tank exceeded the 'value' of the 'Hydrogen energy' said big Iron tank could hold on the user page.
There are pretty much no good ways of storing energy. Just some some methods that are less bad than others.
Batteries work well but they are expensive. Simple systems like pumped water and compressed air are probably among the most efficient.
But these days, you are much better off trying to reduce power usage and figure out good ways to consume power as it is collected rather than buying storage systems.
Pumped water and compressed air are both dependent on having the right geology and geography handy to use.
In the case of the former you have to pump a heck of a lot of water up to a heck of a height to get worthwhile amounts of storage.
Norway is fine, but not the Isle of Wight.
Hydrogen is a more universal solution, in spite of its low round trip effciency
Someone else agrees
http://www.tinaja.com/h2gas01.shtml
At those distances of 10-15 miles you could ride a bike! Or at least an electric bike! Geez!
Of course you could, although the island is fairly hilly.
That is not the point though.
They are aiming to cover all transport needs, which includes much more than personal transport.
And beyond that, this is a proving ground for technologies to use much more universally, not just on the island.
I think the emphasis on renewables is a nonsense, but that is another issue.
What they are attempting is clear, and has far wider implications than getting around on the Isle of Wight.
Mildly curious: if the renewables are nonsense, then what's the point of the hydrogen? I mean, the alternative to alternatives ("renewables") is fossil fuels, and if you've already got those, why bother with the hydrogen? What makes any of it 'economic', exactly?
Desert
I was initially reporting on what they are doing, not what I would prefer.
They think that they can economically use surplus renewable power to generate hydrogen economically.
I would disagree.
However, there are a number of advantages to using hydrogen, even ignoring the renewables bit.
Fuel cells are way more efficient than combustion engines, so even if hydrogen is generated the way it is at present, from natural gas, and taking conversion and compression losses into account it is still more efficient than using petrol, by something like 1.5:1.
For countries like the US there is of course the added advantage that NG is indigenous, not imported, and is more abundant that non-tar sands oil.
A very big reason for me is health:
' Microscopic particles, among the most harmful forms of air pollution, are still found at dangerous levels in Europe, although law has cut some toxins from exhaust fumes and chimneys, a European Environmental Agency (EEA) report said.
On average, air pollution is cutting human lives by roughly eight months and by about two years in the worst affected regions, such as industrial parts of eastern Europe, because it causes diseases such as lung cancer and cardiovascular problems.'
http://news.yahoo.com/breathing-european-air-shortens-lives-report-08390...
Hydrogen is completely clean at point of use, and it is much easier to clean up pollution from big central sources than from millions of cars.
Not all of the air pollution is from transport of course, but urban dwellers heavily exposed to fumes suffer far worse than others, as do those living near heavily trafficked roads.
My preferred option would in any case be nuclear, which would almost eliminate production air pollution.
Talking of the unacceptable risks of nuclear is crazy, when it is clear that in Europe alone millions of people are dying every year from air pollution.
Risks are always comparative.
It is a lot tougher to generate hydrogen economically from renewables than nuclear, as the equipment can be used much more efficiently in nuclear power, basically every night when demand is lower.
Personally I would look to combine batteries and FCEVs in a hybrid, which is still an all electric car and so much simpler with a much lower parts count than ICE and electric combo's like the Volt, but would minimise the use of hydrogen to when it is needed, for longer distance journeys.
Finally, there is no reason why in suitable locations with all year round strong sun and plenty of water hydrogen could not be produced there, given further improvements in cost and technology, and maybe even shipped to other areas of the world.
That is a different ball-game to either DESERTEC, which aimed to pipe the electricity thousands of miles, or generating hydrogen on the northerly Isle of Wight, which is the sort of thing people only get keen on when they are spending other people's money.
I have been reading this discussion between you guys and one thing keeps bugging me about your, DaveW's, insistence that renewables are nonsense. I take it as a given that just about everybody who posts here regularly is on board with the concept of finite resources on this planet of ours. Assuming that you do believe fossil fuels are finite and that one day production of a given FF will decline, what do you propose we use as a energy source for our civilisation once coal production, for example, begins to decline?
I carefully chose coal since the consensus seems to be that it will be the last FF to experience a decline in production so, assuming that the production oil and NG will have already declined by the time coal production peaks, what do you propose we use to replace liquid transportation fuels? Hydrogen?
My final assumption is that at some time in the life of people alive today, production of all FF will have peaked. At that time the only areas of energy production (harnessing) that will be able to grow are nuclear and renewables. Are you assuming that the whole industrialized world go nuclear? If renewables are going to be the only other alternative, when do you propose that we start looking towards harvesting more renewable energy in earnest?
Just askin'
Alan from the islands
Hey Alan,
Many do not think it is a waste of time. I would be awed to have adequate solar, alas, I live at 50 + north on the wet west coast NA.
I think that if we cannot ramp up renewables we will simply do without and do less. That is what I am planning for...a very reduced lifestyle. Sadly, I am reduced to planning for me and mine, as most folks I know do not want to even hear about peak FF, or resources in general. Insulation upgrades, passive solar, wood heat, etc.
We do what we can.
regards...Paulo
Hi Alan.
I most certainly do not think that renewables are a nonsense everywhere.
What gets my goat is the inappropriate use of technologies, under the influence of ideologies which seek to avoid nuclear at any cost, due to incorrect assessment of risk.
It is still a bit dear when total system costs are counted, not just the panels, but in much of the world where heat is the problem, say within 20 degrees or so of the equator, and the sun around the year is pretty constant, then solar pv is likely to be the leading energy source, and that is where most people live.
Things get really silly though when people try to use it in places where they problem is too little sun, not too much.
Solar pv in Germany and the UK will never make sense whilst the earth remains round.
Wind is a great bit part player, and a terrible cost to the grid at too high a penetration.
avoid nuclear at any cost, due to incorrect assessment of risk.
Well why don't you take the time to explain that to us.
While you are at it, explain the risks of civilian nuclear power for the country of Iran in 1976 VS Iran today. Extra credit for Libya and Zimbabwe - nations that had press announcements about the new nuke plants they were going to build in the last 10 years.
About half the world's population lives north of 27° N per Bill Rankin
I had an opportunity to sit in on an event, in my neck of the woods last Friday, where a couple of ladies from Japan spoke about the situation in Japan. They were imploring Jamaicans to never allow nuclear electricity generation on the island, They confirmed what has been stated here by posters like pi, who lives in Japan.
The majority of the Japanese population are extremely uncomfortable with nuclear. It is difficult for outsiders to comprehend just how disenchanted they are. I think it is pi who gave me the best sense of the sentiment there, when he described the situation of living in the shadow of something that, can literally turn your whole world upside down in an instant, making a lot of what you held to be of value, totally worthless. Yes, that's what happened to the people around Fukishima. Their lives were disrupted in a way that is difficult to comprehend.
I am currently sitting here in Jamaica awaiting the arrival of soon to be hurricane Sandy, as is the rest of the population on my island. Given the choice of facing the threat of hurricanes every year for an entire lifetime or the threat of a Fukishima situation for just a day, I would choose the hurricane threat in an instant. After the hurricane is gone, we can pick ourselves up, dust ourselves of and resume our lives. A few people may die which is a rather permanent condition but, for the vast majority of us, the effects are transient. The people displaced in Fukishima will never be able to go back home. The area around that plant, like the area around Chernobyl will be no man's land for decades or maybe centuries, forever as far as anybody alive today is concerned.
I see solar in Germany for example as a desperate attempt to continue to provide power in the face of declining FF. It has it's challenges but, there are some very smart people in Germany who may well come up with ideas to store power harvested during the summer, for use in winter that are actually practical. Desertec is just an attempt to have some more solar power available in Europe when the solar resource there is at it's worst. It's a silver bb rather than a silver bullet.If the worst comes to the worst, Germany will have to depend on (Russian) NG very heavily during winter, until they figure something out.
Given what I've read around here, I question the ability of our civilisation to keep the supply chains necessary for the safe operation of nuclear plants, going for the lifetime of proposed and even some existing plants. A nuclear plant is such a complex beast with thousands of possible points of failure each of which, could result in a catastrophe so, I concur with the Japanese people. Give me intermittent solar power. I'll make hay when the sun shines. In the winter, I'll just make like an Eskimo (if I lived where there was a real winter >;-).
Alan from the islands
Suerte.
NAOM
The initial fuel station is aimed at fleets etc, presumably things like local government vehicles, maybe buses and taxis.
They have a long way to go yet, possibly with delivery vehicles and so on before there is any substantial penetration of the private vehicle market.
Hyundai only plan 10,000 fuel cell vehicles in 2015 - for the world.
I would hope that at least some of the Isle of Wight ferries might use hydrogen and fuel cells, as this ferry does:
http://fuelcellsworks.com/news/2012/10/22/world%E2%80%99s-first-fuel-cel...
'The ZemShip (Zero Emission Ship) “FCS Alsterwasser”, based in Hamburg’s port, transports up to 100 passengers at a time, without producing any emissions. The ships owner, ATG (Alster-Touristik GmbH) has developed in 2009 a so called mono-hull-ship with an engine power of 100kW and a passenger capacity of 100. The ship operates in regular service on the river Alster and its inner-city waterways. The passenger ship has up to now around 1.900 hours on its clock = 11.300 km, since its commissioning and runs absolutely without any problems according to the ships-owner ATG. This year, 2012, the hydrogen consumption has been recorded by 1.400 kg. With this the CO2-saving is around 13.300 kg.'
They had to manufacture, compress, and transport the hydrogen. That probably generated a fair bit of CO2.
"12 hydrogen tanks @ 350 bar in total 50 kg of H2"
I'd hate to be near that thing if there's a collision.
Big, Smart and Green: A Revolutionary Vision for Modern Farming
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/10/big-smart-green-farming/
It sounds attractive.
What I am wondering about is the extra costs of both the smart management, and harvesting the mixed crops.
A lot of these studies don't take account of all costs, but simplify too much.
OTOH the cost of wiping out the pollinator's like bees by excessive use of pesticides is a massive hidden cost.
Their being externalised makes it a lot tougher to move to smarter, apparently more expensive but more sustainable processes.
Wow. They rediscovered crop rotation.
Rotation Dad used when I was a kid;
year 1) plow pasture, plant corn.
year 2) plant oats and clover/timothy grass for future hay. The oats is a nurse crop, and is harvested in August.
year 3) the clover/timothy goes to make hay.
year 4) let the cows into the hay field, it is now pasture.
goto year 1.
We were further north, and the alfalfa and soybeans varieties available then were dodgy at best for the climate. The corn was also dodgy, but as it was chopped for silage to feed the dairy cows, the frost problem that would get you trying to grow shell corn didn't apply.
