The Oil Drum

A few days ago, someone here posted a link to a story about skyrocketing farmland prices in the Midwest. It really made me angry to think about the inflationary chain reaction and the vicious chain of events our politicians have set into motion with these ethanol mandates. It made me even angrier to think that the few who benefit from these policies defend their right to siphon money from the rest of us and into their pockets. (I will be the first to say that surging energy prices are a big component of surging inflation, but with the ethanol mandates we are throwing jet fuel on an already raging fire).

This all started out innocently enough. Oil prices were climbing. Our energy production was shifting to an ever greater extent to countries that are hostile to the U.S.

So, Step 1 in the chain is to propose a solution:

1. The government should subsidize ethanol production to encourage production of home-grown fuels, which will enhance energy security and create jobs in the Midwest.

This is a guest post by Hans Noeldner.

OK, Oil Drummers, it's quiz question time.

Would it make sense to extract crude oil from asphalt? The process for extracting it from tar sands is, after all, very energy- and capital-intensive, not to mention the horrific environmental impact. Meanwhile Earth would be much improved if we-the-people replaced many of our biologically dead highways and parking lots with useful things like forests, wetlands, farms, gardens, and user-friendly habitation for homo pedestrianus. This would give us a lot of torn-up asphalt from which we could harvest energy…

Anyway, here are the quiz questions:

(1) On average, how many barrels of petroleum are there in a ton of asphalt? (Apparently there is about one barrel of oil in two tons of tar sands.)

(2) How many barrels of petroleum are used to asphalt binder per year in the USA? What about other binders like black liquor from papermaking?

(3) Considering highways and parking lots only, what is the total amount of asphalt binder in the USA?

(4) Is a significant percentage of this binder lost (via leaching and evaporation) as asphalt breaks down?

(5) Can the binders used in asphalt be cracked (or whatever) to make the usual range of refined petroleum products – particularly gasoline and diesel?

As I mentioned in my last post, this is the time for Seasonal travel, and so, for the first time it finds us, transiently, in Western Massachusetts. Picking up the local paper The Sunday Republican I discovered tht they are in the midst of a series on Energy in the 21st Century. The series began with an article on solar power , which was followed by one on nuclear power and then by one on the use of coal. The latest, which first caught my attention, is on power from water. There will be two more in the series, one next week on biofuels, and then one the following week on wind.

In addressing the supply side of oil and gas depletion, much hope has been put into the scaling of 'biofuels', by applying new (and old) technologies to annual crops to create ethanol or biodiesel, thus providing chemically viable alternatives to the transportation liquids derived from crude oil. Much of the biofuels debate thus far has focused on their lower energy balance, vis-a-vis crude oil. While this is important, analysis of the impacts on non-energy inputs and impacts should a massive scaling of biofuels occur, urgently needs to be discussed. The National Academy of Sciences recently published a report titled "Water Implications of Biofuel Production in the United States". The paper outlines impacts and limitations on both water availability and water quality that would follow the pursuit of a national strategy to replace liquid fossil fuels with those made from biomass.

Existing and planned ethanol facilities (2007) and their estimated total water use mapped
with the principal bedrock aquifers of the United States and total water use in year 2000.(Source USGS) Click to enlarge.

This is a guest post by GliderGuider. It is also available on the author's own website.

Throughout history, the expansion of human population has been supported by a steady growth in our use of high-quality exosomatic energy. The operation of our present industrial civilization is wholly dependent on access to a very large amount of energy of various types. If the availability of this energy were to decline significantly it could have serious repercussions for civilization and the human population it supports.

This paper constructs production models for the various energy sources we use and projects their likely supply evolution out to the year 2100. The full energy picture that emerges is then translated into a population model based on an estimate of changing average per-capita energy consumption over the century. Finally, the impact of ecological damage is added to the model to arrive at a final population estimate.

This model, known as the "World Energy and Population" model, or WEAP, suggests that the world's population will decline significantly over the course of the century.

