February 05, 2012
Energy and Climate
There's an interesting guest post at Climate Etc. Curry comments: I‘m trying to remember if I've previously come across a more insightful and sensible essay on energy and climate policy, and I can't think of one. In reading it my reaction was ho-hum, and a tendency to skim looking for something interesting. It isn't exciting. It says nothing controversial IMV, but that's the point. It's sensible, which is uncommon. It notes that energy security policy and climate policy are separate things in spite of claims that they ought to be lumped together. In the United States and Canada, ensuring energy security for the next few decades at least will require that those countries continue to rely on their huge endowments of fossil fuels. For example, the World Energy Council estimates that the United States has around 30% of the world's known coal resources, which is more than any other country. They also estimate that Canada has more than 70%...
November 07, 2011
Solar Moore
Is the cost of solar coming down to the "too cheap to meter" level? What interested me more was the growing evidence that solar energy might be subject to a Moore’s Law rate of improvement. According to Ramez Naam in Scientific American, the cost of solar photovoltaic models has been falling at an exponential rate since 1980. Installation costs have been falling too. So much so, in fact, that in a decade, solar would outperform the average kilowatt energy cost in the US. A decade after that and it will be approaching the cheap baseload fuels. ... As I point out in a paper forthcoming in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, the two targets of environmental policy can conflict. First, if we push towards energy conservation in behaviour, innovations that encourage energy conservation are less valuable — that is, if you produce a technology that allows you to save $$ per KW on your electricity bill, your returns...
October 17, 2011
Low Energy
I've been arguing for years that we need more and cheaper energy, not more expensive and less available energy as the muddle minded greens and the misguided climate alarmists advocate. We can't deal with our problems without abundant and affordable energy. It is oil and energy consumption that produces real GDP and creates lasting wealth, not digital billions conjured out of thin air. ... It must surely be the extremely poor and highly misguided energy policies pursued by most OECD governments that are threatening economic growth and it is this economic stagnation that lies beneath nation's losing ability to service their debts. If we had strong economic growth, the extant debt problems would be less severe. Failure by OECD governments to recognize that it is growing supplies of cheap energy that have oiled the wheels of economic growth for decades lies at the heart of the problem. The notion that we can have an economy based on magic money...
October 15, 2011
Born Again
And again, and again ... Environmentalists get in the way. They often ask the right questions, but they’re chasing the wrong answers, often hypothetical or uneconomic solutions. Venture-capital firms invest in trends by projecting returns. But most projections are pretty much bogus, and research shows that experts are no better at predicting the future than dart-throwing monkeys. Big ideas are where real innovation is, and calculations are near impossible. We see returns as a side effect of bringing big ideas to market. ... Electric cars are coal-powered cars. Their carbon emissions can be worse than gasoline-powered cars. And today the Prius has a very expensive battery. Real change needs to meet the “Chindia price.” That’s the price at which people in India and China will use your product without subsidies. Unless your technology can achieve unsubsidized competitiveness against the market and fossil fuels, you’re just a toy. ... I’m very excited by biomass and biofuels. We have a company,...
October 15, 2011
Energy Future
Things keep changing. The impact of shale gas in America is already huge. Gas prices have decoupled from oil prices and are half what they are in Europe. Chemical companies, which use gas as a feedstock, are rushing back from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Mexico. Cities are converting their bus fleets to gas. Coal projects are being shelved; nuclear ones abandoned. ... Jesse Ausubel is a soft-spoken academic ecologist at Rockefeller University in New York, not given to hyperbole. So when I asked him about the future of gas, I was surprised by the strength of his reply. “It’s unstoppable,” he says simply. Gas, he says, will be the world’s dominant fuel for most of the next century. Coal and renewables will have to give way, while oil is used mainly for transport. Even nuclear may have to wait in the wings. And he is not even talking mainly about shale gas. He reckons a still...
August 19, 2011
Solar Hydrogen
One of the naive environmental myths is that nitrogen fertilizers are made from petroleum. Several earlier posts have debunked this myth. One of the ways to synthesize nitrogen fertilizer, the Haber process, uses hydrogen feedstock and the most common way to get hydrogen is the steam reforming of methane, CH4. Obviously, if hydrogen was available from other processes at an affordable price then no methane, of fossil origin or not, would be needed. Hydrogen can be made by electrolysis of water, H2O, but not affordably yet. The technologies are not yet mature. There may be a new method. Like other solar-based systems, the hybrid system begins with the collection of sunlight. Then things get different. While the hybrid device might look like a traditional solar collector from the distance, it is actually a series of copper tubes coated with a thin layer of aluminum and aluminum oxide and partly filled with catalytic nanoparticles. A combination of water and methanol...