"Wow. They rediscovered crop rotation."
...... everything old is new again
(and we might see more of that in the future)
Not long ago someone posted a link here on DB to a company that just invented the battery.
Re: "Gig Economy", this quote gets me:
How many can really afford that? And can we have a functioning economy where we all just blog, paint and mix drinks for one-another?
"And can we have a functioning economy where we all just blog, paint and mix drinks for one-another?"
No, but it will help. It seems like this kind of economy is emerging already, based on what I see on Facebook and other social media.
Yeah, this article annoyed me. Of course they would look at the comedian/software engineer rather than the adjunct/pizza delivery guy, or farmer/mechanic for that matter.
There is some truth to the trend of the freelancing, but the media keeps portraying it as some kind of new bobo trend for yuppies who can't decide between their high paying professional careers and their thriving creative hobby.
The truth of the matter is that most modern freelancing is just an attempt to make a living wage out of itinerant labor with low pay and no benefits.
When I hear the word "retraining," I reach for my revolver...
I did very well for two decades in a 'gig' economy, mainly due to my passion for constantly "re-training" myself. While this was, in part, to keep from getting bored, when engineering contracts were nearing completion, I was able to demonstrate a level of versatility that many of my 'specialist' coworkers couldn't. Contract gigs also allowed me to, as the article hints at, regroup and re-evaluate my goals, and take time out of the race. From design and control systems I managed to slide into other aspects of a rather broad industry, like IT, coding, and early GIS (which previous gigs in utility surveying contributed to). What began as a hobby, alternative energy/solar, drew on previous systems experience, and eventually resulted in some sideline income.
My wife's hobby, showing dogs, led me to learn dog grooming (totally unrelated to any previous employment), something I found I had a talent for, enjoyed, and landed me some gigs that helped us through the crash beginning in 2008 (both of us lost full-time jobs to companies' going bankrupt).
Virtually all of these contract gigs paid enough to offset full-time employee benefit programs, which were clearly being reduced/eliminated. I also avoided the stigma of 'job-hopping'; when asked why I left my previous job, I stated "contract completed". It seems similar to life in the oil patch; boom and bust; not a big problem if one manages things well.
Keep learning and follow your bliss... Be passionate about what you are doing and something always comes up. If you've gotten burned out on what you've been doing, it shows.
Ditto, (in effect..)
I still 'Gig' as a videographer, gaffer and grip, but I also 'freelance' as a landlord/handyman, and I just finished my 'retraining' to operate Industrial Embroidery Machines for L.L.Bean of all places for some seasonal cha-ching.. ('Very Similar to your Vaporators, in most respects..' ie, the clunky Motion Control IMC rigs I used to run for animated commercials back in the late 80's, with their beautiful old, repurposed/retrained 35mm Mitchell Rackover Camera Bodies!!)
As Steven Sondheim said in Follies,
"I stood on breadlines with the best,
read while the headlines did the rest,
In the depression, was I depressed? Nowhere Near...
I met a big financier, and I'm here!"
"Then you career from career to career,
I'm almost through my memoirs, and I'm here!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4D_kA6mrZI&feature=related (Go, Marilyn Maye!)
Adapt or die..
I like the *idea* of "do what you love, the money will follow", and closed-end contract gigs are certainly one way to help you accomplish that goal. However, it doesn't always work out that way in reality. Most workers, salaried or contract, get paid because there is demand for some type of skill or service, not because it's something that's fun to do or personally/spiritually rewarding.
I applaud and admire anyone who can take a fun hobby (or several) and turn them into a paying and sustainable career, but I think it's a tad unrealistic to expect we can all do that --much in the same way that most Americans believe that everyone becoming rich is actually possible. It's important to recognize that a market (demand) must first exist for your skill/service --ideally an underserved one. And once you have that identified (no easy task in itself), you must convince customers and businesses that you can do it better, faster or cheaper than anyone else, so they will part with their hard won cash and hire you. This is far, far from an easy task for most people. Salesmanship has a lot to do with those who are successful or unsuccessful at this approach, and that can be a difficult skill to master for many people.
And then sometimes, you learn to love some of your new skills precisely because they are new skills in your kit, AND they are jobs that were available which saved your butt. There is a part of 'doing what you love' that is basically the love of learning new avenues and devising new options.
I'm usually a hardware and shop kind of guy, but now I'm being paid to use a sewing machine (a tool which I already really liked anyhow) ... and yet I never thought it would be a revenue source for me. PLUS, my Maternal Great Grandmother was a seamstress in Worcester, Mass.. and passed her Fabric Arts down to my Granny, my Mom and sister and Brother.. more rhyming histories!
It just seems that even for those who didn't have to sharpen the tool of self-marketing and self-employment up to now, that the Mother of Invention has brought that option up out of the murk, given these times of tightening horizons.
I think such learning is exhausting and sometimes frightening.. but it can also keep you young.
I just read "Who moved my cheese". Quite interesting from our perspective. The synopsis on Wikipedia is all you need.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Moved_My_Cheese%3F
More detailed background information (i.e. charts and graphs) on the After the Boom in Natural Gas article can found in the February 6'th TOD post Gas Boom Goes Bust. It appears this information is working its way into the mainstream consciousness. So far, the New York Times is only willing to use the phrase "After the Boom" in the title. What happens over the next winter with respect to both the climatic and economic temperature will determine whether "After the Boom" evolves into "Bust".
190 million tons loss of ice a day?! Yet another AGW denialist claim debunked.
This would be about 5 mm / year if my math is right.
Your math (and the article) are both wrong.. Surface area of earth's oceans 3.6E+8 km^2.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean
1 mm of sea level increase.. == 3.6E+8 km^2 /1E+6 (mm/km) == 3.6E+2 km^3
That's 360 cubic kilometers of melt water to increase sea level by 1mm.
Meanwhile 190 million tonns of melt/day is 1.9E+8/1E+9(tonns/km^3) == 0.19 km^3 melt water per day.
360(1mm SLI/km^3)/0.19(km^3/day)/365.25(days/year) == ~5.18 years to increase sea level by 1mm. or (~0.2mm per year).
But.. as they say.. the study period ended a while ago.. and melting has vastly accelerated.. plus several other errors, like sea water density max'd out 4C, fresh water mixing with salt, gravitational attraction of surrounding water(up to a doubling) etc..
I had calculated the reduction in thickness of ice over the area of Antarctica, which Google gives as 14,000,000 km^2. This would be 1.4E+13 m^3.
So 365 * 1.9E+8 / 1.4E+13 = 4.9E-3 m/y = 5 mm / year.
The average depth of ice in Antarctica is about 2200 m, so this is 100 * 4.9E-3 / 2.2E+3 = 0.0002% / year of Antarctic ice being lost.
Almost always left out-- and has huge consequences.
The article indicates "69 billion tonnes" per year, bottom line loss, of ice in all of Antarctica.
Perk Earl,
The deniers fail to understand the difference between extent and volume, i.e. square miles of ice compared to cubic miles of ice.
My understanding was that warming was causing increased snow fall there and thus Antarctica was gaining mass? No?
In any case that figure from the article title is localized (probably to W. Antarctica). Net loss according to the article is 69Mt/day or 25Gt/y, +/- ?, we are not told.
That's in considerable conflict with Wingham et al published RPS 2006.
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/364/1844/1627.full.pdf
Not the first to conflict with Wingham 2006; probably not the last either.
Accelerated Antarctic ice loss from satellite gravity measurements
J. L. Chen, C. R.Wilson, D. Blankenship and B. D. Tapley (2009)
220Gt/year => ~600Mt/day
Something I've not understood regarding GRACE measurements: GRACE measures mass via gravitation pull on the satellite, but *all* mass, underlying rock, ice everything. Given isostatic rebound, how are the two, ice and rock, separated?
Maybe I'm missing something simple here ...
GRACE measures mass.
Loss of mass is assumed to be ice (or water in other locations).
Is there any reason to assume a loss of rock?
Isostatic rebound would not cause a loss of rock mass.
To be specific GRACE measures satellite acceleration brought about by localized changes in gravitational force, the force being dependent of course on both mass and distance. Isostatic rebound changes the distance, satellite to the localized mass. Perhaps only the mass change is significant?
The whole gist of the article is a new better attempt to disentangle the effects (of land motions and ice loss). Thats where the bigger uncertainties come in. In places that aren't so completely covered by ice, there are at least a few landstations to constrain the rebound rates. I think for Antarctica it has to come from modeling of rebound. I'm sure they look at predictions of parameters that determine rebound versus things that can be observed.
No, Antarctica is losing mass.
"Meanwhile, measurements from the Grace satellites confirm that Antarctica is losing mass 11. Isabella Velicogna of JPL and the University of California, Irvine, uses Grace data to weigh the Antarctic ice sheet from space. Her work shows that the ice sheet is not only losing mass, but it is losing mass at an accelerating rate. "The important message is that it is not a linear trend. A linear trend means you have the same mass loss every year. The fact that it’s above linear, this is the important idea, that ice loss is increasing with time," she says. And she points out that it isn’t just the Grace data that show accelerating loss; the radar data do, too. "It isn't just one type of measurement. It's a series of independent measurements that are giving the same results, which makes it more robust."
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/20100108_Is_Antarctica_Melting...
It snow more, and melt more. Turns out West Antarctica is a net loser, and East Antarctica is (for now) a net gainer. The balance of the two is a total net loss.
As the world keep warming up, the gaining areas will gain mass faster and faster, but at the same time they will shrink. In the long run, this will lead to an increase in net loss. But there may be an increase in net gain in the early phases. This happened in Scandinavia, where we had several growing glaciers in the 1990ies, but now only have one, the other ones are losing mass.
Thats only 70 Gigatons/year. Greenland is several times that. Thats why it says, its surprisingly low so far.
Of course the denialist claim uses conflation, Antarctic sea ice extent has increased slightly (explained by counterintuitive effects), and they just say ice, so that the casual reader thinks -ohh so no threat to sea level.
The key is the surprising rate of acceleration ... non-linear ... and that rate is greater than Greenland.
Antharctica has another troubling factor, the "glacial rivers" that flow to the sea from the interior. Their rate of flow is increasing, ie. accelerating.
They are telling us this will catch up to us quicker than some of the things that do not have as high a rate of accelleration.
Lethal Exhaust: Study Leads To Designation Of Diesel Fumes As A Known Carcinogen
... which means that freeway corridors are 'cancer alleys'
The damage is not just in the Third World:
'Exposure to ambient air pollution from traffic during infancy is associated with lung function deficits in children up to eight years of age, particularly among children sensitized to common allergens, according to a new study.
