CNN had three energy-related stories this morning.  One was about how high fuel prices are increasing the prices of Christmas trees and poinsettias.  The other was a warning that gas prices are likely to rise soon.  Though they are dropping now, oil prices are on the rise, and eventually, that will be reflected in gas prices.  They think oil prices may spike this week, because of the storm heading toward the northeast.  

The third story wasn't directly energy-related.  It was about the federal government promising "mortgage assitance" to homeowners affected by the hurricanes.  Zero percent interest, for as long as it takes to get back on their feet.  It reminded me of the peak oil episode of Wall St. Week Reports.  One of the guests on that show thought that suburban real estate would tank, while urban real estate would boom.  He thought the government would be forced into offering a mortgage assistance program to suburbanites, because so many of them would owe more than their houses were worth.

Could this really be the technonogy optimists have been toting this whole time?

 "I am not going ot predict what the storm will do"

 He was going to leave it up to models and use them instead.  To me it was rather funny, Just from reading them all the time I see that they are as confused about why these storms are there as most of us are, except they know something is up, just not what exactly.  They see the writting on the walls, but are still trying to see through all the rain still falling what the heck was written there.

 The storms that left rain here left snow up north I hear.  Fun Fun, But it sure got cooler down here too.  Most everyone heats with some form of Gas here in northern Alabama.  I saw my neighbors chimneies just puffing out smoke,  while I sit here and bundle up in the nippy air, wondering if I have another Blanket somewhere.

 Got to go out and pay last months Utilities bill, Sewerage, water, NG, Electric, Trash pick-up and tax all rooled into one neat bill, for $81.00  Yay me!.  Next months bill is going to be far higher.

It was all about the politics behind the movie, with interviews with Robert Baer, Anonymous(the CIA agent whose name I forget), and Sonia Shah, the author of "Crude." These were mixed in with George Clooney and Matt Damon.

I was wondering if anybody else saw it and knows if the first 40 minutes was any good?

This is a request. A few threads back we talked about the Iranian Oil Burse, which aroused some debate. This coming March the 20th the Iranian Oil Burse will open (in case action is not taken by the Bush Adm), later in the year the Moscow Oil Exchange will also come on line. The information on this events is scarce, but it seems that both won't negotiate in dollars. What are the consequences?
Can you Oil Drummers get a bit more of info and post it to our discussion? Thanks.

One estimate I've seen is that the Gulf Stream delivers something like 27,000 times as much energy to the UK as all of their power plants turn out.  

It would appear that a large part of this energy is in the process of being withdrawn from the UK and Europe (and the NE U.S.) and redirected toward the U.S. coast in the form of Cat 4/5 hurricanes.   In turn, these Cat 4/5 hurricanes will continue to hammer our oil and gas infrastructure on and adjoining the Gulf of Mexico.

For both of these reasons--cold & hurricanes--I don't think that I would be buying ocean front real estate anywhere from Bangor, Maine to Brownsville, Texas, or for that matter real estate with 200 miles or so of the coast.

ANWR, peak oil and chemicals
(For more on these and other Capitol Hill stories, see today's Environment & Energy Daily.)

Budget conference to determine fate of Arctic drilling
House lawmakers return to Washington this week facing the daunting task of merging very different House and Senate spending cut bills -- a process that will decide whether struggling efforts to allow new Alaskan oil drilling through budget reconciliation will succeed.

House hearing to examine 'peak oil' theory
The concept of "peak oil" gets its first official congressional forum this week when the House Energy and Air Quality Subcommittee convenes Wednesday to conduct an informational hearing on the subject. Peak oil posits that declining worldwide oil production, and the higher costs of emerging sources of oil, cannot keep pace with rising global demand.

Collins floats regulatory bill for chemical sector
Senate Homeland and Government Affairs Committee Chairwoman Susan Collins (R-Maine) late last week took the wraps off a long-anticipated draft bill that would implement a series of federal security regulations for chemical facilities, which some analysts have long identified as vulnerable to a terrorist attack. The far-reaching legislation would place unprecedented security requirements on the chemical sector, but it has already been criticized by environmental groups who say the bill falls short in at least one key area.