August 18, 2011
Foreign Oil
Ours, that is. By the 2020s, the capital of energy will likely have shifted back to the Western Hemisphere, where it was prior to the ascendancy of Middle Eastern megasuppliers such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in the 1960s. The reasons for this shift are partly technological and partly political. Geologists have long known that the Americas are home to plentiful hydrocarbons trapped in hard-to-reach offshore deposits, on-land shale rock, oil sands, and heavy oil formations. The U.S. endowment of unconventional oil is more than 2 trillion barrels, with another 2.4 trillion in Canada and 2 trillion-plus in South America -- compared with conventional Middle Eastern and North African oil resources of 1.2 trillion. The problem was always how to unlock them economically. But since the early 2000s, the energy industry has largely solved that problem. With the help of horizontal drilling and other innovations, shale gas production in the United States has skyrocketed from virtually nothing to 15...
July 12, 2011
BioNonsense
As the harmfulness of current biofuel systems becomes more well known, the evasions and alternative ideas based on imagined future technologies increase. Growing perennial grasses on the least productive farmland now used for corn ethanol production in the U.S. would result in higher overall corn yields, more ethanol output per acre and better groundwater quality, researchers report in a new study. The switch would also slash emissions of two potent greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide. The study used a computer model of plant growth and soil chemistry to compare the ecological effects of growing corn (Zea mays L.); miscanthus (Miscanthus x giganteus), a sterile hybrid grass used in bioenergy production in Western Europe; and switchgrass (Panicum virgatum L.), which is native to the U.S. The analysis found that switching 30 percent of the least productive corn acres to miscanthus offered the most ecological advantages. ... "According to our model, just by making this replacement you convert that...
May 25, 2011
Renewable Superstition
It may be the most renewable resource of all. Last week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a thousand-page report on the future of renewable energy, which it defined as solar, hydro, wind, tidal, wave, geothermal and biomass. These energy sources, said the IPCC, generate about 13.8% of our energy and, if encouraged to grow, could eventually displace most fossil fuel use. It turns out that the great majority of this energy, 10.2% out of the 13.8% share, comes from biomass, mainly wood (often transformed into charcoal) and dung. Most of the rest is hydro; less than 0.5% of the world's energy comes from wind, tide, wave, solar and geothermal put together. Wood and dung are indeed renewable, in the sense that they reappear as fast as you use them. Or do they? It depends on how fast you use them. One of the greatest threats to rain forests is the cutting of wood for fuel by impoverished...
May 21, 2011
Oleaginous Rant
On this day of apocalypse not-now, see an entertaining rant about Hubbert's pique. Exhaustionists [are] out in full force, each plaintively wailing of the dangers of Peak Oil (as well as Peak Copper, Peak Corn, etc.—though never, thankfully, Peek Freans). As is always the case at such times, the name of M. King Hubbert has been given a great deal of air, as if the old rhetorical trick of argumentum ad verecundiam should be decisive in this matter. Yes, to give this particular devil his due, he did accurately predict that US onshore oil production would top out in the late 60s/early70s, so assuring his prophethood for ever, especially since the validity of the estimate became recognised amid the traumas caused by the first Oil Shock. His other glances in the crystal ball have, alas, not borne out quite so well, however. World oil production was to reach its apex in 1995, he foretold in 1974: so far he...
May 03, 2011
Agrofuels
The problems caused by ethanol mandates have been in the news a lot lately since food prices have gone so high and reserves have fallen so low. Biofuels policies in the US and the European Union have led to the creation of biofuels industries with significant output capacity – mainly ethanol in the US and biodiesel in the EU. In the US, government policy mandates 48 billion liters of ethanol in 2011. Production capacity already exceeds that level. Since this quantity is required by the government to be blended with gasoline, regardless of the price of ethanol, corn, or gasoline, the demand that it creates for corn is not at all responsive to the price of corn. In economic terms, such demand is highly “inelastic”: the mandate must be met at any price. That is the situation in which we now find ourselves, at least in the short run. The added inflexibility (or inelasticity) amplifies the price response to...
April 28, 2011
Peak Nonsense
It's not news that much of the politicized crap about peak this and that is based on the flimsiest sort of evidence that is at best questionable and old, and that it utterly denies contrary evidence as it continuously is found. The rare earths issue is a classic example in that they are not all all rare; it is the mines to extract and purify the ores that are rare, and that is only because they are not in high demand or cheap to refine. There's little profit in them but if there was, when there is, profits to be made then competitive mines and refineries will blossom. Another one that we have begun to hear about is peak phosphorus, though there is no peak immanent. Most of the phosphorus for the production of fertilisers is mined. At today’s volumes, the known reserves will eventually run out, and so the term ‘peak phosphorus’ was coined in 2007. As with...
March 26, 2011
Going Nuclear
In an update to an earlier post discussing nuclear power generation in the context of the Japanese quake and tsunami a Guardian article by Monbiot was cited in which he changed his position to now support nuclear power, arguing that the facilities, though plagued by all of the common defects in implementation and operation, had demonstrated that nuclear wasn't especially dangerous compared to all other choices. I wondered, given the Moonbat track record, if this should be seen as a contrary indicator. I'm not the only one who had that thought. As a general rule, if George Monbiot agrees with you, start worrying you may be wrong. ... Actually my doubts about nuclear power came before the Fukushima crisis, which has indeed reaffirmed the low risks involved in nuclear power. ... a perceptive article by Shikha Dalmia explains where nuclear's flaws come from -- its symbiotic relationship with government. Nuclear power requires, demands and gets subsidies of many different...
