Jumping on the technology bandwagon
Posted by Yankee on December 4, 2005 - 6:16pm
Topic: Alternative energy
Tags: alternative techonologies, coal gasification, peak oil, synthetic fuels [list all tags]
Not surprisingly, I guess, the cover article of Wired for December is called "Why $5 Gas Is Good for America". Why, you ask? Well, because it's going to kickstart funding for new, clean, alternative technologies, of course.
I'm going to let you guys read this article and form your own opinions, but I did want to provide just a few reasons why this article managed to push my buttons.
So rising oil prices are more than just an irritant or even an ominous nick out of the GDP. They're an invitation to corn and coal and hydrogen. For anyone with a fresh idea, expensive oil is as good as a subsidy - with no political strings attached. Indeed, every extra penny you pay at the pump is an incentive for some aspiring energy mogul to find another fuel.
What bothered me the most about this article is that there's absolutely no concrete examples of said "aspiring energy moguls" and their projects to back up his claims. Maybe I've been a scientist in academia for too long, but I find it irresponsible to be making grandiose claims about our happy future without a single example.* The mere mention of tar sands and synfuels is not good enough for me; even if he doesn't have room in his article to discuss specific projects, this is the web after all, and some links are critical to making his point. Thus, I can only assume he doesn't provide such links because no projects are sufficiently well developed that they convincingly provide the silver bullet, even in combination with one another.
A look at a recent thread of ours demonstrates that for every promising alternative someone mentions, someone else points out a problem. For example, NW Rich mentions that biofuels from algae look interesting, but Coffee17 worries about how clean such a process can be. TJ worries that coal gasification will take a rather long time to come online, and other have noted that not only may we not have that time, but it will take an enormous amount of fossil fuel input to get the relevant technologies in place—input we may not have if we wait too long. I won't even get started on Reiss's suggestion of synthetic diesel made from natural gas, which many people believe has already peaked.
If technology is going to save us, why aren't the technogeeks (sorry) already showing us working prototypes and convincing us of how easy it will be to scale the technology up to current levels of consumption? I'm hoping as much as anyone else that technology will be our savior, but I have yet to get really excited about one or more of the possibilities being able to replace petroleum in all of its many forms someday.
*I guess that the BP announcement about their plans to spend $8 billion in investments in wind, solar and hydrogen was too late to appear in the Wired article, but even if Reiss had mentioned this, it would only have shown that companies may now be willing to invest, but not that there are any proven technologies that will eventually be able to account for a significant proportion of worldwide energy consumption.
What did I miss? Why are you no longer 'Ianqui'?
"...Yergin's response, "I wonder what...I'm not sure what report that is, but I expect there to be a few reports coming out from the U.S. Government, from the geological side, that I think are more confident about the resources...."
yeah sure, yergin's never heard of the hirsh report...and we're in iraq to instill democracy...don't pay any attention to the man behind the curtain, dorothy!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-smiley/twentyfive-years-a-sucke_b_11587.html
The SUV trend aside, there is no way we are going to make a four passenger car 1000x lighter.
This artticle is just more King Canute. It struck me as another example of someone trying to spin reality away. Without magic markets and magic technology the Wired way of life would be doomed; no one is going to be interested in wrist computers, Google Universe and AI when you can't heat a house. Therefore if you say it can't happen often enough then it won't.
In fifty years we have made no progress. That's when the Scout program started up.
I think you nailed it. They didn't discuss anything specific because they didn't have anything specific to discuss. Typical mindless Wired boosterism of anything new and technical.
If there is more wasteful consupmtion when the crisis hits there will be much more time to go by just going on a diet... the difference is time - supposedly this will give us more time to find a way out. If it is not already self-evindent nothing will be commenced neither by the government, nor companies and individuals until they feel the heat with their own pockets.
These mind twist manipulations are pretty effective on Joe SixPack because tucked away in his head are rememberances of "Going to the Moon", the home computer, and the Internet; all indeed great successes of science. What Joe forgets is the slice of foam that knocked the knees out from under the Space Shuttle program.
Call it hubris. Yes we humans are the greatest thing since canned tuna fish. But we don't know why gravity is. We can't make even a single tree (we can cut 'em down & run for sure). And we can't make an efficient solar panel even though we've been trying for years.
Biggest problem might be that the news journalist is a technical illiterate. Gone are the days when the science reporter had to have a degree in science.
http://www.oecd.org/speaker/0,2879,en_21571361_34225293_34671219_1_1_1_1,00.html
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/02/issue/forwards.asp?p=1
I have scanned through their magazines before and since i am not hip or 20 something of age, i found nothing of interest to a mid 40's guy like myself. IPODs are neat, (see? i'm already showing my age), and cell phones are very handy, i still despise 99% of cell phone users. but thats a different rant. Can ya dig it?
FWIW, it sounds like this story was structured as a gee-whiz fable of the future, when we know it should have stronger shades of grey.