"Earlier studies have shown that children are highly susceptible to the adverse effects of air pollution and suggest that exposure early in life may be particularly harmful," said researcher Göran Pershagen, MD, PhD, professor at the Karolinska Institutet Institute of Environmental Medicine in Stockholm, Sweden. "In our prospective birth cohort study in a large population of Swedish children, exposure to traffic-related air pollution during infancy was associated with decreases in lung function at age eight, with stronger effects indicated in boys, children with asthma and particularly in children sensitized to allergens."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121012074345.htm
That Science Daily link has a whole host of studies on the negative health impacts of car/truck exhaust. It is looking more and more when it comes to public health, cars (and trucks) are the new cigarettes.
This is why it was a poor decision for the California governor to cave in and allow the switch early from California's less polluting summer blend of gasoline to the more polluting winter one. When it is hot and sunny, the air in the Bay Area, the Central Valley and LA can get really nasty. It is an amazing state of affairs that air clean enough for children to breathe without a trip to the hospital is considered an expendable luxury while gasoline cheap enough to allow people to continue to propel 5000 lbs of metal with them wherever they go is considered a serious necessity.
"..cars (and trucks) are the new cigarettes."
This has been obvious since long ago. That's why we had emissions regulations and catalytic converters in the first place.
The worst part is that exhaust is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the damage from car-centric development and such. The personal auto for everyone was a very expensive blind alley to go down for our society.
Funny, when I used to smoke it was a pet peeve that people hated cigs but ignored car exhaust.
I can't help but wonder if diesel school buses aren't causing the asthma that seems to be so common today. When I was a kid, at least in our area there weren't any diesel buses, and I don't remember anyone with asthma either.
Climbing The Ladder Of Awareness
These five stages seem remarkably like the old favorites from Kubler-Ross: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.
The article is mine, and I agree that it's very similar to K-R's stages. In fact, just a couple of weeks before I wrote that one, I wrote the article Finding the Gift in which I extended K-R's five stages to include a missing sixth stage:
My response to realizing the full extent of our predicament and the utter improbability that we will "solve" any of it, has been to take a turn towards non-dualism. It's one of the ways that people can enhance both their equanimity and their wisdom at the same time, and become more able to cope with whatever "rough beast is slouching towards Bethlehem to be born."
Paul,
I've been enjoying your writings via Carolyn Baker's site. Good stuff! Thanks!
Agreed, nondualism is better software, and can be run-in alongside the old OS's and hopefully take over as they fail. But rapid voluntary takeup isn't happening, so we're trying targeted infection locally.
Based on this article, I'm at Stage 5 and past my depression.
The world as we know it was never going to last forever. Enjoy the ride while it lasts and try to step as lightly as you can all things considered.
I'm not too worried about the problems that beset the world and how they impact things, I just want to watch what happens from a reasonably comfortable and secure vantage point. Watching it all change so much on the levels we're seeing now is a remarkable experience. I wouldn't recommend it for everyone though. Stages 4 and 5 can be a real pain in the butt, and in the brain.
So it goes...
My dear friend, " Been there done that" .Had the most harrowing 2 months when I realised PO was a reality . But once into acceptance ,never been happier . Going to Barcelona next week and to Greece in December to study collapse . As the Chinese say "May you live in interesting times" .Tks to all at TOD to for teaching me and for my internal peace .
Some folks who know my rather bleak view of the future are fairly surprised when they discover our quite laid back lifestyle, as if I should be running around like Chicken Little or something. The first comment below the article talks about being the rounded rock in the river bed, though I view things as being a bit more of a challenge than that, doing things to adapt to an accepted trend, rather than running around trying to keep the sky from falling, or trying to convince one's self (and everyone else) that "it just ain't so".
I conclude that to be comfortably ensconced in stage 5 requires one to adopt a fair level of socioapathy, especially after TSHTF... How many of you really felt bad for this woman? Perhaps if she had been blind?
Agree with you all the way,chief.
Whenever I encounter the typical Joe Sixpack who is complaining about high prices of fuel, groceries, etc. , I smile brightly and respond, "Just think, these are going to be called The Good Old Days!"
I get a variety of reactions, but it generally shuts down the whining.
I like to stress out my barber.
I say: "When I got my 1st new car, back in 1993, fuel was roughly US$1/gallon. Now it is, even rounding down, US$4/gallon. So... if it keeps going, how much will it cost when we retire?"
And that is just discussing user fuel price, not even curving, or worrying about availability.
Yes, stereotypes don't die easily...do they ? IMO PO/AGW folks prefer to spend more time on things like taking a walk in the park or spending time with the family rather than running after things like useless gadgets and EMI's.
My friend, if you are coming to Spain to learn about collapse better than Barcelona visit Madrid and Alicante, it is much more obvious and there are demonstrations almost every day --Barcelona, not so much.
Spain has always been very clever at hiding its miseries and Barcelona is so tourist oriented that a visitor, specially if he doesn't speak both Spanish and Catalan is not going to think that the situation is as bad as it is reported. Also the Catalans are going to whine to you all the time about the political situation and about Madrid not giving back all the money they collect in taxes and old Medieval wrongs.
The best tourism in Barcelona is sex tourism, but perhaps I should not give explicit directions -just turn right on the Rambla, to the Old Market of La Boquería www.boqueria.info/index.php?lang=en during the day it is a proper market, during the night that neighborhood satiates other appetites.
But in Madrid the people are angry and not in a pleasant mood, although violence in the demonstrations is non existent --imagine hundreds of thousands marching down the avenues, not a window pane got broken, not a car burn not a policeman shot.
Disgusting, more like a herd of sheep than a mob.
Now, London, that's different, that's the place you have to go to learn about collapse.
Remember that a year ago the capital of Britain was burning?
People seem to have forgotten. It didn't happen anywhere else in Europe. Mobs of Africans in London burning down buildings, stealing and killing people, but in Manchester it wasn't the blacks, it was the whites, young white English people all of them.
So don't bother with Spain, Barcelona or Greece.
Go to London, you speak the language, you are sure to learn something new, something better that the usual slagging off by the gringos of the non-English speaking Mediterranean Countries.
Thanks Santalucia ,but your guidance comes late . I wish I had this viewpoint before and would have gone to Madrid . Anyway I will make amends since London by train is just 3 hrs from where I live on the Belgian/France border. I am from India where demonstrations are never and I repeat never without violence ,tear gas and batons,the atmosphere of demonstrations in Belgium or Europe surprises me .What they have here are whistles,drums and flares . I really laugh when I see this .No stones,no rods,no sticks . What happened ? Too much of the good life seems to have castrated the European spirit for revolt or is it just fatigue ,boredom , defeatism etc ? What is it,can you shed some light ? I always tell my Belgian friends that if we had an episode like Dexia Bank in India ,there would be a bank run and a riot, but here nothing happened . By the way all TOD readers are requested to shed light why things are not exploding in Europe with the current situation especially in the real hard hit PIIGS .
I do not know about the others, but in Spain the people are afraid of being murdered by the fascists with impunity, as happened in 1936 - 1939 and for many years afterwards, with the aproval of the democracies who sustained Franco in power.
And the Mediterraneans are not the only ones hard hit by the crisis, what with the Germans and their millions in Kurzarbeit -part time work, the rest financed by the State- and the UK double dipping all the time under The Death of a Thousand Cuts imposed by the Tories.
I have only explained my views in depths to one close friend. She already have some degree of understanding so I correctly assumed she would be able to understand my view point. When I was done, she asked me how I could find the strength to carry on in such a hopeless world? I then had the work to do to explain to her that I never been freer and happyer than I am now. With some useless old priorities dead, I can now live a more natural and "complete" life. She had some rather large issues understanding that last bit.
Want The Shortest Path To The Good Life? Try Cynicism
I bet one of Diogenes' family slaves would drop by his barrel a couple of times a day to make sure that the eccentric aristo wasn't suffering too much from hunger pangs.
California gasoline prices - up like a rocket, down like a feather.
A story in today's Los Angeles Times describes some of the problems that caused the recent price spike, how the major oil co.s dominate the State, and how independent station owners try to compete (or close because they can't sell regular at $5.10/gl.)
Refiners will fill contracts to their own brands first, no surprise, but it forces the independents to gamble on the spot market.
The article mentions how the price increases hurt SS Fuels owner Nazhi Simaan, maybe a name change is in order.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-california-gas-prices-20121022,0,4...
In regards to the article Saudi refinery eyes Europe diesel exports up top, note that while not specifically stated Saudi Arabia may still continue importing diesel anyway, especially diesel with high sulphur content and of a low quality that is not desired in most elsewhere in the world:
http://af.reuters.com/article/energyOilNews/idAFL3E8LJ4A520121019
While I can't say for sure, some of the low quality diesel appears to be coming from a refinery in India that processes a lower, heavy quality of oil that is exported from Saudi Arabia to India.
Somewhat surprisingly, while the Saudi Arabia is taking the lead in processing sour, heavy, even contaminated grades of crude, to be refined into products for export, it uses lower quality fuels internally.
According to the US EIA, the US almost never ships oil products like gasoline and diesel directly to Saudi Arabia, although on occasion some US diesel has indirectly ended up in KSA.
Fuel shortages at Scottish airport a warning for winter
FERC Order 1000: The Most Exciting Energy Regulation You’ve Never Heard Of
Oilsands Ethical Investors Say Industry Must Cut Environmental Risks
Seminal Study Finds ‘Climate-Change Footprint’ In North America, ‘Continent With The Largest Increases in Disasters’
Universal Rules Discovered That Allow Anticipation of Critical Transitions
It's not so much discovered, it's been known for decades (hell, I've known of it for decades) - but instead it's a comparison of different techniques and their characteristics.
My guess is someone has these types of analysis running on the oil market - but keep the results to themselves.
Scope for an open source project maybe?
Morning Radio Stations were abuzz on reasons for the projection of 50 cent drop per gallon at the pump. No mention of Motiva. Perhaps just unwelcome news to be even deeper in energy slavery to KSA now that we are on track for energy independence? Ya think an extended "glitch" with a $10 billion, 600,000-bpd production CDU has no influence on higher pump prices? Everyone agrees that the gubberment needs to fix this gas problem now. I wanted to call the host, but lacked off-head situational intelligence or numbers.
Donald, I had no idea what you were talking about so I googled it (news.google).
Gas prices could drop up to 50 cents a gallon soon
If gasoline prices do fall it will not last... unless we go deeper into a recession. I paid $3.35 a gallon in North Alabama two days ago. That is the lowest since June.
World oil production will increase slightly in the fourth quarter, over the third quarter of 2012 but not higher than they were during the fourth quarter of 2011. Well that is my educated guess.
