DrumBeat: May 25, 2006
Posted by threadbot on May 25, 2006 - 9:30am
Topic: Miscellaneous
Now for some wise words from the readers of The Oil Drum...
[editor's note, by Yankee] Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma has a blog at the New York Times. Today's post is rather similar to Robert Rapier's ethanol post from yesterday in that it argues that corn-based ethanol is a waste of our time. He didn't mention, however, that at best corn-based ethanol could only make up 19% of the gasoline supply (so I left a link to Robert's post in the comments). Still, it's good that someone linked to the MSM is trying to debunk the corn-based E85 hysteria.
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I took your analysis a step further, in part as a response to GW and in part as a response to a likely decline in a major economic input.
Couple electrification with MUCH higher efficiency,
Diesel 18 wheelers take 8 times as much fuel as diesel railroads to move a ton-mile (gross #s from 2002).
An electric RR (with regenerative braking) uses about 1/3 the non-oil energy of a diesel RR.
Shifting half the freight ton-miles from 18 wheelers to electric RR in a decade seems like a workable goal. Growing RR freight by 9%-11% per year is doable. Russian rates of electrification of existing RRs are doable and probably twice as fast.
Electric Urban Rail creates it's own ridership over time. It alters the urban form away from sprawl with "natural" market forces. It's called TOD (Transit Orientated Development).
As with freight RRs, major savings directly. Perhaps 1/12th the energy (non-oil) to commute by Light Rail than by car/SUV. But double that savings with changes in urban development.
The electricity demands to cut US Oil concumption by 10% are likely less than 2% of our total electricity used. Small enough to be "created" by slightly better conservation or new wind turbines.
OTOH, plug in hybrids have no associated efficiency gains, other than a shift to smaller cars. Batteries lose energy when stored and add weight to move around.
Plug-in hybrids are a "half measure" and they should be, IMO, a minor supplement to a major thrust for electric RRs and MUCH more Urban Rail, Plug-in hybrids, because they are not a significant step up in efficiency, are less sustainable and this will lead to further problems in a generation.
We will soon be engaged in a race between the decling volumes of oil that we can afford and our demand for oil while maintaining a reasonable level (severe recession ?) of economic activity.
Gains of 24:1 are likely to be much more important than 3:2 and 2:1 gains.
People can hypothesize dozens or hundreds of CTL plants, but have trouble getting their heads around the concept of putting back double tracks which were torn up a few decades ago for a lower property tax single track.
AFAIK, there are shared triple tracks in Wyoming serving the coal fields. The US standard railroad ROW is 100' wide. One can do a lot in that space.
On a macro level, in 2002 railroads carried 27.8% of the ton-miles; highways 32.1%. If half of the highway ton-miles were switched from highway to rail in a decade; railroads would have to grow the "normal" growth in our economy + a compounded 4.7% to take half of the trucking ton-miles in ten years. My goals are, if anything, too modest !
The rail capacity problems of today are "bottlenecks". Most lines have excess capacity. And simply adding more tracks will help with that.
"Coal is clogging our railroads, they can barely handle the load".
I live close to what I have been told is the world's busiest railroad bridge. I have never seen a coal train on it. Lots of containers, tank cars, boxcars, grain cars, automobiles, piggy back truck trailers, lumber, steel, etc. but zero coal.
The railroad business is much more than hauling coal.
In addition he said we have a monopoly on the tracks that are coming out of most ALL ethanol plants. This was done roughly 3 years ago and our tracks are connected directly to many, many refineries. As he said, "you can't pipe ethanol." I didn't know if that was true, so I left it alone.
Lastly he said LNG is not an option, at least from a RR standpoint and he went on the knock it for what it was. He also said we've been moving heavy equipment up to Alaska in anticipation of a need. I wonder how soon we'll have that "need."