March 20, 2011
Backsliding
A current thread of popular concern is nuclear power. An increasing number of thoughtless opponents had been slowly and grudgingly changing their views as they became more aware of the silliness of "alternative" energy schemes and the irrationality of emissions controls as a response to rising GHG concentrations. Then the tsunami hit. The devastation was cruel yet photogenic, and was exploited by the legacy media for profit and to advance their inimical agenda. Now the anti-nukers have been re-energized. Many of the greens who had cautiously begun to champion nuclear on the ground that its no-carbon virtues outweighed its cancer risk will now find opportunistic opposition to nuclear projects irresistible again. ... Yet safety is not nuclear’s real problem: economics is. Even if it were to get as bad as Chernobyl (which it won’t), Fukushima will kill few people, raise cancer rates only slightly and cause no birth defects. Compared with coal, oil, gas and biofuels, nuclear energy is...
March 09, 2011
Prestige
Continuing the ideas from the previous post that national energy policies are nonsensical, especially the idea of increased funding to spur innovation. academics don’t study topics because they are important; they study topics to gain prestige, by being certified as mastering impressive techniques. Sure, all else equal it can help to write about an important topic. (At least if you avoid taking on a topic too big for your status – big grand overviews and contrarian jabs tend to be reserved for senior folk.) But academics usually aren’t rewarded enough for the added effort to figure out what topics are actually important. So they might as well just do what others say is important. This doesn't mean that academics have no idea what is important, just that they won't work on such things. Too risky. That goes doubly if it is the government with a fat wallet that is saying what's important, no matter whether it is so or...
March 07, 2011
Poor Tools
Authoritarians seem to have a childish notion of government-as-parent, a first resort and last resort universal solvent for every problem. That this is silly, and that the kinds of fixes that governments can implement seldom help and often hurt is ignored. nobody is opposed to cheap, clean, domestically-produced energy. But the political attempt to provide it will only result in expensive energy, with unseen environmental costs (biofuels), and increases in budget deficits that will harm, rather than enhance, America's strategic position. The Department of Energy was established during the Carter Administration. As far as I know, no one has ever suggested that we have benefited from its existence. The other night, Ron Bailey pointed out that its original goal was "synfuels," which not only were ridiculously expensive but would have greatly increased the carbon emissions of our transportation system. Still, if you suggest that America should not have an energy policy, everybody other than a hardcore libertarian will dismiss...
February 26, 2011
Squandered Energy
A large share of the electrical energy generated is lost in transmission and conversion. Perhaps conversion losses can be hugely reduced. Transphorm claims 90 per cent more efficient alternate to direct current conversion which could improve energy efficiency and reduce overall energy consumption by 10% ... Power conversion works via rapidly switching circuits, which enable the transformation of electricity from one form to another. Transphorm's efficiency breakthrough comes in the form of a revolutionary material known as Gallium Nitride, or "GaN", which switches at far higher frequencies than traditional components. This superior material, coupled with innovative circuit design, enables the world's most efficient, most compact, and most cost-effective power conversion technology. Computing will be one of the beneficiaries, and the company plans to market its products initially to large data centers. Not surprisingly, Google Ventures is a lead funder....
February 03, 2011
Hydrogen
The excitement about technologies that generate and use hydrogen as a transportation fuel has quieted, funding for research is an on again off again thing, but there are still relevant discoveries being made. Researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a biohybrid photoconversion system -- based on the interaction of photosynthetic plant proteins with synthetic polymers -- that can convert visible light into hydrogen fuel. Is this a new twist on solar energy, or perhaps a very old twist? Photosynthesis, the natural process carried out by plants, algae and some bacterial species, converts sunlight energy into chemical energy and sustains much of the life on earth. Researchers have long sought inspiration from photosynthesis to develop new materials to harness the sun's energy for electricity and fuel production. In a step toward synthetic solar conversion systems, the ORNL researchers have demonstrated and confirmed with small-angle neutron scattering analysis that light harvesting complex II (LHC-II) proteins...
January 28, 2011
Green Gas
There has been a lot of talk on the gasification lists lately prompted by the failure of a major player. "Cellulosic ethanol company Range Fuels is closing its Soperton, Georgia facility after completing it first batch of ethanol, according to story posted by Georgia Public Broadcasting. The firm, which has received more than $300 million dollars in state, federal and private funding, will lay off the majority of its workers and shutter operations, while it attempts to raise more money and address technical issues." The insider's chatter is that the technology is flawed and that raising more money will just prolong the agony. What has them even more upset is that this isn't unusual. One commenter compiled this partial list of squandered funding. Occidental's flash pyrolysis unit in Sad Diego: $100mm Britestar/EDL pyrolysis unit in Australia: $200mm Range Fuels: $300mm Molten Metals: $90mm(mostly DOE earmarked funds) Hawaii IGT/EPRI/Westinghouse/HPL/ gasification unit: $30-50mm? Battelle's dual fluidized bed gasification system: $60mm? Thermoselect's...