Ron P.
As far as I know, the latest news is that Motiva will resume operations in December:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/17/markets-europe-distillates-idU...
However I wouldn't bet on Motiva going fully back to normal in December. The Saudi Arabia owned shipper 'Vela' sent some extra heavy crude cargoes out of the Persian Gulf for Motiva a few weeks back, but lately Saudi exports have appeared to slow down.
On the subject of a 50 cent price drop - keeping in mind that the price of gasoline along both the east and west coasts went temporarily about 50 cents over the benchmark NY futures exchange price, it would not be that surprising if the east coast sees prices dropping back 50 cents. But that should not be expected nationwide.
Here is some general information on Motiva:
Source: CompaniesandMarkets.com (Pg. Unavail. Online)
Can this be true? Can any court in the world be this stupid?
7 experts convicted of manslaughter in Italy for failing to adequately warn about deadly quake
I know this has little to do with energy. However I believe the general ignorance people in general has a lot to do with energy, population and the troubles the world finds itself in today.
Ron P.
I guess if you want to find your country suddenly has no scientists, this is the way to go.
Now if it were bankers, and the convictions and prison sentences were for crashing the financial system and false accounting, then I would say:
'Way to go, Italy!'
Exactly which law is the bankers are to be convicted of?
Buying congress critters who then write laws that allow them to break laws that should have been written?
If personal bribes were actually given ala Cold Cash Jefferson's cash in the freeze that is indeed against the law. Cite some evidence and someone goes to jail. Otherwise, "the right of the people...to petition the Government for a redress of grievances" is the law, even for bankers.
I think he was referring to the influence lobbyists exert on the law making process via party donations as opposed to bribes.
Fraud?
Corruption?
Incompetence?
Reckless endangerment?
The list is long and untested on the bankers.
Incompetence is against the law now? And warrants, what, the death penalty? Yikes, hope you haven't ever done anything demonstrating incompetence.
Suppose Garyp is managing Oil Futures, gets drunk, then buys $520 million worth of oil in the middle of the night. Should any action be taken?
Actually showing crass incompetence in a job, such that it kills someone or costs lots of money, has long been a way of finding yourself in the dock. Build a bridge that falls down, or a ship that sinks and if you haven't done the engineering right, you are looking at a prison term.
Only in finance you only find yourself in court if your bosses lose out. If the general public lose, well ...
"Incompetence is against the law now?"
Negligent homicide is the formal name of one variety of illegal incompetence.
Don't forget the money laundering.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/04/wachovia-paid-trivial-fine-for-ne...
Since John Corzine is not a banker, I suppose we should leave him out of this thread.
Perhaps they interpreted the flight of the birds incorrectly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augur
Reminds me of the old pre enlightenment world. Those who practice an uncertain profession, such as medicine or eathquake prediction can be executed for poor results. I'd think it would make it very hard to find qualified practitioners.
I think the practice your thinking of was called Damnatio ad bestias (Latin for "condemnation to beasts") in the Roman Collisium ...
Whereas the term damnatio ad bestias is usually used in a broad sense, historians distinguish two subtypes: objicĕre bestiis (to devour by beasts) where the humans are defenseless, and damnatio ad bestias, where the punished are both expected and prepared to fight.
Those judged less harshly might be condemned ad ludum venatorium or ad gladiatorium – combat with animals or gladiators, in which they were armed as thought appropriate. These damnati at least might put on a good show and retrieve some respect. They might even – and occasionally did – survive to fight another day.
Roman laws, which are known to us through the Byzantine collections, such as Code of Theodosius and Code of Justinian, defined what criminals could be thrown to beasts (or condemned by other means). They included:
- Those who employed sorcerers to harm others ...
- Counterfeiters, who could also be burned alive.
- Political criminals.
- Poisoners; by the law of Cornelius, patricians were beheaded, plebeians thrown to lions and slaves crucified
It looks like this conviction arises from assurances that all was safe. Difficult to judge based on reports in the press. One of the reports that has more depth is from Ars Technica, link below
http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/10/italian-scientists-convicted-of-m...
Mike
Yeah, Ron, they'll do the same to you, for not warning people strongly enough about peak everything and climate change ;-/
I write from Italy. In fact, the judgment of guilt is because these scientists "assured that there was no danger" after many tremors, not because they failed to predict the earthquake.
The sentence was quite a surprise. However, the scientists were not jailed, but now they will ask for the appeal, where most probably they will be discharged.
Prisoners use less water :-)
From above: Thirst for groundwater caused fatal earthquake
Well maybe the court should have watched the late George Carlin's "The Planet is Fine" skit before the sentencing...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eScDfYzMEEw
Yeah, people are pretty damn stupid!
Can any court in the world be this stupid?
If one thinks courts are about finding truth given a set of evidence then one will have a different conclusion then if one thinks courts are an extension of the political body and are used as a form of punishment if you are the nail that stands up that needs to be pounded down or a scape goat is needed.
They tend to be a little of both. The rules of evidence etc. are better than what passes for political debate, at least in the US. There clearly have been travesties. I remember hearing of one case, the expert for one side proved that the case made by the opposing side violated the laws of physics (it was about an accident), but the opposing lawyer admitted the point but argued that the victim wasn't constrained to "obey" the laws of physics. The jury voted against the laws of physics.
LOL! Can't argue with that. QED!
The Opiate of Exceptionalism
Not only are many issues never discussed, I don't get the impression most americans care much about the issues or a candidate's policy positions. They seem much more taken with the style of the candidate.
For example, most people thought Romney won the first debate, but would very many of them be able to name any of the issues or positions he discussed in the debate? I had the distinct impression they were swayed by aggressive body landuage by Romney and a lack of responding body language by Obama. In other words it was mostly decoded by the first brain layer, the lizard brain. They are looking mostly at social content, not informational content.
Look at how many people view Reagen as one of the greatest politicians ever. He was referred to as the Great Communicator. But ask those same people what he achieved and they will probably change the subject or attack you as a liberal. In other words they were taken by how he talked, not what he talked about. Again, they are looking primarily at social content.
The same thing happens when a person gets shystered out of their money, sometimes for millions of dollars. How? Social content, not informational. Information provided is never researched because they are already sold via social content. In many ways we are no different than our primate cousins in the jungle.
I saw a nature program once in which these chimps were vying for dominance, and the top males kept finding new ways to make louder and louder noises until one found a garbage can lid and was banging it with a big stick. It made the most noise so that chimp won.
I have heard some political reporters say that it is instructive to watch the debate with the sound turned off, which I imagine is an attempt to measure the social content, and not be distracted in any way by the actual content. No pesky fact checking required, and no actual requirement to be familiar with much of anything, really.
This has led to someone called "BadLipReading" to do some quite funny videos where they make up nonsense dialog that sort of matches the facial expressions and the motion of the lips. Here is their version of the first debate:Eye of the Sparrow
Here's another one: Paul Ryan's Diary.
Have you guys ever heard of Alex Carey? Take a look. Americans are not spontaneously different. This is the most heavily and successfully indoctrinated society in world history. It's not fair or accurate to place the blame for that on the masses. There's a reason it costs a billion dollars to run for president. It's a great way for Big Money to be assured of discipline from the candibots. Talking about real problems and new answers is simply forbidden.
This is the most heavily and successfully indoctrinated society in world history.
http://www.whale.to/b/casey_h.html
Monitor Your Energy Use With 'Simple' Smart Plugs
IP Centric Monitoring and Control. http://www.ubnt.com/mfi#csen
Don't know how much of this is shipping yet. Ubiquity gear is rock solid once they get the kinks worked out.
All we need now is Providers to Implement IP6, a decade late in North America. I getting my block of IP6 addresses.
As an admitted energy geek, I'm a little conflicted about the 'need' for more gadgets to monitor the energy use of our gadgets. I know: Knowledge is power, even when it requires using more power and embedded energy. Best hopes we return to a point where one's relationship to one's energy use is more intuitive and culturally frugal. IMO, what we have today is beyond a 'longage of expectations'; it's a corruption of 'requirements'.
"a corruption of requirements" - That's a meme I hope has legs
It's the control side. I know someone that was breaking up with their mate who kept chilling the thermostat to 70F when possible... until this came along.. http://www.nest.com/, The new weapon for control freaks. Run m out of the house with IPhone. Perhaps next is a pay as you go 2S Power Meter that reads prepay sim cards. Free gov. cell phones .. but prepay for kWhs?
yep, already happening:
http://residential.directenergy.com/EN/Energy/Texas/Pages/Power-To-Go.aspx
Yair . . . What's new.
I can remember my Mum keeping a pile of coins to keep the power on in our flat in Melbourne Australia sixty years ago. . .the power went off when every one went to bed and Mum would go out into the hallway and 'feed the meter' to cook the breakfast porridge. Worked for us.
Cheers.
We've had pay-as-you-go for years. Go down to the corner store and buy electricity. You get a code number you punch into the meter, like buying air time. There are also online sellers. Municipalities like it because they get the money in advance and don't have to worry about defaulters.
If you're smart, you buy massive amounts of electricity before price rises. It helps keep costs down.
Get yourself a few Raspberry PI's, a shunt and voltmeter with interface to the Pi, therefore make your own, and release the design and software as Open Hardware/Open Software ; )
Anybody played with those here? I'm sorry, Ghung, but there's a cute little gadget I'd love to add to my pile!
.. oh, just buy the damn thing already!
Would love to get a couple but they seem to be forever unavailable here.
NAOM
Kurdistan begins international oil exports, defying Baghdad
Chinese nationals brought in to fill B.C. coal miner shortage
Vancouver Sun
Why Temporary Foreign Workers Are Political Dynamite The Tyee
Auditor general warned of fraud risk woven into Canada's program.
How many seats will the B.C. Liberals (in-name only) still hold after the next election?
Hopefully not too many. They are very corrupt IMO
Three of four Canadians against ceding control of resources to foreign governments: poll
The Cons wrap themselves in the flag and play the patriotism card whenever they can for the Tim Horton's vote. Perhaps folks drinking their coffee at the local Tim's might not be happy with the country's resources being sold off to opaque foreign state owned companies.
A confounding factor in the proposed Chinese takeover of Nexen is that Nexen has only 28% of its production in Canada - in fact most of its production is in the US Gulf of Mexico, the UK North Sea, and Offshore West Africa. So, from a Canadian perspective it is not a big deal, but from a Chinese perspective, it gets them into a lot of major international producing areas.