(there are gee-whiz stories out ther, PO just isn't one of them)
But I realize oldsters have been saying the same sort of thing since the time of the ancient Greeks. However, I think what is different here is that most young people have an almost wired-in acceptance of State authority, no doubt a product of the current public school system plus TV shows like 'Cops'. It really make my skin crawl when I see young people so willingly subjecting themselves to searches at checkpoints, fully believing that such is for their own safety against this amorphous threat called 'terrorism'.
It will only get worse, that is until things get so bad that they have no place to go but to only get better. But who knows, maybe there is a movement out there, totally invisible to us older ones, that has the will and wherewithal to pull us out of the hole. But I will not hold my breath.
I think they were the last free Americans. Now we're in to something else. Something very docile. The end, I guess ...
The NG price by the end of the week may be past $15 after the current cold snap, see what song they are singing by Saturday.
What's the 42?
Instead of looking around for the silver bullet, we have to realize that we have the solution in a combination of all those things. I call it the Silver BB Solution.
It isn't going to be possible to scale up technologies to current levels of consumption. The doomfreaks (sorry) are pushing a false dilemma: either technology can maintain our current obese habits, or we are screwed.
My view lies in the middle. Technology is perfectly capable of saving us if we meet it halfway. Step 1 of the solution is conservation. Step 2 is technology.
I agree with you. I don't like Reiss's facile tone either. He is greatly underestimating the complexity of the transition. He is also thinking in U.S.-centric terms, and ignoring the larger world-wide problems that peak oil will cause in other countries (like the UK and Mexico) which don't have huge coal and oil shale reserves.
On the other hand, I don't think shooting down his solution means much. The genuine solution is conservation+technology. It's not so easy to trash that idea, and that's the position of the informed technogeeks.
Yes, though I think it is more like the `rational' solution is conservation+technology. Give us 100 years and maybe we will know if it was the "genuine" solution.
Ever since then I have stupidly stuck to my self-appointed task of working on energy efficient designs, and always, here and overseas, I have been rebuffed by the same old argument "it's not economic when oil is so cheap". My argument that oil only seems cheap because we can get away with counting only part of its true cost, and that conventional economics is the outgassing of Beelzebub gets me nowhere.
I'm not saying that any of my gadgets are all of themselves world savers, but they and lots of other good stuff can be helpful. Almost everything in a normal american house that uses energy could be made to use a lot less of it if we just applied what we already know.
A couple of simple examples- a fridge that is connected to the frigid outside by a heat pipe so that it doesn't have to run as much in the winter. Bubblewrap insulation, Wood stoves ( or any heater) with big water thermal stores and built-in stirling generators, And of course all the car mods we know about, like plugin hybrids, not to mention straw fired power plants for farm equipment. And of course all the things Amory Lovins has been hawking these many years.
And I betchya a hundred megabucks the above CAN be scaled up and have no serious unkunks
So high oil prices might help some, in my worn out humble opinion.
Let me repost and review in the future, and also not after fishing all day, burp.
So lets talk about ethanol: The US gasoline consumption is 9.5 million barrels / day, 9.5 * 365 * 42 = about 145 billion gallons annually. The US annual corn crop harvest is 10 billion bushels. 10 * 2.5 = 25 billion gallons of ethanol. Ethanol yield is about 2.5 gallons per bushel. 25 / 145 = about 17% If we used the entire annual corn crop to produce ethanol, the 17% would be used for increased demand before the new ethanol plants came on line.
The NG price by the end of the week may be past $15 after the current cold snap, see what song they are singing by Saturday.
We only use 50% of the oil for gas, so it would be more like 35% of our gas needs, with bio-diesel making up a possible 10% of our diesel needs...every little bit helps I guess.
I think corn is going to be a big waste of time anyway. I would bet most farmers will switch to Rapeseed/Mustard instead.
Basically, they are trapped and ADM, Cargill, et al like it that way.
Algae is most definitely not the answer. It's only another crop, with all the problems any crop has. And even higher water needs. They've been trying to get algae working since the '70s oil crisis, to no avail. Weeds - algae that doesn't make good biodiesel - are a huge problem, and harder to control than weeds with other crops.
Use these numbers on a different forum where this is also being discussed.
Cheers
In his yearly birthday speech, the King of Thailand made the following comments ( translation done by artical author)
And in another another the following was remarked
The thing that chaps my ass (love that term) about the Wired article is that it implies that everything will be taken care of, don't worry your little head about it. Just sit back and enjoy the techno-toys. Of course, that's not true; someone has to make the techno-toys, and come up with the new ways to power them. There's no hint in the article that the author thinks this job is interesting, worthwhile, or even exists in this world.
The real world is different. Someone's going to have to do the engineering to make the energy systems. Someone is going to have to gene-splice the bugs that turn the trapped oil in spent fields into methane, munch cellulose and turn out ethanol, use sunlight to crack water into hydrogen and oxygen. If you don't have the people capable of doing the job, it doesn't get done; if you have the people but don't pay them to do the job, they do something else and the job doesn't get done either.
Or it gets done by somebody else, who gets a patent on it and you're stuck buying your necessities from them.
We've got a lot to do, and while I see hints that things are happening there is no movement big enough to address these problems as fast as they're going to hit us.