Do you remember that wacky book by Art Bell called "The Coming Global Super Storm"?  How about that implausibly plotted movie "The Day After Tomorrow"?

Could it really be true that the Gulf Stream's flow to Northern Europe has slowed down by 30% in the last 12 years.  Check out this article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,3605,1654803,00.html?gusrc=rss

If Northern Europe's winters were 5 deg C colder, would this not affect the demand calculations for Peak Oil?

Factoid: Your daily share of all US energy could lift you (180 lb.) 285 miles in the air. Beyond the air, really -- the  the  international space station orbits at just 217 miles.

Details: Total US energy flow per person is about 900 megajoules daily. (http://eed.llnl.gov/flow/02flow.php) After discarding a 62% heat loss, you are left with 342 megajoules for lifting.

The primary sources of American energy are: Oil 36%, Natural Gas 25%, Coal 24%, Nuclear 9%, Hydro 3%, Other (biomass, wind, solar) 4%.

And now here we are, merely 19 days later, and electricity is up to:

http://www.bloomberg.com/energy/index.html

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 = 20 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,  10% could be used for gasohol while the other 7% would be consumed by increased demand before the new ethanol plants came on line.

In addition to corn I have been looking at some numbers on soybeans and potatoes.

The US harvests about 2.5 billion bushels of soybeans annually, and about 23 million tons of potatoes. Potatoes yield about 25-30 gallons of ethanol/ton or  688 million gallons of ethanol about .5% of our gas consumption.

There has been much talk about bio-diesel from soybeans. The only numbers I can find are that soybeans yield about 9.5 to 10 pounds of oil/bushel. How much bio-diesel will 10 pounds of soybean oil yield??  2 Gallons??  that would make 5 billion gallons of bio-diesel.  Our annual distillate consumption is 4.5*365*42=69 billion gallons.  Soybean bio-diesel would only supply 7% of our distillate needs.   5/69=.0725.

So all the corn, beans, and potatoes are used for liquid fuels. The cows, hogs, and chickens are skinny and starving, egg production has collapsed and we are on bread and water.  I hope this can put in perspective our alternate liquid fuels problem.  Furthermore we are not sure if it requires more than a gallon or less than a gallon of oil to produce a gallon of alternative liquid fuel.

For those who are not aware:  US gas consumption 9.5 million barrels/day,  diesel 4.5 million barrels/day, oil 20.5 million barrels/day . Of course the gas and diesel are refined from the oil.  The balance is used for plastics and etc. World wide oil currently about 83.5 million barrels/day.

However, the only articles I can find about Daqing (like this one from China's People Daily) seem to indicate that Daqing is past peak.

Is Ghawar truly the only super giant left that has (supposedly) not reached peak?

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1126709,00.html

Monday, Nov. 07, 2005
What's Cooking On Campus
Locally grown food is the latest student cause. Can this movement save family farmers?
By MARGOT ROOSEVELT / PORTLAND

They shut down the Pepsi machines in the University of Portland cafeteria the other day. The plastic bottles of Hunt's Ketchup disappeared. Sugar was replaced with honey from a neighborhood beekeeper. And everything else on the lunch menu, from soup (lentil) to nuts (hazel), was locally grown, baked, milked and mixed. The shrimp was harvested in nearby Netarts Bay, not in Thailand; the herbs were gathered in adjacent Clackamas County, not in California; the chicken was pastured on fields outside Eugene, not imported from the Midwest's vast factory farms. "It's awesome," said Alex Samuels, 19, a freshman from Puyallup, Wash., swigging a drink made from Oregon berries. "We're helping smaller farmers instead of big corporations."

