DrumBeat: July 28, 2006
Posted by threadbot on July 28, 2006 - 9:30am
Topic: Miscellaneous
Challenges of Linking Kuwaiti Production with Oil Reserve
Ten members of the Kuwaiti National Assembly last week tabled a motion to link Kuwait's crude oil production with its oil reserve. After it is passed by parliament it will become a law under which the Ministry of Energy and the oil sector will operate.
Aging grids cited in blackouts
The nation's power system may be showing its age.Recent heat wave-related blackouts in California and New York are at least partly being blamed on creaky transformers, circuit breakers and cables.
Green Party candidate calls for national oil company
Howie Hawkins, the Green Party candidate for US Senate from New York, called today for the creation of a national oil company to help protect American consumers against the rapidly escalating price hikes for gasoline.
U.S. policy entangled by rising price of oil
Oil Is Like Milk; China Has No Need to Buy Cows
Andy Mukherjee thinks China should trust the market.
If you need milk every day, you should buy a refrigerator. A cow in the backyard would be too much.
Violence continues to stymie production in oil-rich Nigeria, as Royal Dutch Shell announced its production levels have not recovered in 2006 and armed militants took 40 oil workers hostage this week.A Shell executive told reporters Wednesday that production levels were expected to be down in 2006 due to the continuing violence directed at foreign oil companies operating in the oil-rich West African nation.
API: U.S. Oil, Gas Drilling Activity Hits Two-Decade High In Q2
Re: Electricity
I would like to make a pitch for one or more threads on the electrical grid, primarily in the United States, but also worldwide. Consider the following:
- Arguably even more than automobile transportation, electricity is fundamental to the way we live and work today
- Electricity has been gaining in share of all energy consumption since its inception
- Many of the peak oil mitigation solutions being proposed at the Oil Drum and elsewhere involve electricity, for example electric and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (EVs, PHEVs), light rail, certain renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power, and of course the rebirth of nuclear fission
- Electricity is relatively agnostic as to how it's generated and as such is a good energy exchange format between a wide variety of sources and sinks
- Electricity is in the news during the hot summer months as usage strains capacity
- Fossil fuel-based electricity generation, particularly coal, is a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions
For these reasons and more, I for one would be quite interested in learning more about how the electrical grid works, not just technically, but economically and politically as well. I know there is a lot of information readily available, (http://www.eia.doe.gov/fuelelectric.html, for example), but it would be nice to see the topic discussed here. I don't have the expertise to write about the grid, but it's likely that qualified and willing contributors can be readily found amongst the Oil Drum community and their friends, professional colleagues and family members.Maybe we should contact these folks and see if they have an expert to help lead a discussion on the topic.
I am reposting my response that was near the bottom of the Khosla ethanol thread.
Here are my thoughts again.
1. Reduce consumption everywhere, particularly liquid fuels, via drive for efficiency of motors and conversion of fuel energy to work.
2. Eliminate waste everywhere. All waste will be some one elses raw material. Stop sending everything to Land fills. Ames Iowa has one of three Resource Recovery plants in the nation (built in the 1970's) that sorts metals, glass and others and and provides refuse derived fuel, RDF. The RDF is sent directly to the coal fired generating plant and reduces coal consumption very significantly, electric rates haven't changed for 25 years. We need more of this approach country wide.
3. Mass transit should be funded massively to reduce use of cars for work commuting. This can be electric, hybrid diesel or other and can be light rail buses or other. The goal is lots of bodies moved per btu's consumed.
4. Raise CAFE standards (double?) now with built in increases yearly. Make sure these can't be reversed if things improve in the short run.
5. Do not pick winning transportation strategy (hybrid, electric, hydrogen, NG, etc.) but allow 3) to crank up innovation.
6. Each state must identify the correct mix of alternative low fossil fuel energy to chase. This needs to be fostered with incentives provided nationally to holistically reduce energy consumption and start capturing renewable energy.
7. I live in Iowa and see ethanol from corn and biodiesel from soybeans as viable for the midwest. Good EROEI in these states where irrigation is not needed. This technology should not be exported to all 50 states.
8. For the midwest it makes sense to maintain a liquid fuel supply to farm and transport agricultural commodities. Biofuels can meet this need with waste streams feeding animals or used for industrial purposes.
9. The loop on biofuels can be closed in the midwest. Percent of crop used to make fuel which is used to plant and harvest next crop with distillers grains and glycerine being used locally to make more food. If this can be done other places with other raw material it should be pursued. Energy must be captured and used locally, don't make ethanol from cellulose in New England and send it to Arizona for consumption. All the efficiency is lost in transportation.
