The Oil Drum

There were a couple of small Australian solar power projects that I left out of my look at solar thermal power a little while ago, as I thought they were worthy of separate consideration.

I talked about one of these - Wizard Power's technique for storing energy using ammonia - last week. The other project is by a company called Acquasol which is building a plant to desalinate water using solar thermal energy at Point Paterson, near Port Augusta in South Australia.

Like Wizard Power and Lloyd Energy's graphite based energy storage technique, Acquasol received an initial round of funding from the (now defunct) Australian Greenhouse Office's Advanced Energy Storage Technology program.

In this post I'll look at the Acquasol project and then more generally at water scarcity worldwide and some of the approaches being taken to tackle it.

Saudi Arabian cultivated fields as visible using Google Earth. Each circle is an irrigated area of about 1 km diameter. The whole square is about 10 km side. The coordinates are 26°47'21.64"N, 49°10'41.43"E.

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.

I was recently in a meeting with some State officials, and representatives of a large fossil energy supply company. The meeting was largely focused on State-centered efforts to increase the amount of renewable or sustainable energy. In the course of the discussion the company representatives raised the issue of water availability, and how this might impact some of the options. It is a subject that is starting to raise its head in more than just this type of discussion. If we look at the current drought status of the United States, for example.

The exceptional drought in the South East and the extreme drought in the South West are both evident. The growing impact of the sustained lack of water, or the need to provide water to an increasing number of people or a growing industrial base, from a fixed resource, is one that will have an impact that goes beyond just the immediate short term. And so, being curious, I looked at the major users of water, and what they did with it. And it was in this light that I then looked at one of the promising new technologies that Dave Rutledge had mentioned at the ASPO conference, the use of concentrated sun power (csp), and in the process I also looked at how they are handling process water in the oil sands of Alberta.

This is a guest post by WisdomfromPakistan. Wisdom is a computer engineer living and working in Karachi, a cultured city of some 20 million people. He has been conducting his own research into human nutritional requirements and the Earth's carrying capacity which he now wants to share with The Oil Drum readership.

As peak oil approaches, shortly followed by peak gas and eventually peak energy, we have to retreat to agriculture as the prime energy producer in society. Post-peak agriculture will be radically different to modern agriculture. Today’s agriculture is more an energy consumer than an energy producer. In developed countries it takes ten calories worth of energy from fossil fuels put into a farm in the form of fertilizers, pesticides and transportation fuel, to get one calorie back in the form of food (see also here and here).

Happy children fetching water

This is an Energy and Environment Round-Up by ilargi.

As the tar sands royalties soap drags on, and we do have links to some really good articles on the topic, from Nature.org, Mother Jones, and many others, still, how could we not open with climate change, two days after Al Gore and the IPCC won the first ever Climate Change Nobel Prize, and Sheila Watt-Cloutier and James Hansen did not?

Everything that the winners stand for is rendered obsolete in one broad stroke by the article from New Scientist that we open with below. And that is the problem: the people who do the frontline work are snubbed, while the late arrivals get decorated. Yes, Gore raises awareness. But awareness of what, exactly?

And that’s not the only issue: both winners stand out for being repeatedly, if not incessantly, wrong on what they claim to be experts in, only to be corrected time and again by those they beat out for the award. Yes, it’s done, we know, and maybe we should just lower our standards, like everyone else. Problem with that is, we don’t trust there’s time left for any standards other than the real ones.

In Alberta, the debate of the the tar sands royalty review is heating up. Major companies are threatening to pull investments in the province, while other point out that a peaking world offers them few other options. The environmental effects of large-scale bitumen mining, which are not considered often enough, are discussed in detail in journalist Willam Marsden's new book.

On the other side of the country, LNG shipments seem set to ignite a political row over safety in narrow shipping lanes. Nuclear appears to be approaching a revival, although cost is an issue. The effects of climate change are making themselves felt across the globe, notably in the Australia and in the Arctic, where Inuit climate change campaigner Sheila Watt-Cloutier could be about to share the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. (More under the fold!)

Macleans: Alberta stands accused
_{A huge fight between East and West -- over the oil sands -- is just starting}

Left unfettered, Alberta's energy sector will, by the end of this century, transform the southern part of the province into a desert and its north into a treeless, toxic swamp. Driven both by global warming and oil and gas developments, temperatures in Alberta will soar by as much as eight degrees. The Athabasca River will slow to a trickle, parching the remainder of the province's forests and encouraging them to burst into flame, generating vast quantities of CO2. "They're going to be the architects of their own destruction," says journalist William Marsden, whose new book outlines the environmental threats posed by Alberta's energy industry.

This is a guest post by Glenn Morton, a geophysicist in the oil industry. For Kerr-McGee Oil and Gas Corp., Glenn served as Geophysical Mgr Gulf of Mexico, Geophysical Mgr for the North Sea, Dir. of Technology and as Exploration Director of China. Currently he is an independent consulting geophysicist, and you might know him as seismobob.

I have intentionally paraphrased this wonderful Christmas song because it has much to say about the future after peak oil which I am now ready to say has already happened. As energy declines, we will indeed go to our grandmother's house--one without electricity and running water, sewer or septic and deep, mechanically pumped water wells. At least that was MY grandmother's house. She lived on the Kansas prairies of the 1890s. In the 1960s I asked my grandmother what the greatest invention of her life had been. She said electricity because before they had lights, everyone went to bed shortly after sun down because it was simply too dark to do to much. There was no air conditioning, so the summers were very hot. In the winter, trips to the outhouse were cold (and brutally awakening if during the middle of the night). While she had wood where she lived, about 100 miles west of her home, people had to burn dung as is done in Tibet today. See the picture below of the dung plastered against the house. When one wants to cook, one retrieves a patty.

Without cheap energy, we go back to my grandmother's house or one quite like it...

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.