It may seem to lack the ideological passion of antiapartheid or antiwar protests, but the new activist slogan on campuses is "Eat local." Students are rediscovering the political adage that you are what you eat. And colleges are voting with their palates--and their multimillion-dollar food budgets--against an ever more global agricultural industry in which produce travels, on average, 1,500 miles from farm to plate. Posters around the University of Portland campus proclaimed that BUYING LOCAL FOOD IS ONE WAY YOU CAN HELP STOP GLOBAL WARMING ... AIR AND WATER POLLUTION. A racier consciousness-raising stunt was staged at Brown University, where activists published Ripe, a 2005 calendar featuring naked students posing
with strategically positioned Rhode Island fruits and vegetables (for August, cantaloupes rest on the buttocks of the women's soccer team).

Will politically correct gastronomy save the family farm? That may be wishful thinking. At the University of Portland, the all-local lunch was merely symbolic--Pepsi was back for dinner. What's meatier is that the university, which serves 22,000 meals weekly, has hiked spending on local and regional products to 40% of its food dollars--up from less than 2% five years ago. "Even the burgers are from Oregon steers," boasts dining manager Kirk Mustain.

Some 200 universities have jumped onto the eat-local haywagon--half of them since 2001, according to the Community Food Security Coalition, an advocacy group based in Venice, Calif. For many of these academic foodies, buying local is only part of an educational mission. Scholars like Oberlin environmental-studies professor David Orr advocate "ecological literacy," tying agriculture to the study of fiction, history, science, economics and politics. In a form of dirty-fingernail "experiential learning," some 45 universities and colleges, from Maine's Bowdoin to Minnesota's St. Olaf, have started campus farms. And courses like Sustainable Food Systems at the University of California at Santa Cruz deconstruct relationships between producers and consumers, with such readings as The Maturing of Capitalist Agriculture: Farmer as Proletarian.

The eco-food movement may appeal to antimultinational globophobes: packaged, refrigerated goods transported from afar use tons of fossil fuels that pollute and release ozone-depleting gases. Locally grown produce typically needs fewer pesticides than big farms use--and fewer synthetic additives for a long shelf life. But as students seek to upend the food-supply chain, they get a gritty lesson in practical economics. Cafeterias are often serviced by billion-dollar behemoths such as Sodexho Inc. and Aramark Corp., which make money partly by purchasing cheap foreign produce and centralizing distribution. Even when colleges operate their own dining halls, the staff is used to making a single phone call to order thousands of meals from distributors like the $30 billion Sysco Corp. Roast beef arrives cooked and sliced, powdered soup requires only added water, broccoli comes in precut florets. When the University of Montana decided to eat local two years ago, four graduate students spent months finding 34 nearby suppliers and organizing logistics. "We couldn't have 10 different farmers driving pickup trucks to drop off tomatoes," said dining director Mark LoParco. They nudged growers into co-ops for delivery and processing. Now the romaine comes washed and chopped--and the farmer gets a higher price. In January the university's new contract with Sysco will stipulate that the company supply bacon from Daily's Inc., a Missoula processor.

If caterers are starting to pay heed, it may be none too soon. University of California students on 10 campuses launched a statewide campaign last month to pressure U.C. regents to spend at least 10% of their $20 million annual food budget on local and organic products. Sodexho, which was ousted from the University of California at Santa Cruz after a student campaign, recently began to draw its supplies from local sources near eight Midwestern campuses. Aramark works with the University of Rochester and Vassar to buy from nearby farmers. And California-based Bon Appétit, which operates dining halls at 67 colleges, has hiked spending on local food to 20% of its budget.

In some cases, cooking from scratch with local ingredients is more expensive. Williams College will pay $85,000 more this year to double local products to 14% of its $2.7 million food budget. But at the University of Montana, even though the price of local beef and safflower oil was higher, the dining bill actually shrank slightly because of reduced spoilage. Liability can also be an issue, as University of Vermont students discovered when Sodexho forced a nearby orchard to buy $4 million worth of insurance. But activists persist. "Students go through purchasing reports to see where we are buying pears," says Robert Volpi, Williams' dining director.