10. The goal is for each state/region to manage their energy balance, gaining as much non fossil energy as possible from appropriate sources. Every southern state is a natural for solar cells on every roof surface.
11. Push solar, wind and micro-hydro at the individual consumer level. Facilitate a distributed grid for electricity production and storage. Lots of small generating sites rather than a few huge generating sites. Big companies can manage the maintenance and distribution system.
12. All of above should be set up to allow people to track their consumption and production of energy so that feed back loops get created.
13. Once people are more responsible for having to maintain more of their balance of energy they will hunt for ways to use less and make more on their own because it has direct financial benefit to them.
I believe in the silver BB's approach to reducing reliance on fossil fuel. Government and investment capital needs to stop trying to replace oil, NG and coal with technology X. Isn't going to happen. Invest instead in conservation approaches and on site energy capture.
This needs to be a 50 year, minimum, retooling of the United States. The Interstate highways took 50 years to build. The new transportation and energy system will take just as long but will be self sustainable when complete.
Over the 50 years it takes to get off oil and coal world population has to be allowed to decrease through lower birth rates matched with natural die off of elderly. If we stop having lots of children in 30-50 years 6 billion people will be die naturally at the end of their life span. At that time a smaller population can use the energy capture system that will have been built to maintain a stable population.
That's the vision. How do we convince moneyed and political interests to buy into that long term view at the expense of short term gain?
Those are all good suggestions...but I have two problems:
- Essentially, your thrust is to maintain the status quo. It seems to me that what is needed is a new societal paradigm, that is, one that leads away from a growth-based economy. Were this to occur, appropriate, necessary change will follow from it.
- A time-frame based upon change over a generation+ is unrealistic. I'm not even sure we have five years. My optimistic outlier is ten years.
ToddFurther, if we should really have a hard time before we can complete our investment in new infrastructure, then it will make finishing it that much harder. I think after the fall of Rome, civilization fell too far too fast, and look how long it took to dig its way back out.
"One cannot leap a great chasm in 2 bounds" - You either get to the other side in one, or you fall in the hole.
My approach might ( I stress might) if we really reduce fossil fuel consumption immediately. We can't go cold turkey the infrastructure won't allow it.
The problem I see is there is no real proactive plan to reduce consumption of fossil fuels. Until we try and power some things with renewable, and prove how little energy will be available, there will be no target for energy consumption per person to shoot for. I see too many people voicing the concept of using all the fossil fuels we want until it is well past peak and then we will shift to "the new energy sources". That approach is dangerous.
Better to force consumption now, and start using alternatives now, giving us some emergency stored fossil fuel to make the 50 year transition. This approach is really for the developed countries to implement. The third world doesn't consume that much fossil fuel except as food. The world needs to know there isn't the carrying capacity for 6.5 Billion people. Not enough energy, not enough food without the energy. What is the carrying capacity using renewables? I haven't a clue but we better find out soon.
The goal needs to be a planned steep decline in use of energy and population. The alternative is dropping off a cliff. Both energy and population will crash. We will end at the same place wether we engineer the decline or we crash. The difference is what is left of civilization via the two paths.
Renewables can provide more than enough. Wind in the US could generate twice the electricity we use now. The earth receives 100,000 terawatts of solar energy continously from the sun, and humans use the equivalent of 4.5 terawatts on average.
It's late so you may not see this before this thread goes to thread heaven.
We all want to believe that there are alternatives that will work. But, the reality is that homo sapiens are sucking every resource dry - water, aerable land, gas, oil, the sea, minerals, forests; everything.
It is a package deal. Gaia if you will. There are no magic answers. I say this from personal experience since I embraced alternative energy and a concern for sustaible living 30 years ago. I'm not into theoretical arguments about alternatives.
I'm not going to tell you are wrong because a change in reality only comes through experience.
Todd
Well, I agree that there are serious problems with all of these. I haven't had time to research all of them thoroughly. But TOD is dedicated to peak oil, and I have had time to research PO and energy thoroughly, and as far as I can tell peak oil is NOT peak energy. I find that encouraging.
"It is a package deal. Gaia if you will. There are no magic answers."
I'm not sure what you mean by this. It sounds a little...err...faith based. This seems unclear and fuzzy. I respect the role of intuition, but I find that I don't understand something in a clear way I get in trouble.
"I say this from personal experience since I embraced alternative energy and a concern for sustaible living 30 years ago."