January 27, 2011
Microbial Consortia
I've commented many times in the past about the dominance of ruminants in natural environments due to their superb digestive systems which allow them to thrive on forage that other species can't use. Humans have observed this for eons in disparate cultures and often held ruminants in awe and based their civilizations on them. See a very old post, Golden Calves, for some examples. The Avars had been dominant in Mongolia, hundreds of miles north of China, but by the mid sixth century had been driven from the area by the Turks, a mountain people long dominated by the Avars. The Avars fled west toward Constantinople and warmer climes where their superior horsemanship gave them an edge over the weakened Romans. What allowed the Turks to rise up against the Avars and force them west and so bring down the remnants of Rome? Keys speculates that it was that same volcanic winter that devastated Constantinople. What interests me about...
January 20, 2011
Resource Discovery II
The idea from Cleaner Exhaust of reacting CO2 in exhaust streams with calcium to mineralize and sequester it, if complete, is a zero carbon solution, but we might be able to do even better. By using a solar cavity-receiver reactor, we combined the oxygen uptake and release capacity of cerium oxide and facile catalysis at elevated temperatures to thermochemically dissociate CO2 and H2O, yielding CO and H2, respectively. Stable and rapid generation of fuel was demonstrated over 500 cycles. Solar-to-fuel efficiencies of 0.7 to 0.8% were achieved and shown to be largely limited by the system scale and design rather than by chemistry. More In the short term, Haile and her colleagues plan to tinker with the ceria formulation so that the reaction temperature can be lowered, and to re-engineer the reactor, to improve its efficiency. Currently, the system harnesses less than 1% of the solar energy it receives, with most of the energy lost as heat through the...
January 19, 2011
Cleaner Exhaust
Perhaps. Using seawater and calcium to remove carbon dioxide (CO2) in a natural gas power plant's flue stream, and then pumping the resulting calcium bicarbonate in the sea, could be beneficial to the oceans' marine life. ... Rau found that the scrubber removed up to 97 percent of CO2 in a simulated flue gas stream, with a large fraction of the carbon ultimately converted to dissolved calcium bicarbonate. At scale, the process would hydrate the carbon dioxide in power plant flue gas with water to produce a carbonic acid solution. This solution would then be reacted with limestone, neutralizing the carbon dioxide by converting it to calcium bicarbonate — and then would be released into the ocean. While this process occurs naturally (carbonate weathering), it is much less efficient, and at a much slower pace to be effective. "The experiment in effect mimics and speeds up nature's own process," said Rau. "Given enough time, carbonate mineral (limestone) weathering will...
January 18, 2011
Resource Discovery
One of the ideas of resource optimists is that things that are now considered to be wastes or useless materials will increasingly be recognized to be resources, and so avoid the predicted peak-whatever scenarios so beloved by pessimists. One of the underutilized resources that has intrigued me over the years is heat. We are bathed in heat. It comes to us from space, it wells up from the core of the earth, and we release it from chemical and nuclear materials for our energy purposes. Among the methods discussed for utilizing such "waste" heat have been geothermal systems and CHP (combined heat and power) systems fired any number of ways but especially by biomass leaving a biochar residual. All of these systems can be more efficient when thermoelectric technologies are developed and used since they directly convert heat to electricity. The problem has been that the efficiency of current thermoelectric systems are low. That may be changing. Researchers at...
November 17, 2010
Biomass Coal
It's a strange thing to call charcoal, but it's just one of many newspeak terms used to dance around the simple and well understood term charcoal. It's been called biochar, agrichar and manmade coal too. Since all coal is biomass coal this particular term is idiotic as well as inexplicably deceptive. The circumlocutions do not seem to be deterring a growing number of start up producers. GE Energy Financial Services and North Bridge Venture Partners will invest $8 million in a company developing a biofuel production process coupled with the production of biochar. Cool Planet Biofuels converts cellulosic byproducts like plant waste and woodchips into biofuel that can be used in vehicles. The company's byproduct from the process is biochar, or manmade coal as some call it, which just like conventional charcoal can be burned for fuel. It's something the company says qualifies its biofuel process as being carbon neutral. The biochar can also be buried in the ground...
October 13, 2010
Minitel Rose
One of the semi-interesting side shows in the current US political circus involves political machines of the right allying with those of the left to fend off challenges from outside the ruling class. The important thing for both sides of that bent coin is to maintain their control. It is a single party with two factions whose differences are minor compared to their differences with the rest of society. For example: This white paper is the product of a more than yearlong dialogue between scholars at three think tanks situated at divergent points on the political compass. Drawing on America’s bipartisan history of successful federal investment to catalyze technology innovation by the U.S. military, universities, private corporations, and entrepreneurs, the heart of this proposal is a $25 billion per year investment channeled through a reformed energy innovation system. ... To accelerate energy innovation and modernization, we propose a role for government that is both limited and direct. It is...