Well actually no. The problem is it doesn't tend to separate. Water and ethanol are mutually soluble in all mixtures. So the water is just taken up by the EtOH and goes merrily along with it. Hydrocarbons do not mix with water, which can be separated from the stream by a simple sump, a low place in the pipe, whatever. (I'm not intimate with pipeline technology but do have a bit of lab experience)
As for (2), all that wet ethanol tends to rust things. That, and even anhydrous ethanol is a polar solvent, which has more of a tendency to remove lubricants and coatings or soften them to where they no longer stay in place.
You have to make all your pipelines and equipment out of different materials than you do for hydrocarbons. Since it's kinda expensive to replace thousands of miles of pipe, they'll just truck it. There will be this interval of time while TPTB come to their senses, and they can truck the ethanol for that long. Or TPTB won't come to their senses, and the whole system will collapse. In which case they can also stop trucking the ethanol.
OTOH, I believe synthetic- or bio-diesel, can go through existing pipes without much trouble.
BTW, I would like to forward an eMail copy of my conference handout to you.
Please send me an eMail at Alan_Drake@Juno.com
http://ergosphere.blogspot.com/2005/07/super-cooled.html
He did some back of the envelope calculations down in the comments to see if the idea was even close to doable, and on paper it might be plausible. I don't recall offhand what the efficiency is of these things.
My point is that if such a thing were to work, you could effectively have an electrified railroad without the need to string overhead wires.
You would need the electric locomotives, of course. In actuality railroad locomotives are already electric - in theory you might even be able to adapt a diesel locomotive so that it can draw electricity from they fuel cell instead of from the diesel generator, but I don't know whether the actual designs they use could easily be adapted in this fashion - given that they weren't designed to be used in this fashion there might be other problems.
You would also need the fuel cell itself (presumably in a car of its own), and finally you would need the infrastructure to recharge the fuel cells with electricity.
DAMN IT !!
We do NOT have time for delays for something that MIGHT be better (but probably won't be) !
One can ride on electric trains from London to the Pacific Ocean ! TODAY !
It has been done, the problems are solved, we have a century of operating experience in every climate, it is "off the shelf" technology, it is affordable, it is VERY efficient, it is environmentally benign and it is about the quickest alternative that can be implemented !
The problem is that despite what any of us say here, nothing at all is happening in this area. Next week the situation will be exactly the same as it is today. A month from now it will almost certainly be the same. And there is a good chance that a year from now the situation will be unchanged.
We can say let's get to work, but until the railroads develop an interest in this, nothing is going to happen. State and local authorities might be able to do some things to incentivize the railroads. Federal authorities might in theory also incentivize them, but I just don't see that happening given who is in charge now. And despite all of this, it will still have to be the railroads that decide to change their way of doing things.
So what exactly should we be doing??
I don't know, bitching and moaning and getting frustrated, which is what I was doing - sorry to take it out on you.
Send me an eMail at Alan_Drake@Juno.com for a copy to send out as well if you like. (Anyone is welcome ! :-)
I am working for more streetcars here in New Orleans and developing some theories for their use and route planning. Plus more local recovery work whereever I can.
Pushing my agenda here, which I think will grow in influence over time.
I am pushing long odds, I know. But if I DON'T try, the odds are still longer.
I figure several thousand hours of my effort (+ money) will have a >1% and less than <5% chance to impact public policy in some positive way.
I accept that "cost" and odds.
Yeah, I know - I was there when you were handing all those things out at the meeting in DC. Long odds but worth the effort. In reality, I am just trying to think of ideas that can get things moving more quickly.
Is there any chance that Canadian railroads might be more amenable than the U.S. railroads to electrification?
Earlier this year, France made a commitment to electrify their yards and small branch lines.
If it's possible to construct such a high speed link (300 km/hr) in a crowded part of SE England constructing more traditional tracks (say 130 km/hr) in rural parts of US should present few problems given necessary political will. Details of CTRL here: http://www.lcrhq.co.uk/
I find it interesting how so many posters think that we will have mass migration and end of surburbia at the same time. Where are all the migrators going to live? In the burbs of sustainable areas (near Agriculture) I think. There is not going to be a 1 size fits all solution to this.
Portland streetcar (I took a course at Portland State University) has some very good ideas on quick cheap streetcar tracks. Not heavy enough for Light Rail.