I've been interested in these things for more than 30 years too, ever since I read the Club of Rome's report.
"I'm not into theoretical arguments about alternatives. I'm not going to tell you are wrong because a change in reality only comes through experience."
Well...talking about this, and learning from each other, is what we do here. I know there are people feeling pessimistic, but that alone doesn't really tell me whether that makes sense, or give me a chance to change your mind. I think you shouldn't give up on things, and that includes not giving up on communication - we can't come to a consensus on things unless we talk about them.
One thing that interests me about renewables is that there seems to be a tacit assumption that, because they're renewable, they don't have a significant downside to their use.
All that solar energy being dumped on the Earth isn't going to waste, for example. Much of it heats the atmosphere and the hydrosphere, which makes conditions amenable for life. I wonder what environmental changes would result if humanity were to capture a significant chunk of solar energy, say 10 or 20 percent (20,000 terawatts), and redirect it through technological infrastructure. Sure, waste heat would contribute to keeping things warm (perhaps too warm!), but it would be distributed through the atmsophere in a different way. Could be detrimental.
I wonder what harnessing 4.5 to 9.0 terawatts via wind energy would due to local environments? Wind turbines tap into fluid momentum, and must produce a lot of friction on airflow. On a massive scale, wind "farms" could, perhaps, alter local wind-climates (at the surface), which may also have some interesting effects on local ecosystems.
Just some ideas. I would like to see more deep thought on just what the true ramifications may be for a full-scale "power-up" on renewables.
-best
Yes, I provided that link a few days ago :
Sow the Wind, Reap the Drag Coefficient (Dept. of "We are as gods, and might as well get good at it")
The thing you have to keep in mind is that the solar energy is typically absorbed as heat now. The likely places for solar panels is existing structures. PV might change the albedo a little, but not a whole lot. There are a lot of buildings with dark roofs, which absorb a lot already - PV might actually absorb less.
Heat engines (coal, nat gas, gasoline ICE's) throw
off 3 units of heat for every unit of electricity generated. IF solar absorbed an additional .1 unit for every unit generated, that would be a 30 to 1 difference, and that doesn't even include the reduction in CO2 and global warming.
If you were really concerned, it wouldn't be a big deal to make some human structures a little lighter to compensate for a little more absorption at the solar panels. Really, the whole effect is negligible.
However, I think the change of albedo would become significant if the goal is to collect a high percentage of insolation. If, for instance, an attempt to collect 80-90% of total insolation was successful, then the Earth's albedo must change from it's estimate of around 0.30.
Anyway, I'll keep thinking...
-best
Sure. Of course, that would be about 20,000 times as much energy as we use now. I think it's safe to say that human energy use will level out a long time before that.
- I think Americans could learn to drive about 10% less by carpooling, combining trips, vacationing closer to home, and god-forbid maybe even taking some trips on foot or bike.
- Reinstitue the 55 mph speed limit.
- Use the A/C in the car less.
These three steps could bring an immediate 10 to 20% reduction in gasoline use and could buy us a few years to make longer term and more dramatic changes such as:- increased electric rail in cities and towns.
- dramatic reductions in personal automobile use.
- returning to rail and river as the main means of shipping.
- slowly migrating out of the suburbs and megalopolises and back into our small cities and towns. My little town alone (pop. 15000) has 500,000 sq ft of unused space above the shops of our 6 or 7 block downtown retail district. In the 19th century, these were used as apartments. Today no one lives there bc/ of the lack of parking, but they could very easily be converted back to 500 or so housing units without any new construction. These floors are literally just sitting empty or maybe store the owner's junk. On several of our streets, the rails that haven't been used by electric trolleys in 60 years are still in place.
I see the "powerdown" as a return to a late 19th century standard of living. Lots of walking, mass transit, a substantially increased percentage of people working in agriculture, less cross country and international travel. more river and rail transport.The future may look a lot like the past:
I remember sharing rides being fairly common in the 70s when I was a kid. If one person had a car, there were several people who knew them and a ride for the one person into town often ended up being a ride into town for a couple of their pals too. In fact a person would be considered standoffish, greedy/cold if they always drove by themself. We'd have really been hurting without welfare though. As 'rough' as my memories of the dirty 70s, are, they'll be nothing compared to the 2nd great depression coming up.
Also, reinstating the 55 mph limit will not necessarily make people drive 55 mph. I actually think the limit has little bearing on how fast people actually drive.