October 05, 2010
Heat Mining
Again. This was a semi-exciting idea a few years ago. There has been some discouragement in the field in failed attempts to implement systems, but it is evidently still being pursued. The SMU Geothermal Laboratory has increased its estimate of West Virginia's geothermal generation potential to 18,890 megawatts (assuming a conservative two percent thermal recovery rate). The new estimate represents a 75 percent increase over estimates in MIT's 2006 "The Future of Geothermal Energy" report and exceeds the state's total current generating capacity, primarily coal based, of 16,350 megawatts. ... Three non-conventional geothermal resources that can be developed in areas with little or no tectonic activity or volcanism such as West Virginia are: Low-Temperature Hydrothermal – Energy is produced from areas with naturally occurring high fluid volumes at temperatures ranging from 80°C (165°F) to 150°C (300°F) using advanced binary cycle technology. Low-Temperature systems have been developed in Alaska, Oregon, and Utah. Geopressure and Co-produced Fluids Geothermal – Oil and/or...
September 30, 2010
Quantum Thermoelectric
Continuing my fascination with thermoelectric technologies. See Figure Of Merit for an earlier discussion of a breakthrough with silicon nanowires, and new work using polyphenyl ethers. Bergfield and Stafford discovered the potential for converting heat into electricity when they studied polyphenyl ethers, molecules that spontaneously aggregate into polymers, long chains of repeating units. The backbone of each polyphenyl ether molecule consists of a chain of benzene rings, which in turn are built from carbon atoms. The chain link structure of each molecule acts as a "molecular wire" through which electrons can travel. . . The secret to the molecules' capability to turn heat into power lies in their structure: Like water reaching a fork in a river, the flow of electrons along the molecule is split in two once it encounters a benzene ring, with one flow of electrons following along each arm of the ring. Bergfield designed the benzene ring circuit in such a way that in one...
June 16, 2010
Energy Muddle
Consider this previously quoted comment: The problem was, Obama and Salazar were more interested in pursuing their vision of a clean energy future. Under Obama, the Minerals Management Service, driven by a strongly ideological commitment to green energy sources such as wind and solar power, chose to stress "renewables" while de-emphasizing the tough and dirty work of managing the nation's existing offshore oil wells. . . And this one too: The fact that the international process is going nowhere fast and the US is not going to cap emissions is not news to anyone who has been paying attention. Then read this: Most important, nowhere did the president mention two hard ideas that the public must accept if we are to move to a cleaner energy future: nuclear power and carbon taxes. . . The oil spill isn’t really a new event. It’s simply another reminder that not all of the costs of oil are reflected in the price;...
June 04, 2010
Black Lagoon
I noticed a few headlines proclaiming that the gulf oil spill wasn't really such a big deal in the great scheme of things. I didn't read any of them and so can't give details of their reasoning, but this may be part of it. more oil is spilled from the [Niger] delta's network of terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico, the site of a major ecological catastrophe caused by oil that has poured from a leak triggered by the explosion that wrecked BP's Deepwater Horizon rig last month. . . With 606 oilfields, the Niger delta supplies 40% of all the crude the United States imports and is the world capital of oil pollution. . . "If this Gulf accident had happened in Nigeria, neither the government nor the company would have paid much attention," said the writer Ben Ikari, a member of the Ogoni people. "This...
May 21, 2010
KI4S
Mini-nukes are in the news again. Manufacturers of refrigerator-sized nuclear reactors will seek approval from U.S. authorities within a year to help supply the world’s growing electricity demand. . . “A 25-megawatt plant would put electricity into 20,000 homes, and it would fit inside this room,” James Kohlhaas, vice president at a Lockheed Martin Corp. unit that builds power systems for remote military bases, said in an interview. “It’s a pretty elegant micro-grid solution.” . . . So far, no manufacturer has sought certification for any small reactor, according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Formal approvals would probably take three to five years, the same as for bigger reactors, said Scott Burnell, a spokesman for the commission. Small reactors have been used in U.S. submarines since the USS Nautilus was commissioned in 1954. . . Toshiba, based in Tokyo, is working on reactors that would produce 10 megawatts and 50 megawatts, called 4S for “super- safe, small and...
May 09, 2010
Charged Up
Wind electric systems have been a disappointment. The problem - aside from the ugliness, noise and general aesthetic faults - is that the wind happens far away from where the energy is needed. Believers lobby for convoluted schemes to take over power grids and manage them to compensate for the weakness of wind as an energy system - at huge expense as well as increased fragility - but there are other options. these researchers and entrepreneurs would like to store surplus electricity – such as from wind power or solar energy – as climate-neutral methane, and store it in existing gas storage facilities and the natural gas network. Throughout the world, electricity generation is based more and more on wind and solar energy. So far, the missing link for integrating renewable energy into the electricity supply is a smart power storage concept. Because when the wind is blowing powerfully, wind turbines generate more electricity than the power grid can...
