The Oil Drum

I have given a lot of thought to the issue of opening up new areas for drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). My position has always been to leave that oil in place for a very rainy day. I wanted to see major conservation efforts in place before we considered tapping that oil. Opening those areas when oil was $20 a barrel would have meant that much of it would have been used frivolously.

Now that oil is over $100 - and in my opinion will be much higher in 5 or 10 years (T. Boone Pickens predicts $300/bbl in 10 years) - we will have tightened our belts a good deal by the time any of this oil could actually reach the market. Therefore, I think now is the time for Congressional hearings on opening up these areas. Let's have an open debate on the issue. However, if these areas are opened for drilling, I have a compromise that should be very attractive to those in opposition.

The following is a guest post by Bill James.

Gasoline prices give a a clear measure of consequences of making oil the lifeblood of our economy. As our economic lifeblood, oil is giving us:

1. Heart attacks, unstable price spikes in this plateau of Peak Oil
2. Leukemia, undermining our planets ability to support us with Global Warming

Facing the facts and acting to resolve them can defeat peak Oil and Global Warming, both civilization killers. A primary fact is that our current infrastructure is the cause of these killers. We built the infrastructure. We can build better. The purpose of this essay is a call to action to defeat these civilization killers by changing the way we govern infrastructure from specifying HOW to build it, to stating WHAT is needed and allowing a free market to find the rare individuals with lucky breakthroughs that can build sustainable infrastructure. We must get lucky and discover the energy equivalents of lasers, personal computers, cell phones, the Internet, etc....

The World Wind Energy Conference is just around the corner and happens to be in my home town. I was flipping through the conference program and noticed a familiar name pop up quite a lot: Paul Gipe. He's written a number of books on wind power and most recently has become involved in feed-in tariffs for wind power in North America. I spoke to him a while ago about how the industry has developed.

To listen to the show, you can either play it in the built in player, or download it directly via the link.

or download directly: Wind Power Conversation with Paul Gipe

This is a guest post by Dr. Thomas Hinderling. Dr. Hinderling is the CEO of CSEM Centre Suisse d'Electronique et de Microtechnique SA. One of CSEM's most exciting projects concerns the design of a new class of large scale concentrating solar power systems, called Solar Islands ¹. This article introduces the solar island design to the readers of TOD ².

Pétrole: François Fillon prône de "changer progressivement de sources d'énergie"		Oil: François Fillon says we have to move to other energy sources
"S'agissant de l'essence, il faut bien se mettre dans la tête qu'il n'y a pas de solution à cette question autre que de changer progressivement de sources d'énergie parce qu'on est devant une pénurie avancée", a souligné le Premier ministre sur RTL. (...) "Si on dit aux Français 'ne vous inquiétez pas on va trouver des moyens artificiels pour baisser le prix de l'essence et vous pouvez continuer à consommer de l'essence comme avant', on se trompe", a mis en garde le chef du gouvernement. "Il faut mettre tout l'argent disponible sur la recherche d'énergies alternatives". AP		"Speaking of gas, we have to get in our minds that there is no other solution to this question than to move to other energy sources because we are facing a forewarned shortage" (...) "If we tell the French: 'don't worry, we'll find artificial ways to lower the price of gas and you can continue to use gasoline as before', it's a lie", warned the head of government. "We have to put all available money on alternative energy R&D"

Will his government actually listen to what he is saying?

As an addendum to the Olduvai 2008 post there's a movie available that digests the main ideas presented there.

This was an original idea of Nate Hagens and Chris Vernon to somehow broaden the TOD readership spectrum to people with busy schedules and/or short attention spans. This new Olduvai assessment seemed a good place to start, although in the future the objective is to have more concise and direct movies, targeted for people who are not so savvy on fossil fuel depletion.

The budget was €0, so this piece of media is far from perfect, to which we ask for your understanding.

You can watch the movie using these links:

Google Video

YouTube (part 1)

YouTube (part 2)

Forecast for Conventional Fossil Fuels per Capita.
Sources: UN for Population model, Jean Laherrère [pdf!] for Natural Gas, Energy Watch Group for Coal and The Oil Drum - Khebab for Oil. Click for large version.

Last year I came across the story of Dutch company Kema and their energy island idea - basically a variant on the usual pumped hydro energy storage concept where water is pumped out of a space below sea level then allowed to flow back in, generating power as it does. The "island" uses wind power to pump water out of the enclosed area. An obvious extension to this idea would be to harness ocean energy as well - letting wave and/or tidal power supplement the output of the wind turbines. An attraction of this concept is that it potentially allows a large amount of new energy storage to be brought online - and this storage would be along the world's coastlines, where most of the population lives.

Another form of energy island has been in the news recently, this one a substantially more ambitious proposal which envisions artificial islands to collect wind, wave, ocean current and solar power in the tropics, along with a more unusual energy source - harnessing the difference in water temperatures between the warm surface and the cold depths using a technique called OTEC (Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion).

Well it was raining in Cork this morning, site of this week's ASPO conference, but by this afternoon it turned out to be somewhat nicer, and so I meandered over to the The Lifetime Lab where the evening welcome reception was to take place. (Irish descriptions tend to be “at the top of the road”, “meet in the City Center”, “within walking distance”, and so I wanted to be sure I got there). What those who showed up at the reception missed was that this is a recent addition to the Cork Landscape (open just over a year) and is a teaching tool for the community with several thousand school kids a year coming to learn about energy, the alternatives and the issues that will dominate their lives. The staff at the Lab were very kind, as well as informative about what they were doing with geothermal, as well as solar energy (20 sq m of panels on the roof) and, more to the point, took pity on a relatively geriatric case who took nearly an hour to make the “easy 20-minute” stroll out, and drove me back to the hotel.

I will leave each of you to write your own caption to the photo I thought most memorable from the reception. You should know, however, that the "victim" is Dr Campbell who was welcoming us to the reception, and yes the hawk was alive.

Anaerobic Digester

The Ontario government has recently been emphasizing its green credentials, particularly in relation to small-scale renewable generation, in the run up to a provincial election this fall. The Standard Offer Program (SOP - previously discussed here) is claimed to provide a framework for bringing a substantial array of new embedded generation on to the grid - generation based on different energy sources and varying widely in size. This is exactly what needs to happen if Ontario is to avoid a painful energy squeeze in the future, due in part to the approaching decline of natural gas supplies in North America. However, achieving it is proving to be far more difficult than one might reasonably expect.