My car's a darkish color and heats up quite a bit, I have to run the AC once the outside temperature exceeds 75F! I could avoid using the AC a lot more if it were a much lighter color, and didn't have a huge expanse of black dashboard under the sloping windshield. Anyone who has a Prius knows what I mean.
The A/C unit aboard a car will use up energy if for no other reason being that it causes the engine to have a faster idle. That causes the gas mileage drop. With my Kia Rio of Year 2001 the car has the mpg as above. 28 in winter and 24.5 in summer. Aggressive driving is no help! :)
It's easy to combine trips on a commuting mission. You can stop off at this or that mall on a mission home but you still use that damn gas for the mission home. That is the problem for the commuter. I use 3 fifths of gas each way as of now. I will use two fifths each way once I move. In a push-come-to-shove case, I will be able to use a bus as a "booster rocket" to get a bicycle toward where I work.
It's plenty about time that suburbanitic people think in terms of gas use instead of "minutes". That is, "gallons away" or "liters away". See above, and I think in terms of a "fifth" with the gas! Just yesterday, I saw a gas station with a sign of $3.76-and-the-9 a gallon. One penny short of a buck a liter. That was for the premium stuff. Buck a liter gas is coming, like it or not.
That with suburbanitic people thinking in terms of "minutes away" has always escaped me. The assumption is always that you use a car. If you don't always use a car, miles (or kilometers) becomes the better measure of distance. Time will depend on distance and transit use, and your walking. If you walk fast, you get to reduce travel time.
I would imagine the grids are contructed whereas to spend as little money as possible to keep it going. Just my thoughts! It's all about the money!
When we first built it, we never imagined the load we would one day put on it, nor how dependent upon it we would eventually be. That makes it hard to rebuild and repair the system.
What they could not imagine were probably that the electricity distribution companies would neglect to continue invest and build upon their exelent system and that people at large would stop necessery investments due to NIMBY.
There is an old Swedish farmers saying for this that litteraly translates "To live on rust and rot", that is neglecting to maintain and reinvest in your houses and equipment and letting them wear down. An existance for retiering people withouth heirs, for people who dont care much about the future.
Then there's the Internet. I doubt anyone foresaw today's giant server farms in the '60s, let alone the '30s.
The 800 kV level were proposed and planned for in the 70:s to interconnect the nuclear powerplants in southern Sweden and it would then probably have started to replace 220 kV and 400 kV lines. The proposal died in the general technology scepticism following the nuclear power debate. There are rumours that a lot of the 400 kV poles installed in the 80:s are prepaired for lenghtening for a future conversion to 800 kV.
There must surely have been a simmilar development in the USA for your numerous coal and nuclear powerplants built in the 60:s and 70:s. It would be quite odd if the backbone of your grid were fromn the about a 100 kV era.
The building of main grid lines have been a slow addition of DC-links, upgrades of old 220 kV lines and a few new short 400 kV lines for better redundancy after the building boom during the height of our nuclear investments. Investments are planned to increase to facilitate more power trading and more redundancy. I have heard no rumours about 800kV upgrades but it is undecided if a new major link in southern Sweden should be 400 kV overhead line or a HVDC cable. There is also a major reworking of the Stockholm power distribution underway. But we are not especially different from you, this would probably not have happened if we not had had a few major outtages showing that that the redundancy were incomplete and the grid did not deliver the expected quality of service. I am afraid that proactive maintainance and investment needs an accident now and then, hopefully one can learn from others mistakes.
As I drive home on my commute, I get to see (and marvel at) a substation. You have the "extreme" voltage transmission lines go to it, then it feeds huge transformers and it has giant capacitors to even out power factor. The conductors between the parts are exposed pieces of pipe.
In downtown Chicago, the extreme voltage power is carried underground. But that takes heavy-duty insulation on the wiring. Possible all right, but not cheap. Even a "mere" 4,200 volts takes some impressive insulation on the wires. It's way cheaper to have exposed cable on towers for long range power transmission - despite lossiness.
This is due to a cables higher capacitance to ground. During a period this capacitance is charged and if the cable is long enough it is time to reverse the current flow when the cable is fully charged leaving no power to extract for doing work at the other end. (Not a very good explanation :-( )
An overhead cable also have better natural cooling then an insulated cable making it possible to run a higher currant thru the same gauge of conducting metal.
Making it possible to use long cables and to exchange power between unsyncronized AC grids were the original reasons for developing HVDC. It is also more efficient for very long overhead power lines due to the same unsensitivity to the lines capacitance.