April 24, 2010
Energy Bunnies
This is how business colludes with government to exploit society's concerns. despite talk about the need for "21st-century" energy sources, federal spending on clean energy research -- less than $3 billion -- is also relatively small. Compare that with roughly $30 billion that the U.S. government annually spends on health research and $80 billion on defense research and development. . . We need a vigorous strategy to invent our future and ensure its safety and prosperity. In the realm of energy, as with medicine and national defense, that requires a public commitment. Why can't the private sector do this? What makes energy different from, say, electronics? Three things. First, there are profound public interests in having more energy options. Our national security, economic health and environment are at issue. These are not primary motivations for private-sector investments, but they merit a public commitment. Second, the nature of the energy business requires a public commitment. A new generation of television...
December 15, 2009
Fatal Flaw
A list entry pointed out this biofuel site, Planet Power, that makes a nuanced case for the production and use of biofuels. Most of the criticisms of biofuels are acknowledged and addressed at least in part. It makes informed and sometimes compelling arguments for biofuels. But the whole argument depends on a key assumption: In determining the value of renewable energy sources, a key question must always be: What does a specific technology option displace on the integrated grid? To answer this question, one must understand "basic terms" of (1) base load, (2) intermediate load, and (3) peaking load generating options. Because of availability (number of hours and when the sun shines or the wind blows), solar and wind options are typically considered either intermediate or peaking technologies on an integrated resource grid. As such, wind and solar options will displace primarily natural gas generating units (where natural gas is by far the cleanest of fossil fuels compared to...
December 10, 2009
Fuel Factories
One of the tech threads I've been following is the engineering of photosynthesizing organisms that produce liquid fuels. This isn't the clumsy sort of biofuel we've heard so much of, and laughed so hard about, where stuff is grown, harvested, transported, and then stewed in some manner to produce a poor substitute for gasoline or diesel. Rather, the microorganisms excrete the fuel and keep growing. One reference was a brief chat with J. Craig Venter, the fellow who broke the bureaucratic logjams on genomics. We're using a unique type of algae that we've genetically engineered to turn sunlight and CO2 into C8 and C10 and larger lipids. . . Because we actually have to feed them concentrated CO2, we can take CO2 streams from power plants, cement plants and other places. People view CO2 as a contaminant—they want to bury it in the ground or pump it into wells to hide or sequester it. We want to take all...
November 24, 2009
Reverse-Combustion
With energy we will mine the atmosphere rather than the soil. Researchers still have to improve the efficiency of the system, but they recently demonstrated a working prototype of their "Sunshine to Petrol" machine that converts waste CO2 to carbon monoxide, and then syngas, consuming nothing but solar energy. The device, boasting the simple title Counter-Rotating-Ring Receiver Reactor Recuperator (we'll go with "CR5") sets off a thermo-chemical reaction by exposing an iron-rich composite to concentrated solar heat. The composite sheds an oxygen molecule when heated and gets one back as it cools, and therein lies the eureka. The cylindrical metal CR5 is divided into hot and cold chambers. Solar energy heats the hot chamber to a scorching 2,700 degrees, hot enough to force the iron oxide composite to lose oxygen atoms. The composite is then thrust into the cool chamber, which is filled with carbon dioxide. As it cools, the iron oxide snatches back its lost oxygen atoms, leaving...
November 24, 2009
Stover Wood
I'm surprised anymore to read some press release that mentions climate related matters that is not just silly. Researchers worldwide are trying to economically convert cellulosic biomass such as corn stover into "cellulosic ethanol." But Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists have found that it might be more cost-effective, energy-efficient and environmentally sustainable to use corn stover for generating an energy-rich oil called bio-oil and for making biochar to enrich soils and sequester carbon. Stover is made up of the leaves, husks, cobs and stalks of the corn plant, and could provide an abundant source of feedstock for cellulosic ethanol production after the grain is harvested. But removing stover from the field would leave soil more vulnerable to erosion, deplete plant nutrients and accelerate the loss of soil organic matter. . . . . . it could be more cost-effective to produce bio-oil through a distributed network of small pyrolyzers and then transport the crude bio-oil to central refining plants...
November 04, 2009
Hot Donuts
Dare I say it? Rule the world! For high reliability, a tokamak needs to sustain the hot and dense plasma for as long as possible. Recent work has shown that tokamak plasmas can be induced to exhibit the following relationships: higher pressure => more self-generated electrical currents that help control the plasma => less reliance on external controls => longer pulse (including potentially steady-state) operation => higher reliability. After decades of effort to improve the behavior and output of fusion plasmas, scientists are discovering that nature may actually be so kind as to simultaneously allow high performance (lots of electricity!), optimal efficiency (affordable!), and high reliability (the electrical outlet will always work!) in the design of future power plants. I'd be happy to see even one commercial fusion plant....