This post is Robert Cialdini's testimony to the Subcommittee on Research and Science Education, House Committee on Science and Technology, on the topic of "The Contribution of the Social Sciences to the Energy Challenge," September 25, 2007. A link to the committee's session (which involved other prominent social scientists such as Dr. Robert Bordley, John "Skip" A. Laitner, Dr. Jerry Ellig, and Dr. Duane Wegener) can be found here.

I bring this to you for many reasons, but most of all to generate a discussion of extant social norms in the social scientific realm with regard to energy and environment as well as to generate a discussion about the state of our study of those norms. Plus, I just think loads of Bob Cialdini, who is Regents’ Professor of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University; Cialdini has written many important tomes on applied psychology, and I suggest you read as many of them as you can.

Abstract
Social norms, which refer to what most people do (descriptive social norms) and what most people approve (injunctive social norms), are remarkably powerful in directing human action. Social science research has uncovered the most successful ways to incorporate norms into messages designed to produce socially desirable conduct.

Studies in several environmental contexts (e.g., home energy conservation, household recycling, hotel conservation efforts) show that (1) energy users severely underestimate the role of social norms in guiding their energy usage, (2) communications that employ social norm-based appeals for pro-environmental behavior are superior to those that employ traditional persuasive appeals, and (3) even though these highly effective social norm-based appeals are nearly costless—requiring no large technological fixes, tax incentives, or regulatory changes—they are rarely (and sometimes mistakenly) delivered.

This is part 2 of a guest post by Chris Nelder. It was originally written for Friday's Energy and Capital.

This is a continuation of my previous article (Tar Sands: The Oil Junkie's Last Fix, Part 1) on the challenges facing the Canadian tar sands, in which we looked at the cost and financing issues. Today we look at water, energy, labour and the environment.

(See also the Finance Round-Up on TOD:Canada.)

Exploring for Oil in the Arctic's 'Great Frontier'

These days, the frontiers of oil exploration include the waters north of Alaska. Nobody knows how much energy is hidden beneath the Arctic waves. But oil companies want to find out.

A federal court blocked Royal Dutch Shell proposal to drill for oil in the Beaufort Sea, above Alaska's northern coast. But the company is still trying. And its story tells you a lot about the forces shaping the Arctic's future.

This summer, Shell assembled an entire fleet in an Alaskan harbor.

Crews were performing maintenance on a drill ship. It carries an oil derrick 190 feet high. That means it steams around with a tower taller than the Statue of Liberty, from its toes to its torch.

"This is the Frontier Discoverer. I would call it the state-of-the-art drilling rig, one of the very few that are capable of working in the Arctic today," says Vince Roes, who works on the ship, which has a reinforced hull.

"We stand, in most places on earth, only six inches from desolation, for that is the thickness of the topsoil layer upon which the entire life of the planet depends." R. Neil Sampson in Farmland or Wasteland: A Time to Choose

One of my interests, dating back 25 years to when I was a member of my local FFA land judging team, is soil conservation. I have long been interested in things like terra preta and composting because of their ability to build topsoil. But I never thought much about how difficult it can be to build up topsoil until I read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy - Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars (great books, by the way). The books trace a future hypothetical terraforming of Mars, and one of the major difficulties the characters face is producing topsoil on the planet. It was then that my interest in the mechanisms for topsoil erosion and topsoil production greatly increased.

As I continue to work on an Ethanol FAQ, I again wanted to solicit feedback from readers on the following question:

What about the environmental benefits of using ethanol as fuel?

The feedback I received on the previous posting on ethanol use and foreign oil displacement was very valuable in helping me to identify poorly communicated points, and make some key edits. I am hoping for the same kind of feedback on the present offering. I would also ask readers to take a look at the questions I have tackled in the FAQ, and let me know if there are glaring omissions, errors, typos, or items requiring additional clarification. I will continue to post some portions of the FAQ here for feedback, with the intent of posting a finished product within a month or so. And although it seems like all I have been posting on lately is ethanol, I don't expect that trend to continue following completion of the FAQ.