RockyMtnGuy what is your opinion of the following: "On May 14th, 2013, there will be an election in BC. The governing "Liberals"(conservatives in liberal clothing), will be turfed from office. The NDP will take over the gov't and they will not allow haper's folly to cross BC land. But just in case, keep up the pressure to drop this thing and refine in Canada." Is this likely in your opinion?
Btw that observation is from the comments section in this article on the BC Pipepline http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/1267961--why-northern-gateway...
Also, what are the obstacles to refining it in Canada?
Thanks mucho.
The main obstacles to refining it in Canada are the environmental movement and the BC government. If there is going to be this much controversy over a fairly simple pipeline to the BC coast, just imagine what would happen if someone tried to build a world-scale heavy oil refinery in BC. Most people who do not live in Texas have never seen a 500,000 bpd refinery, and if they did see one, the sheer size of it would scare the wits out of them.
At this point in time there are only 2 oil refineries left in BC, the 42,000 bpd Chevron Burnaby (Vancouver) refinery and the 12,000 bpd Husky Energy Prince George refinery, and the Burnaby refinery is in danger of closing due to unfavorable oil prices and government regulations. BC is just not a good place for oil refineries.
It would be possible to put some world-scale oil refineries in Alberta, where people are not nearly as touchy-feely about these things., but the economics are unfavorable. It is cheaper to build and operate oil refineries in Asia, and the available market is much bigger. Alberta is landlocked and there would still be the problem of getting millions of barrels of refined products to market, vs the problem of getting millions of barrels of bitumen to market. It requires pipelines across BC, just different kinds of pipelines. Given the problems, companies would prefer not to take the risk of investing tens of billions of dollars in refineries.
I don't think the people promoting the "refine it in Canada" option have really thought it through that well.
As for the BC government blocking the pipeline, the people suggesting that should read the fine print in the Canadian Constitution. Pipelines fall under the Peace, Order, and Good Government provisions that were used to build the transcontinental railways. People who stood in the way of them got "railroaded", to use the old phrase.
Thanks RMG, great stuff.
I cannot speak for the straightforwardness of laying a pipeline through rainforest but the tankers worry the author of that article.
"The first surprise was that the exact tanker route from Kitimat to the ocean is far from direct or straight. Disabuse yourself of any notion there is a wide-open, direct channel to the sea. Indeed, the route twists and turns, offering different options.
It starts at the top of the Douglas Channel, a 70-kilometre fjord with forested mountains plunging to the water on each side. It is about two to three kilometres wide.
Just across from Marven’s village of Hartley Bay, the channel meets Gil Island, 27 kilometres of cliffs and trees that sits smack in the middle of the route. A tanker could pass on either side, but the channel narrows by half. One suddenly remembers that supertankers need at least 500 metres to alter course."
Ray Mears did a special from the Great Bear Rainforest a few years back. He had been all over but was still taken aback by it. I hope they can find another way.
The channel into Kitimat may not be overly wide or perfectly straight, but it is better than the route the tankers are currently taking into Vancouver. The supertankers going into Vancouver barely fit underneath the bridges and between the pilings, and the channels have to be regularly dredged so they clear the bottom. Vancouver is also the busiest seaport on the west coast of the Americas. Kitimat by comparison is a piece of cake to get in and out of.
It seems to me like there is a difficult choice there. Kitimat is in a nearly pristine environment, while Vancouver is citified and degraded by comparison. But Kitimat doesn't have the traffic and other issues of Vancouver that you mention. So, you pay your money and you make your choice.
I think Canada would be best off with the proposed idea of moving it west-east and using mostly domestically, but failing that it doesn't look there is any really good choice. A spill coming in or out of Kitimat would be a disaster, but a spill in Vancouver wouldn't be pretty either.
"The main obstacles to refining it in Canada are the environmental movement..."
So we should ship the bitumen to China and offshore the pollution. And once again abdicate our responsibility to the environment and society.
Frankly, it seems that it would be more efficient and effective to refine the existing bitumen production in Alberta and transport the diesel, gasoline etc. via the present (unexpanded) Kinder Morgan pipeline. Rather then doubling the Kinder Morgan to ship condensate into Alberta to dilute the bitumen and also building the doubled Northern Gateway for condensate delivery into Alberta and Dilbit out. Seems like there is a lot of wasted effort there.
Went looking for some info for background and came across this comment to an Andrew Leach blog post that
And this note at teh bottom of table A-8 in this IHS CERA pdf (46 pages) prepared for API... "12 percent loss of volume upgrading bitumen to SCO"
A little rooting around found the following...
Also this table from above article is telling in that it shows how much residual is in Athabasca Bitumen...
So producing SCO in Fort McMurray, and then refining the SCO there would seem to eliminate the need to...
a) import condensate
b) reduce energy demand need to import condensate and ship dilbit
c) substantially reduce the volume of liquids that need to be shipped out of Alberta by pipeline as you'd mostly ship the high value added products like gasoline, diesel, jet and heating fuel
It seems to me the oil industry in Alberta is making it unnecessarily difficult for itself by trying to ship out dilbit.
Anyway, I still think the fundamental problem for Alberta (and Canada) is that catastrophic climate change, which is our present course, will necessarily force us into dramatic reductions in GHG emissions sooner than we think. And the Tar Sands will be among the first to be impacted by these reductions.
This summer's Arctic ice melt is far greater than any of the models forecast! By necessity, we'll be reducing emissions faster than we could ever have imagined.
From the German Advisory Council on Global Change...
Certainly it would be more efficient to refine the bitumen directly to products in Alberta rather than ship it to China and refine it to products there, but the reality is that it is much cheaper to build and operate the refineries in China than in Canada, and the government approvals are far easier to get in China.
Alberta also doesn't really need the jobs. The unemployment rate is only 4.4%,probably the lowest in North America outside of North Dakota, and the average family income in the oil sands region is about $190,000 per year. Any more industrial activity would create an immediate labor shortage and cause wages to skyrocket even more. By contrast, in China, if you need more workers, you just have to advertise that you are paying $1 per hour more than the average wage, and a million workers will show up at your door the next day. (This has actually happened to companies that tried it.)
As for GHG emissions, China now accounts for about 25% of the world total, ahead of the US which produces about 20%. The largest amount in both countries comes from burning coal. Canada only produces 2% of the world's GHG emissions, and the oil sands accounts for less than 7% of that, or less than 0.14% of the global total. The reality is that oil sands are insignificant in the total climate change picture. King Coal is the biggest culprit.
the oil sands accounts for less than 7% of that, or less than 0.14% of the global total
That accounting is a bit too pro-Canadian/pro-tar sands.
Tar (not oil) from the tar sands needs to be upgraded. Some % is upgraded in Edmonton, the rest elsewhere. Does that 7% include that ?
Syncrude from tar needs to be refined into products (unless a one step process, tar > diesel) is used. Do you include that ?
And then someone will burn the tar derived gasoline, diesel, bunker fuel, etc. Is that included ?
The percentage of carbon emissions today from tar sands are approaching 1% of the global total by my early morning back of the envelope calculations.
And as burning tar in situ grows, so will carbon emissions.
Alan
The fact is that the bitumen from the Canadian oil sands is actually extremely heavy oil rather than "tar". I have a degree in chemistry, so I am a bit finicky about definitions. Tar is a man-made material produced by the destructive distillation of organic substances such as wood or coal. Bitumen is a heavy grade of oil which is semi-solid at ambient temperature - at least in the Canadian definition.
An oil sands upgrader is really just the front end of a heavy oil refinery, and since much of today's oil production is not much different than bitumen - particularly if it is diluted with lighter hydrocarbons to allow it to flow in pipelines, many heavy oil refineries would prefer to buy diluted bitumen rather than synthetic crude oil because the price is lower. This is particularly true of refineries optimized to run Venezuelan and Mexican heavy, because production in those two countries has been falling and Canadian oil is a good substitute.
Canadian oil sands are currently about 1.5 million bpd, versus a global oil production of around 85 million bpd, which is less than 2% of the total. However, burning oil is not the biggest source of GHG emissions. People are also burning coal, natural gas, wood, charcoal and other substances. Even in Canada, which produces 60% of its electricity from hydro and 15% from nuclear, the largest sources of CO2 emissions are coal-burning power plants.
To allocate all of the GHG emissions to the oil sands assumes people would not burn something else instead. Most likely they would, and in China and other developing countries it would probably produce more GHGs than burning oil products. This is why China, India, and other developing countries are the main source of new GHG emissions.
You can't assume they are going to switch to photovoltaics, wind power, and electric vehicles, because in countries like China they just aren't going to do that. Most likely they will burn more coal instead because there are huge amounts of cheap coal available world-wide..
Probably already been discussed...
Report: Nissan To Add Cheaper, Stripper Version Of LEAF To 2013 Model Lineup
Also I stopped by a Toyota dealership a couple of weeks ago to get a sense of how long customers should expect to wait for delivery of a Prius PHV (plug-in). Word is it is at least a few months. And if you want a Prius C expect to wait six months. That's probably what to expect for delivery delays in Ontario and Quebec.
Why Does the US Green Building Council Seem So Out of Touch?
Allison Bailes, Energy Vanguard
LEED is a complicated point scoring process whose priority isn't necessarily energy efficiency.
Oh my aching brain...
I kept looking and looking at this article from 'the Economist' to see if this was some kind of April-fools-style joke...alas, the author appears to be trying to pass this fantasy disco pap off as serious...
http://www.economist.com/news/business/21564821-carmakers-are-starting-t...
If you want an easy read and some gallows humor, read this...I don't understand how The Economist can fall for the cornocopian siren song of the majik 'next big thing' coming along to create another industrial/commercial revolution to extend our techno-BAU to new heights...
Alan from Big Easy will have a chuckle reading about caravans of driver-less busses streaming between cities and out-competing trains...
.....and then I woke up and it was all a dream!
The End
This article sees driverless cars as solving every negative aspect of the automobile and other road borne transport.
One reason driverless cars will not be accepted: People want to go fast and driverless cars will not go over the speed limit. At least 80% of the cars and 50% of the trucks go over the speed limit by at least 5 mph. People will get frustrated by not being able to pass other vehicles. If driverless cars have an overide mode, most will use it to get ahead of the other guy, IMO.
Correct.
In addition to the plethora of engineering hurdles which cannot be plausibly overcome to make this idea safe and affordable and flexible/practical, the optics go completely against the historical and current marketing angle of selling cars and 'light' trucks...
...as your bulging codpiece personality projection (Amazon breastplates for the women)...
...the commercials showing high-speed snap-cornering maneuvers (closed course, professional driver...do not try yourself!) and scenes showing Ram/Ford/'Like a Rock' Chevy tough trucks receiving front-loader bucket-fulls of gravel into the bed, towing 10,000 pound loads up steep mountain winding roads, and dramatically fording pristine rivers in super slow-mo.