From memory, $300/foot and three weeks per block.
I had dinner with an LTK consultant in Portland. He agreed that if the process was changed, they could cut years off the process of designing and getting OKs for a new light rail line. Costs down at least 30%.
Hand-in-hand with more funding for Urban Rail needs to come drastic reform of the process. We could learn much from the French in that regard.
Portland can get the Green Line (Light Rail) built within a couple of years, and then the line to Milwaukee (spelling) after that. Meanwhile the streetcars will go far south down river and both sides of the river. We will hopefully be in just the early stages of post-Peak Oil by then.
The line to Vancouver, with a new Columbia River bridge in all probability, is going to a problem.
What other Light Rail plans are on the conceptual drawing boards of Portland ?
In your opinion, as a resident, will these MAX & streetcar lines above, once completed, be "enough" with some buses ?
Texas had two years after PO before they saw more than a trivial decline.
For now, I am still promoting Urban Rail with my "Step #3" being more trolley buses.
I see ETBs as being the quick fix AFTER the crunch hits. Till then, I will talk more about the "better solution".
Quite frankly, the body politic is not willing to "buy into" a doomer, quick crash scenario. I think Urban Rail sells better than ETBs in todays world.
I think we defer only in strategy and timing details.
I can only hope that when the US finally gets serious about meaningful mitigation and conservation: that you will finally be recognized as the right man with the correct plan to get this all jumpstarted. I truly hope, for all our sakes, that you will soon get overloaded with consulting offers for RRs and mass-transit. =)
Bob Shaw in Phx,AZ Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
I believe that everyone would classify the tar sands as unconventional. The very heavy oil in Venezuela seems to be in a twilight zone between conventional and
unconventional. The common connection between the two is that they are hugely capital and energy intensive, combined a low production rate relative to the capital cost.
The stuff is extremely high in gravity, 8 to 10 API, high in sulfur content, 3.5%, and high in metal content, vanadium and nickel. This all means that it would be extremely expensive to refine it into any kind of motor fuel, but it could be done.
http://tinyurl.com/du8wd
Right now the best and most economical use of the Orinoco bitumen is to use it for boiler fuel. They mine the stuff, mix it with water and dump it right into the boiler. Of course that dumps a lot of sulfur dioxide and heavy metals into the atmosphere, not to mention C02. But some countries simply don't care.
http://www.soberania.org/Articulos/articulo_1375.htm
Terrific link! Considering the present values of metals, you would think it would be cost effective, besides environmentally smart, to harvest these metallic elements instead of just spewing them into the atmosphere. Seems like a huge opportunity being bypassed by some enterprising chem. eng. outfits. Maybe it is attributable to the increasngly onerous business conditions that Chavez is creating inside Venezuela.
Bob Shaw in Phx,AZ Are Humans Smarter than YEast?
Why do we just throw away stuff that was wrung from the earth with such effort?
- The US uses the most oil per capita
- The US imports the most oil
- The US has had traditionally low gasoline prices, so the increase in crude prices affects the US consumer's outlay at a higher percentage.
- The US economic/transportation model relies more on low fuel prices than other developed countries.
Of course, the US has some unique advantages in dealing with PO:lifted earlier this year] on the finding of "lack of harm".
Perhaps it's more appropriate to describe the US economy as "The Ghawar of Economies."
http://www.energybulletin.net/16393.html
Published on 25 May 2006 by Museletter / EB. Archived on 25 May 2006.
Energy Geopolitics 2006
by Richard Heinberg
Excerpt:
The neocons' efforts have meanwhile squandered immense amounts of fiscal, political, and diplomatic capital. And these efforts have played out (not coincidentally) as global energy streams are drying up. America's power elites bet the farm on the neocons and lost. There can be no second chance. A recovery of America's former position of unquestioned dominance, enjoyed until only years ago, is simply not in the cards. The best that can be hoped for is a partial re-consolidation based on withdrawal and reconciliation abroad, and massive inflation at home. This is a reversal of truly historic proportions.