October 24, 2009
More Frakonomics
I know, I said that you had likely already heard more than enough about this elsewhere, but this is good. One of the saddest things for me about climate science is how political it has become. Science works by having an open dialog that ultimately converges on the truth, for the common benefit of everyone. Most scientific fields enjoy this free flow of ideas. There are serious scientific and technological issues in studying our climate, how it responds to human-caused emission of greenhouse gases, and what the most effective solutions will be for global warming. But unfortunately, the policy implications are vast and there is a lot at stake in economic terms. It seems inevitable that discussions of climate science would degenerate to being deeply politicized and polarized. Depending on which views are adopted, individuals, industries, and countries will gain or lose, which provides ample motive. Once people with a strong political or ideological bent latch onto an issue,...
October 17, 2009
Laughing Gas
How big is it? Experts now believe that the country has far more natural gas at its disposal than anyone thought three or four years ago. The revised estimates are largely due to advanced drilling techniques that make it economically feasible to extract the fuel from shale. And while the Marcellus [shale formation] is the most recently discovered and possibly the largest shale-gas deposit, others are scattered throughout the country. The U.S. consumes about 23 trillion cubic feet (TCF) of natural gas a year, according to the Department of Energy's Energy Information Agency (EIA). The Potential Gas Committee (PGC), an organization headquartered at the Colorado School of Mines, put the country's potential natural-gas resources at 1,836 TCF in a biennial assessment released in June. That's 39 percent higher than its estimate of two years earlier. Add to that the 238 TCF that the EIA has calculated in "proved reserves" (the gas that can be produced given existing economic conditions)...
October 14, 2009
Rare Good Sense
With all the bleating about methane emissions and hare-brained schemes to reduce them the main anthropogenic sources of methane have been largely ignored. To the naked eye, there was nothing to be seen at a natural gas well in eastern Texas but beige pipes and tanks baking in the sun. But in the viewfinder of Terry Gosney’s infrared camera, three black plumes of gas gushed through leaks that were otherwise invisible. “Holy smoke, it’s blowing like mad,” said Mr. Gosney, an environmental field coordinator for EnCana, the Canadian gas producer that operates the year-old well near Franklin, Tex. . . Within a few days the leaks had been sealed by workers. Efforts like EnCana’s save energy and money. . . some three trillion cubic feet of methane leak into the air every year, with Russia and the United States the leading sources, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s official estimate. (This amount has the warming power of emissions from...
September 11, 2009
Peak Hype
What if fossil fuels were being continuously generated without fossils? Researchers at KTH have been able to prove that the fossils of animals and plants are not necessary to generate raw oil and natural gas. This result is extremely radical as it means that it will be much easier to find these energy sources and that they may be located all over the world. . . Together with two research colleagues, Professor Kutcherov has simulated the process of pressure and heat that occurs naturally in the inner strata of the earth’s crust. This process generates hydrocarbons, the primary elements of oil and natural gas. According to Vladimir Kutcherov, these results are a clear indication that oil supplies are not drying up, which has long been feared by researchers and experts in the field. . . “There is no doubt that our research has shown that raw oil and natural gas occur without the inclusion of fossils. All types of...
August 09, 2009
Anomalous Hydrogen
I wish that I understood this. Hidden inside the volcanic-like ash, piling up below Verde Reformation's low temperature gasifier, we have managed to isolate and control, an extremely productive and sustainable "anomaly", capable of producing large quantities of hydrogen along with the most popular industrial, 'heavy' processing oils. A chain of multiple inter-related reactions are at work, exchanging energy and matter that in turn, produce the large quantities of concentrated hydrogen (up to 5 times more efficiently). It starts with the reactions between the electrical nature of non-organic micro- pyrolytic minerals (found in all low termperature biomass ash, in a non-fused state) consisting of iron, magnesium, silicates, phosphorus, sodium, potassium, etc., that creates a reaction across the electrons of carbon in the ash, that in turn, heats up further till we stablized the reaction, that strips loose hydrogen ions from water primarily. Somehow, what began as an increasingly common low temperature pyrolysis system that produced gases which could be...
July 28, 2009
Photobioreactor
We've heard about synthetic trees designed to capture CO2 from the air so that it can be stored somewhere, and we've dreamed of synthetic organisms that would poop gasoline (BTW, that old post is a perennial high hitter that may be worth a read), and now we have something in a similar vein. A startup based in Cambridge, MA--Joule Biotechnologies--today revealed details of a process that it says can make 20,000 gallons of biofuel per acre per year. If this yield proves realistic, it could make it practical to replace all fossil fuels used for transportation with biofuels. The company also claims that the fuel can be sold for prices competitive with fossil fuels. Joule Biotechnologies grows genetically engineered microorganisms in specially designed photobioreactors. The microorganisms use energy from the sun to convert carbon dioxide and water into ethanol or hydrocarbon fuels (such as diesel or components of gasoline). The organisms excrete the fuel, which can then be collected...