Skynet-controlled Logan's Run pod-mobiles, even equipped with a massage Barkolounger and Play Station etc. won't sell the Freedom Fries (TM) 'See the USA in your Chevrolet' fantasy...
You can use your cellphone/iPad/laptop, ...and the microwave... while watching videos.
I can't wait for the GoogleCar 2020. It holds 70 passengers. You get on for a small fee and it takes you to or near your destination. You barely have to pay attention to the road.
It's the future! ... and for once I can believe it.
(sarc)
Actually, that is close to a real live jitney bus. The most common form of jitney buses is a mini-van following a fixed route. For a small fee, people get in at designated spots on busy streets (such as a bus stop) or known points and are taken along the arterial and dropped at an intersection close to their destination. Jitney buses are in operation in many countries. Works very well as a supplement to cabs and public transportation. With more flexibility and lower passenger numbers for profitable operation, jitneys can cover neighborhoods where buses don't operate and fill in the voids caused by infrequent bus service. They are legal and licensed in many countries. They operate just under the radar by greasing the cops in some other countries. The only place where I am aware of jitneys in the U.S. is some poorer areas of New York City. NYC does not provide adequate public transportation to these neighborhoods. Private enterprise stepped up, so of course NYC periodically clamps down.
"Jitney buses are in operation in many countries."
I hung on for dear life to more than one Jeepney in the Philippines. None of this pansy stuff about seatbelts, airbags, doors, windows, or maximum rated capacity either.
The good old days. Why exactly am I still alive again?
I often catch minibus taxis, as they are known here in South Africa. The fares are slightly higher than bus or train fares, but this is because they are unsubsidised.
They are notorious for aggressive driving and the deadly "taxi wars" that break out from time to time, but are not so bad to ride in.
Frankly I'd rather catch the bus, but on my busy main road my bus is every twenty minutes, during which time ten or more taxis will come past (I've counted). It's hard to resist them when you're in a hurry. Problem is, your taxi will often wait several minutes at a stop hoping for passengers while the bus you could have caught sails past because it's on a schedule while the taxi isn't.
As usual MSM picks on the most sensational stuff. I work on 'smart car' algorithms. Driver less cars are a bit far away, even with improvements in algorithms it's most likely that it will take more than a decade, even after that IMO they won't catch on because of legal issues. However continuous improvements would have meant that one could leave most of the driving to the computer if someone wanted to.
I think a few jurisdictions passed laws allowing driverless cars. One is California, where I live. So it may be that the legal barriers are falling faster than the technical ones?
Google cars use accurate modeling of the roads, GPS and a host of other external data, it's possible to use them where these exist but truly autonomous cars which rely only on camera and radar alone are a bit far away. The pedestrian detection algorithms for example are nowhere close to satisfaction levels right now and you don't want a autonomous car on the road that can't properly identify a pedestrian or a biker.
I think they will actually be pretty popular. They would make cheap taxis, would haul your kid to and from practice when you were too busy, and would require no parking space (if car-shared like taxis today) or go park themselves out of the way (if privately owned). Every trip would be chauffeured, and every drop-off would be valet.
Even I, the proponent of time is money, would make the trade of 10-over for with-traffic if I could read or work while traveling in my car, at least most days.
It's not a panacea, but it would make life better in several important ways.
Paleo,
Level with us..do you really think these are feasible?
The article alludes that these will be accident-proof/accident-free...they are implying nearly 100% reliability...light weight, fast, comfortable (perhaps luxurious), inexpensive/very affordable...
Do you honestly think these free-range autonomous people-movers can be made to work?
See Ty's comment below please.
The article is the result of the Ed telling the writer to go hog wild/blue-sky and cram as many unfounded assertions about the goodness of driver-less cars into one page, with the stricture of not providing even one caveat.
It doesn't take an engineer to have a substantial portion of skepticism about these assertions...
The obstacles are not just physical, either. Is Google going to accept being a party in millions of car-crash lawsuits? Seriously? And how will they testify about the causes of crashes? Will they send robots to do that, too?
Watch "Total Recall" (the 1990 Ah-nold version). The Johnny-Cab with its irritatingly chirpy and stupid mechanical driver was state of the art pre-iPhone and GPS. (But it was electric. And in true Hollywood fashion exploded on impact.)
What do motorcyclists do in a world of driverless cars? I suspect there'd be some way found out to exploit whatever algorithm these cars use in order to instigate mass crashes. It would be similar to hacking. Maybe I could ride my motorcycle and swerve toward a particular car 3x very quickly which would cause the car's sensors to think a crash was coming and take evasive action, only to end up veering off into a jersey wall or the median at 70mph...at which time physics takes over regardless of how good the traction control is. If I was lane-splitting through traffic would it cause all the cars to veer out of the way for me?
The driverless cars would automatically send a video and position data of any vehicle in their vicinity which is breaking the traffic laws to the highway patrol.
How about the highway patrol sending a signal to a driverless car to do the pit maneuver on a driver that won't stop.
How about this one: My parents tell me I was conceived at 90 mph on the interstate in the backseat of a driverless car.
Could be a very "Interesting" election. I've been reading about the possibility of an Electoral College tie (269 to 269, 270 needed to win). In the event neither candidate gets 270, the House picks the President, the Senate picks the VP. So, in the event of a tie, we might see a Romney/Biden administration. However, talk about one person having an effect.
In the event of a tie, one "Faithless Elector" could swing the entire election to either candidate.
Some links:
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/23/oct-22-ohio-has-50-5...
http://www.thedailyjournal.com/article/20121022/OPINION02/310220021
Hoping election doesn't end in Electoral College tie
Faithless Electors:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_elector
Along those lines wt, here is a link to the most recent poll (for Ohio) done by Suffolk University in Ohio, considered by many as the most critical swing state needed to win the election: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/docs/2012/Suffolk_OH_1022.pdf
Looks like a dead heat at this point. I think which ever candidate wins Ohio wins it all.
There are many ways to win ...
Rigged Elections
Yet More Doctored Audio In Anti-Obama Ads
They've long used images and background music to associate emotions both positive and negative to a given candidate/party. So you see a lot of adds against politician A, with disturbing images and music. Maybe you barely paid attention to them, but your brain is still making a connection of the name and the feeling evoked. In the booth, you don't remember how your gut dread against A was formed, only that his name makes you feel a bit queasy, so you pull the lever for B, never realizing that you were manipulated by psychological techniques.
What's the difference between the Red-White-and-Blue, All American Mom's-Apple-Pie Freedom-Loving voting machines here and those vile secular communist Marxist socialist greenie tree-hugging hippie pinko swishified in-e-lectual machines in Venezuela? The voting machines in Venezuela print receipts.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/28/AR200611...
And if you have a government job in Vz, you need to supply the proper receipt the day after the election.
Alan
"Unlike with most U.S. electronic voting machines, Venezuelans will get paper receipts that verify their choices were properly recorded, and must deposit them into boxes before leaving the polls."
Is Off-the-Grid Living the Future of Housing?
[apologies if already posted]
Minnesota backpedals from online education ban
Free lifelong learning not a threat after all
It seems that some folks are busy deleveraging in some real and lasting ways. Education without huge expense and/or debt? Homes that folks actually can afford to own outright (and live in)? I can see why this concept would scare the crap out of the parasite class.
RE: Alternate, Off-grid Living...
If anyone is familiar with 'Garbage Warrior', a film about Mike Reynolds, an Earthship Builder in NM, here is a good short section with him in a recent Democracy Now! show..
He guaranteed the homeowners of this place that the utilities wouldn't cost more than $100/year.
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/10/11/earthship_biotecture_renegade_new...
Lots of wacky and useful approaches.. lots of local ordinances to rewrite! Go Mike!
That's a whopping $8.33 a month
Now imagine Mitt Romney and his wife living in such a house... their tiny little heads would probably explode!
" autonomous housing structures independent of municipal water supplies, sewer systems, and gas and power lines -- ever truly transition into the mainstream?"
You mean the grandparent's house? Well, septic tank, no natural gas, and no power until the 1930's.
My house is one of 70 on a community well, and we all have septic systems, and no natural gas. Power we've got. So three of the four are already a fact.
What's he selling again?
autonomous housing structures independent of municipal water supplies, sewer systems, and gas and power lines
I grew up in an "autonomous housing structure" like that - hauling water from the well, running out to the outhouse in subzero temperatures, with coal furnace for heat, and a wind generator to keep a few lights on at night. Frankly, it was a lot of work and not much fun. When we moved into town and got "on the grid", life became a lot easier. The grid has its advantages.
Largely Just that, and I see nothing out of place with it.
Clearly there are advantages to being connected, and advantages to being independent. It's pretty classic. Me or Us? and both have their place.. and both aspects should be present in a decent balance with each other.
One of the imbalances of the way we've gone so heavily towards being connected and dependent on outside sources is the way we try to do it invisibly, electric and heating power coming in quietly and on autopay.. it can be an insidious way to bleed a lot of people dry, while others get fat on this bloodletting. There is even the implication that breaking some of these bonds is essentially antisocial, is unlashing one's relationship with society, which is hardly a necessary conclusion.
I'm similarly sceptical about the 'cloud', which paints itself as free and flexible, democratic, independent, universally accessible and integrated.. and will be able to continue to look that way as long as power and money can be poured into it. Upon a good enough hiccough, the flexibility could become instantly brittle AND broken, the independence would reveal itself to be a crippling DEPENDENCE.. what appeared democratizing will unmask it's overlords, and millions of virtual connections will evaporate.
I'm keeping real maps in the car, thanks.
I grew up in a house with borehole water and a septic tank. We had grid electricity to run the water pump and lights etc, but heating was wood and coal from the coal shed.
The day the chimney caught fire was exciting. It was roaring like a giant and glowing inside all the way up. They doused it with a hosepipe from the roof, and made sure it was swept every year after that, never mind the soot on the carpets.
Every now and then the water pipes would cough and clay instead of water come out the taps. We'd have to get technicians in to maintain the borehole and pump. And we had a corrugated iron tank on a rusty tower for water pressure. It was a little awkward as a child to climb. Not to mention my mother would freak out. And sometimes they had to clean out the septic tank, but we kids were kept away from that.
There is a screening of the film Switch scheduled for Austin:
http://www.switchenergyproject.com/aboutfilm.php
(Nov. 1, 7 PM, Alamo Drafthouse Village)
They say 'Audiences are calling it "the first truly balanced film on energy."'
Has anybody seen it?
techsan - No. Can't tell too much from the trailer but it did seem balanced at least in the way it phrased the questions. Too bad they don't have a screening in Austin the weekend of the upcoming ASPO meet. It's being shown just before and after. I wonder if the coordinators of ASPO could rig something up.