Pure idealism? Not necessarily. Local food is usually tastier. When Alice Waters, the celebrity chef, helped her daughter's Yale cafeteria switch to a seasonal, regional menu (even the chips are made from organic potatoes grown in Connecticut), students from other dining halls began forging IDs to crash the feast. When Brown introduced Rhode Island Macouns and Winesaps--replacing the Red Delicious and Granny Smiths grown for long-distance trucking--apple consumption doubled. To be sure, some colleges find it easier and cheaper to install fast-food counters. And some students would just as soon dine on Kraft cheese and Cocoa Puffs ("This stuff is weird," grumbled University of Portland physics major David Baldwin, 18, sniffing at the salmon-fennel latkes). Even a few Yalies grouse that the all-local dining hall doesn't serve tomatoes in winter. "My generation knows how to put food in a microwave and eat in front of a computer screen," says Louella Hill, 24, a food activist at Brown. But she adds, "When someone bites into an heirloom plum, I see a profound awakening."
That awakening is enhanced by growing contact between students and farmers. At the University of Portland's local-foods lunch, fish broker Amy Dickson set up a display with shells, nets and a sign reading SIGNATURE SALMON: 100% LINE-CAUGHT IN OREGON WATERS. "My slogan is 'Roe vs. Wave: Salmon is a choice,'" she joked. Aaron Silverman of Greener Pastures Poultry gave out brochures describing how his chickens "wobble around as they please." And wheat farmer Karl Kupers touted the environmental benefits of no-till planting. "Students come up and shake your hand and call you a hero," said Kupers, whose co-op sells to seven area colleges. Spokane senior Emily Magnuson, 21, echoed the sentiment. "It's a homey feeling to know who's growing your food," she said as the scent of fresh-baked bread made from Kupers' wheat wafted out of the kitchen.

On a completely different tack, here's some info on wood gasification (for cars or stationary power).

1. Many of the WWII gasifiers were updraught gasifiers which produce a lot of tar and hence gummed up the engines
   
2. A downdraught gasifier has minimal tar. Surges of tar can be soaked up by a charcoal filter
   
3. Modern industrial filters can remove carbon dust quite effectively. Swedish and Danish research shows that engines powered by gasifiers with good filters last as long as diesel powered engines. I can supply links if any one is interested. Gasification seems quite practical in many respects, just more inconvenient than we are used to (of course, peak wood is a bit of an issue...)

Catalyst program. Last week on ABC Oz they had a segment on PO.

If anyone is interested to read the transcript or watch the video here is the link. GPM have also put a copy of the transcript on their website.

It also got a mention in the APSO Dec Newsletter.

http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/

Enjoy.

There is an editorial comment at the end of that:
"it would seem quite probable that we have already passed the global Net-Energy peak of oil production. As the quality of the World's remaining oil fields continues to diminish, more and more oil is burnt up in the processes of extraction, refining and transportation. The oil peak we commonly refer to is actually the gross oil peak."

I suppose that a declining EROEI is what they had in mind.  But when oil "production" numbers are reported, are they really "gross" rather than "net"?  Which energy expenditures are already deducted from the number, and which are not?

E.g., the barrels of oil "produced" from the "tar sands" are "gross", in more ways than one, but including the fact that the amount of natural gas used up in the process is not deducted.  How about other energy inputs in conventional oil "production"?  And in refining?  Isn't the oil used for heating within the refinery already deducted from the refinery output?  So if "heavier" oil is used, and needs to be "cracked" into smaller molecules, there is less net output from the refinery.  That does not affect the reported barrels of crude "produced" and fed to the refineries, though.

If the numbers are indeed "gross", can net numbers be found, or computed, to see if indeed "we have already passed the global Net-Energy peak of oil production"?  Simpleminded first approximation: if the overall EROEI is now about 10, and it used to be 100, then it's about a 10% deduction, which is quite significant, equivalent to about 8 mbpd.

http://www.coalcandothat.com/

Also found a full-page ad for an EdenPure advanced quartz infrared portable hetarer that will cut your heating bill up to 50%. "electricity is used to generate infrared light which, in turn, generates a very safe heat." :-)

Has there been much objection to erection cell phone towers all over the landscape?  Granted they are not as tall, but I personally find them to be ugly.  I don't remember public meetings being held to ask if cell phone towers could be erected in the communities I have lived in the past ten years.