More than a few Texas connections in the clip. Besides the mandatory pump jack shots there was a nice areal of the big wind farm along the S. Texas coats. And most might not know what it was but the shot of a chopper filling up with water was the HUET certification: Helicopter Underwater Escape Training. Mine was kinda fun in a scary way: we had blacked out helmets so we couldn't see and the chopper was flipped upside down in a big pool. Then unsnap your harness, figure out which way is up (not as easy as one might think), pop the emergency exit and get to the surface for a breath of air.
Yep, more fun than a barrel of monkeys! Reminds of the time in Brazil when some diver friends of mine were lost, their chopper took off from the rig and powered right into the sea... all hands lost, nobody on board had a chance. C'est la vie!
Nothing to see here folks, get back to work!
FM - I know it's a tad morbid but you probably know as well as me that HUET isn't going to be much help in almost any crash. Maybe in a soft ditching but I've never seen a report of one. At HUET class a few of us discussed it out of ear shot of the "kids" who seemed to think the training made life safer. I recall one guy who was an even bigger smart *ss than me joking that the simulation would be more realistic if they broke a dozen of your ribs first and then see how well you can release and escape. BTW: remind me: you are/were a deep diver? Also BTW: the worst part of HUET for me wasn't the crash simulation but getting out of/into the survival suit while in the water. I must have swallowed a half gallon of pool water. Was tasting chlorine for two days. LOL.
For others who don't know the most common cause of offshore fatalities are chopper crashes and not accidents on the rigs. At least on the Gulf Coast you rarely take ground fire. LOL. Your Brazil comment brings up a sad memory. You recall a few years ago that Air France flying out of Rio went down in the Atlantic with two Americans on board. They were a very good bud of mine and his wife. Mike was offshore ops geologist for Devon. Like others he had his share of near missies. The irony that he's lost at sea while flying off to Paris for some R&R.
Was, long time ago, certified 500 ft. Sub Sea Oil back in 1978, that was considered deep then!
I'm pushing 60 now, (damn time flies), and only scuba off my kayak on the shallow reefs near my home.
Yeah, I know, I gave you my condolences at the time. Sucks!
I started to watch it at a local high school, but the laptop they used crashed part way through. The little I saw was interesting... hope to see the rest of it soon.
I saw the whole film. It more just talks about the availability of various options, but doesn't go into too much detail of the politics or economics. At one point, the professor who narrates the film says something like (I'm paraphrasing),
"The more expensive oil gets, the more becomes available, so we can continue to increase consumption for awhile."
Most of those who follow the debate here understand that oil prices will not increase indefinitely and instead at some point demand will be destroyed. But as I said, he doesn't address the economics.
He also doesn't talk about EROEI or the degrading quality of the resources that are left, so there are a number of shortcomings. The best part of the film is probably the way he addresses the scale of the operations, showing some of the power plants and earth-moving equipment.
Overall, the movie is definitely aimed at non-technical individuals, probably to make them realize we're going to have to make some tough choices wrt energy, so stop putting up fights over fracking, nukes, etc. He doesn't phrase it that way, of course, but that's the way I perceived it through my cynical/jaded personality.
Why even worry about it. This just in, hot off the presses!
US may soon become world's top oil producer
http://news.yahoo.com/us-may-soon-become-worlds-top-oil-producer-1737534...
Would someone please shut this site down. TOD has just been plain wrong!
I saw that article on CBS this evening. It's written by an AP "energy writer", Jonathan Fahey, who has posted stuff like this before. I ran a Google search using the name and date and as of 9:30 PM EDT, there are 10,900 hits, the first few pages of which appear to be links to various news organizations which repeated the story.
Fahey mangles the issue, for example, combining biofuels production, such as ethanol, with crude produced on a volume basis, ignoring the differences in energy content per barrel of the different fuel types. He also writes: "U.S. oil and liquids production reached a peak of 11.2 million barrels per day in 1985", which misses the lower 48 peak in 1970 entirely. US crude production in 1985 was 8,971 mb per day including Alaska, while in 1973, it was 9,208 mb/d. By including natural gas liquids he is able to bump up the production data for 1985.
Just shows how easy it is to spread disinformation, especially during an election season...
EDIT: Here's Fahey's bio from his FaceBook page:
Considering how much writing he has done on the energy problem, one wonders how he could make those obvious mistakes. Well, he did work at FORBES...
E. Swanson
What will the barrels contain? Air? Water? ...
The Myth of Affordable Energy — Interview with Ed Dolan
... in which he disagrees with Gail Tverberg's arguments.
In the interview:
Emphasis mine.
Basically what he is saying is true. But not for the reasons he probably assumes. Being a neo-classical economist he HAS to believe in growth of GDP. What he fails to take into account is that those numbers are extremely flawed and ballooned by the debt and financial shenanigans of the past 30 years. GDP based on real (physical) wealth is substantially lower than government reported and has probably been shrinking during that time rather than growing.
The second claim is almost true if you leave out the "dramatically" part. If he means something like carbon (energy) intensity then the statement is true, but since the denominator is GDP (again), naturally it makes it look as though we are much more efficient. The only problem is intensity is bogus for the same reason that GDP is bogus. Real physical efficiency has improved over the last century but improvements are slowing. Efficiency increases due to technological innovations follow an S-shaped (logistic) curve where the maximum efficiency is a physical property of the specific work process (see Carnot's theorem) and never gets that close to 100% for most of our industrial processes (or homes or cars, etc.)
He can disagree all he wants. But I would recommend he learn some physics.
Still, I hear the energy=GDP thing far too often. In the strong form, it implies GDP is simply total energy consumed, yet human utility (admittedly a slippery thing to measure) isn't equal to neergy consumed. Example for example light, candles, versus whale-oil lamps, versus incandesent bulbd, versus modern LED, efficiency has increased by orders of magnitude. Or keeping your house warm, oil heat with a poorly insulated house, versus a passiveHaus. Similarly with menas of production for identical widgets, the energy consumed might vary dramatically with different production techniques. So energy is an essential economic input, but not one that has a fixed conversion (to human utility) ratio.
Come to the 4th Annual Biophysical Economics conference this Friday! I will be providing the actual relation between MONEY and ENERGY. I don't know of anyone who equates energy with GDP. But real money is related to real net energy available to do useful work. Even utility is explained in this model.
Well I have to think that there IS a pretty hard correlation, but as you point out, there are some extra factors there.
Not unlike the way people who make an income well above what it requires to get the basics for living are usually taxed at a higher rate than those at much closer to or under subsistence levels, there is going to be the 'fat and the meat' in both an economic view of a society, and an energetic one, at which point I would have to think that the inefficiencies and waste in the uses of excess cheap energy will also work relative to the economic picture.. it's just not going to be a 'simple tax rate', proportional all the way up and down.
But still, the running of an economy will be a function of both the essential and the inessential energy whose flows drive it, and the efficiencies that the author talks about a bit too idealistically are at some level the proportion of fat to meat, which is fine to a point, but you can only get so lean before you see a brutally direct correlation between energy and economy. Any of us living today have witnessed economies with SO much fat available to them (figuratively and literally, ) that the extras have gotten regularly entangled with the essentials..
Kids who live in candy stores can develop skewed notions of the world.
Has he taken into account the energy that is now used in developing countries to produce stuff that was formerly made in developed countries or the services that have been outsourced ? I think he will get a radically different number.
Did anyone saw 'the third debate' yesterday ? Noticed what incredible thing Obama said about U.S. oilimports ?
First time it dropped since a long time during his time in office. Said with a pokerface and no reaction from Romney nor Schieffer.
Exactly this he said:
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/presidential-debate-full-transcript/...
Oops, I assume he meant imports not exports. Half is probably a stretch -although the cornucopians are saying we will exceed that by supply only. Its probably a too optimistic supply forecast (-probably what the oil and gas industry puts out, which is part truth and part PR), combined with a too optimistic assumption of efficiency gains (mainly vehicle fleet milage improvements) as CAFE standards start to bite, and (maybe) consumer preferences change.
Well, it helps if you have a major recession AND a price rise sending you in that direction. See the explanatory Figure 1 here http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42465.pdf
Another way of putting it is as Westexas suggests, the USA is not competing so well for world oil exports these days.
Han - Lets take it apart piece by piece. All my numbers are from the govt: http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=mcrimus1&f=m
"We've cut our oil imports to the lowest level in two decades because we've developed oil and natural gas" In July 1992 we imported 6.81 mmbopd. In July 2012 we imported 8.61 million bopd. The tricky thing about that statement is which month do you pick. In Feb 2010 we were importing 21 million bo less per month then we are today. Oil imports swing a good bit on a monthly basis so let's stay with the last month we have data for: July 2012 = 266.8 million bo. The last time we imported less oil in July was 1997 = 253.5 million bo. We imported less oil in Feb 2007 than we did in July 2012.
Two decades ago we were producing 8.65 million bopd. Today we are producing 6 million bopd. Today we are producing 30% less oil than we were two decades ago. Two decades ago 35% of our oil consumption came from imports. Today about half our consumption is from imports. You can toss the numbers around any way you want but: we are producing less oil today than we were two decades ago and a greater percentage of our consumption comes from imported oil. Just MHO but I don't think there is much there for the president to brag about. If the president wants to blame President Bush for the economic slowdown then he should also give him credit for cutting our oil imports in the process.
He may have been taken in by some of the differing metrics thrown out. Crude plus condensate, versus all-liquids, and everything in between. Obviously every one of these metrics has its flaws and potential for abuse. It would have been more correct to have made the statement fewer imports than a decade, rather than two. I'd argue the decrease in domestic consumption isn't just due to the economic slowdown, some is due to increased efficiency (including tougher CAFE standards and other conservation programs), some is due to lifestyle changes -the many younger ones not interested in driving. Of course disentangling all this stuff leaves plenty of room for making choices that favor one ideology over another.
eos - I always have a little problem when folks point to a much improved US vehicle efficiency when they use the CURRENT CAFE standards. Obvious the vast majority of vehicles on the road today don't meet the current standard. Found this: http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/...
For instance the CAFE for new light duty vehicles in 2009 (last data) was 33 mpg. But the average for all existing light duty vehicles that year was 24 mpg. Thus the efficiency assumed for vehicles in 2009, if you base it on the CAFE standard that year, is actually 37% greater than what vehicles were actually getting at that time. I forget the exact numbers but you've seen them: we only replace about 10% -15% of vehicles per year. Average life time of a US vehicle is around 9 -10 year so we won't see a wide spread effect of the new CAFE standards for many years. Which is why I think the hype about the future higher CAFE standards the president is offering is a tad silly for two reasons. The obvious time lag is one thing. The second is that the president can say CAFE standards will be X mpg in the future but he has no control over what they'll actually be. The govt can increase or decrease them at will regardless of what any past president has said.
Car fleet turnover depends on the current sales rate (registered light vehicles/new light vehicle sales).
Last time I looked - just over 17 years.
Alan
Yes, ROCKMAN. However Obama wanted to score by deceiving the listeners that it was because of 'his' policy that oil imports are down while that is because of high oilprices and its effect on the economy. Romney failed to win the debate by making that clear, maybe because he didn't dare to put the finger on the sore spot. Because with so many deniers of Peakoil and ignorant people under the voters a potential win of the debate by replying adequate could in reality become a clear loss. Very sad and heart rending
Han - Yes...sad. I consider Romney to also be playing loose with the spin. Both men have the same problem IMHO: telling the American people of the reality of our energy situation won't help getting elected. Beside spinning the facts they both make promises that few on TOD beleive will ever be kept.
The phrase "true, but irrelevant" seems appropriate….
Lots of oil sands pictures: http://www.theburningplatform.com/?p=42868
Maybe more than you want to see.
Todd
And we'll be told that it'll be made as good as new, if not better...
You knew I'd say that, didn't you?
Mordor.
Ah, JW, you have perfectly summed it up in one word. It is so apt, on so many levels...
So all we gotta do is chuck that ring into the lava, and the whole province self-destructs.
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2012-10-17/scapegoat-chief-race-oval-o...
"Scapegoat-in-Chief: The Race for the Oval Office"
by Richard Heinberg, originally published by Post Carbon Institute | Oct 17, 2012
Sorry if I missed this being posted at TOD before. It's good. Of course, Heinberg has not here addressed the problem of the religio-crazies hoping to take over the law making -- and maybe I am overly concerned because I live in a state where some of them have taken over the state legislature, and the results are abominable.
Lizzie
Monster East Coast storm next week or big miss?
Latest Euro run
NHC track currently not projecting this - that may change.
Little too close to where I live ... >:-<
Little too close to where a lot of people live.
Wow! That would be quite an event if it unfolds.
Headline:
Prayed-for Perfect Storm Eats NE Power Grid One Week Before Election-Coastal area voter turnout expected to be low.
Ghung,
You are a rascal ;-)
One wonders, has a Presidential election ever been postponed due to a weather emergency? What if the voters in the effected region miss out on the last week of very import information delivered via campaign advertisements on their local media? Could one of those great citizens known as corporations file suit to invalidate the results of the election since their natural right of freedom of speech had been perverted by an act of God, which cut off their TV adds? It's getting late and my brain is fast drifting toward sleep...
E. Swanson
The only swing state in the Northeast is New Hampshire and it has only 18 miles of coast line.
It's not just coastlines, the '38 hurricane was blowing up barns pretty well inland, IIRC. Vermont and NH got their fair share!
At this point its ECMWF versus GFDL. The later has it (Sandy plus extratropical system merged) peaking at about 950mb and heading east. We will just have to wait and see. The ECMWF solution is very atypical, and should probably be considered with a large salt crystal at this point. -But I wouldn't discount it totally, lest you risk ending up sharing the fate of the L-Aquila seismologists.
NHC is no longer too helpful as they have deemed tracks as too confusing for the average mind and dumbed down. Wunderground shows most models veering off the coast but some of the ensemble models do turn back to the coast. I think this is on the lower end of the likely scale. So I don't get the Italian job, people should still consider that it might happen and any other scenario might happen too.
NAOM
How Scarce Does Water Need to Get Before It's Valuable?
CNBC claim US may become world's top oil producer:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/49522399
Claims US produces 10.9mbd. Last time I looked I thought US oil production was about 6.5mbd, no doubt they are lumping in biofuels etc in this figure.
andy - As usual you have to watch the wording closely: they didn't say 10.9 mmbo. They said:"U.S. production of oil and other liquid hydrocarbons is on track to rise 7 percent this year to an average of 10.9 million barrels per day." "...and other liquid hydrocarbons". For instance ethanol is a liquid hydrocarbon and has nothing to do with oil production. IOW X mbp is a volume masurement of some liquid. X mbod is a volume of oil per day. A big difference having that little "o" in there.
From: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/2012/06/11/u-s-daily-oil-...
"United States oil production is on the rise. In the first quarter of 2012, average domestic crude oil production topped 6 million barrels per day (bbl/day). This is the first time that U.S. quarterly oil production has been above the 6 million bbl/day mark since 1998."
But their chart is also a good example of how to give a false impression by selecting a specific time frame. They start the chart in the late 90's so it doesn't look like we've had much decline. US oil production peaked at 9.64 million bopd...about 50% higher than today's rate. Another way to characterize today's rate in addition to matching what we were producing in 1998: we're currently producing the same amount of oil as we were in 1948.
Of course, no mention of the fact that, some of that oil production went into the production of these "other liquid hydrocarbons" so, the net after you subtract the amount of oil used in the production of biofuels is significantly less.
Alan from the islands
They also typically count refinery gain.
Migratory Birds Can Spread Haemorrhagic Fever
Coal gasification demonstrated
Didn't we have town gas decades ago or is it that this is a done with magic solution?
NAOM
Mortgage risks underestimated, economists conclude
How have the 2012 doomsday myths become part of our accepted lexicon?
I am planning to throw an "apocalypse watch night" party with my youth group. We will eat snacks and watch apocalypticly themed movies (2012 as the main feature). Dressing in white linen clothes is optional.
Potential idea to convert coal to methane in situ:
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/429682/coal-eating-microbes-might-c...
Anyone in the industry have any comment?
What could possibly go wrong?
DaveW, here is a global solar insolation map.
Global Insolation (Sunshine) Map Tells It All
It shows the average annual power incident on a horizontal surface. It appears to include cloud cover. Note that the region within +- 20 degrees of the equator is generally within 150 to 250 W/m2. From 20 to 60 degrees north latitude they range from about 80 to 225 W/m2. The best places get 225 to 250 W/m2. The insolation decreases to about 50% at 50 degrees north and south latitudes. Tilt the panels up and space them farther apart to avoid shading to improve the performance.
Your assertion that solar panels must have optimal sunlight to be practical or cost effective assumes that the only cost of the system is in the panels. In reality the electronics and installation are significant fractions. The price of solar panels could drop so low that over building barely adds to the cost of the complete system.
I grow weary of the various forms of the argument that continues electric power is a vital necessity while those same anti-solar advocates are too cheap and lazy to overbuild their systems, improve efficiency and do demand side management to make it possible. Germany with about 50% less insolation than the best places on Earth, is getting it done and leaving the rest of the world in the dust.
The traditional view has been that a south facing roof is the ideal. I have been wondering, with falling panel prices, if a roof with south east and south west roofs may be better ie built at 45 degrees to the equator not parallel to it. (note: mirror for southern hemisphere)
NAOM
Given the high humidity > afternoon haze & thunderstorms, I am convinced that the maximum solar PV from fixed orientation in New Orleans would have a morning bias.
Perhaps between SE and S by SE on a 30 degree sloping roof would produce the most kWh per year.
Alan
Defiantly no 'one-size fits all' solutions. Different location and different times of year can change things a lot, here mountains delay sun up by an hour, go just a few miles north and there is no issue, a few south and there is no sun til late morning. For a lot of the year south and east would do me well.
NAOM
You might like this
http://www.shorpy.com/node/13949?size=_original#caption
Down your way, big image alert.
NAOM
Absolutely, NAOM. The optimum direction assuming clear skies for a fixed panel is due south for azimuth in the northern hemisphere and the angle of your latitude measured from the ground to the back plane of the panel for the altitude. If the panel is pointed within 15 degrees of optimum, the reduction in annual energy is a minor 3%. If there is a local pattern to the cloud cover, you can improve the energy output by favoring the sunnier portion of the day.
When PV panels cost $5/W, $10/W or more, one usually focused on optimizing the pointing direction. This causes a peak in power output for a few hours around noon each day. With a low cost for panels, other configurations become reasonable. Your suggestion of two sets of arrays, one with an azimuth of southeast and the other, southwest, and presumably an altitude of 45 degrees is good for getting equal power output through out the day at central latitudes. Because the peak power would be reduced, you could use a less expensive, lower powered inverter while increasing the total energy output. Because the power would be spread out through the day, you would be more likely to use the power directly from the PV panels rather than draw it from the grid or batteries.
I have done this sort of thing with my PV array. It has 3 segments.
1. 472 rated watts point in a fixed direction, azimuth: 15 degrees east of south, altitude: 45 degrees. This direction favors morning and winter conditions while still yielding close to optimum.
2. 135 rated watts, azimuth: due south, altitude: manual tilt which I adjust 4 times/year to optimize total energy output.
3. 135 rated watts, azimuth: 50 degrees east of south, altitude: manual tilt which mostly points between 0 and 45 degrees of the horizon. This one favors morning when I have clear skies in the summer. Because this panel outputs its maximum power at a different time of day than the others, I was able to connect it in parallel with one of the fixed panels (120 rated watts) reducing my cost for wiring and regulation. At sunrise these 2 panels output about 8 A, quickly rise to 10 A and then peak at 12 A to 13A until about 1 PM. Sun goes behind the 135 W panel at about 4 pm. This panel is good at receiving reflected sunlight from white clouds on partly cloudy days in the afternoon. The rear of the panel is white, and I painted the roof below and behind it a dark color to minimize sunlight reflecting onto its rear to keep it as cool as possible. The roof is a very reflective aluminum which is good for reflecting sunlight onto the panels in the winter and keeping the shed cool.
If I mounted another 135 rated watt panel on the southwest facing wall, I estimate the combined current output (of the two 135 W panels) would be 8 A at sunrise, increase to about 12 A at 10 am, begin decreasing at 2 pm and be 8 A at sunset. When pointing at blue sky with Sun behind it. the PV panel outputs 2 A or less. This is about 80% of the power compared to them pointing in an optimal direction. It is a little price to pay for getting more uniform power output through out the day.
RE: Global Chemical Effects..
Triclosan, A Chemical Used in Antibacterial Soaps, is Found to Impair Muscle Function
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2012/08/triclosan-a-chemical-use...
.. wasn't I just saying I feel MORE vulnerable when I use the AntiBacterial soaps that are so ubiquitous at the workplace? And what is that other sanitizer stuff? Yeeks.
.. and I just got my first official workplace 'blood on product' incident yesterday, but like a good Swede, I just disinfect it with a cup of strong black coffee! It's a good day to die!