July 12, 2009
Home Cooking
Consider using producer gas from pyrolysis in a fuel cell. Traditional electricity generation is inherently wasteful. More than half the energy content of the fuel escapes from the power station's cooling tower as waste heat. In addition, more than 5% of the electricity generated is lost in transmission in the journey from grid to end user. An alternative approach is to generate electricity within homes and commercial buildings using a device called a fuel cell – essentially a large battery with a replenishable fuel source. In Manchester, Mike Mason advocated fuel cells that use solid-oxide technology. These can run on natural gas, ethanol or various other fuels, including the gases produced when making biochar. Mason described domestic fuel cells that can produce electricity from gas more efficiently than even the best modern power stations – and at a lower cost. As a bonus, because the generation happens at the point of consumption, transmission losses are minimised and any heat...
June 24, 2009
Flows
A couple of years ago there was a flurry of interest in hydrothermal carbonisation, another way to make char from biomass. Earlier we referred to carbon-negative energy systems that rely on gasification and biochar sequestration: biomass is gasified which results in a carbon monoxide and hydrogen rich gas that can be used for energy or transformed into ultra-clean synthetic biofuels via the Fischer-Tropsch process, whereas a fraction becomes bio-char that can be stored in soils (using a technique known as 'terra preta'). Similar techniques can be build around pyrolysis processes (earlier post). In such systems, soil fertility would be gradually enhanced, 'historic' CO2 would be sequestered and clean biofuels could be used to power our societies. Only biomass can be used for the creation of such carbon-negative energy systems that clean up our emissions from the past. Other renewables are carbon-neutral at best, meaning they can only reduce future CO2 emissions - something many scientists think is not enough...
June 01, 2009
Carbon Complex
One of my mudges is that various species of enviro-climate dark siders each have tunnel vision for the form of carbon about which they are obsessing, either fossil or organic, i.e. not fossil yet, still in the working set. Nothing useful can be proposed without looking at all forms in this system. All the carbon counts: Cutting down forests for agriculture vents excess carbon dioxide into the air just as industrial activities and the burning of fossil fuels do. But whether policies to stabilize greenhouse gases in the atmosphere should include this terrestrial source of carbon dioxide is under debate. According to a new study this week in Science, failing to include land use changes in such policies could lead to massive deforestation and higher costs for limiting carbon emissions. . . For this study, the researchers set the highest concentration that carbon dioxide could reach. Then they compared two ways to stay within that limit: in one, they...
June 01, 2009
Better Bulbs
Really. "We've been experimenting with the way ultra-fast lasers change metals, and we wondered what would happen if we trained the laser on a filament," says Chunlei Guo, associate professor of optics at the University of Rochester. "We fired the laser beam right through the glass of the bulb and altered a small area on the filament. When we lit the bulb, we could actually see this one patch was clearly brighter than the rest of the filament, but there was no change in the bulb's energy usage." The key to creating the super-filament is an ultra-brief, ultra-intense beam of light called a femtosecond laser pulse. . . That intense blast forces the surface of the metal to form nanostructures and microstructures that dramatically alter how efficiently can radiate from the filament. In addition to increasing the brightness of a bulb, Guo's process can be used to tune the color of the light as well. . .Though Guo cannot...
May 08, 2009
Bio-Bubble
A long standing criticism of airy-fairy biomass schemes has been that there isn't enough to go around, which means that there will be competition for the meager supply, and that it will thus be used for purposes that have the highest value. Raising the cost of energy with poorly reasoned regulatory hacks assures that the highest value will be energy production rather than soil management or even food. Dumb, that. Some are now catching on. Biochar advocates are finally grasping that their dreams of mass production of charcoal for soil improvement - or even just long term storage in the sea or in deep holes in the earth as a climate mitigation hack - are unlikely since charcoal is a near-equivalent to coal and can be used as a substitute for coal in power plants to generate electricity. This is both a more efficient and more valuable use of biomass than production of liquid fuels - ethanol. As noted...
April 14, 2009
Pond Scum
A lot of articles have been written and published that select a few factors relevant to climate and then do some number crunching to support a preconceived notion. It's like political economics where ways are sought to make a desired policy add up. It never works out as predicted, but accurate prediction isn't the point. For example: A new study finds that it will take more than 75 years for the carbon emissions saved through the use of biofuels to compensate for the carbon lost when biofuel plantations are established on forestlands. If the original habitat was peatland, carbon balance would take more than 600 years. . . Conversion of forest to oil palm also results in significant impoverishment of both plant and animal communities. Other tropical crops suitable for biofuel use, like soybean, sugar cane and jatropha, are all likely to have similar impacts on climate and biodiversity. "Biofuels are a bad deal for forests, wildlife and the...
April 08, 2009
Stone Tools
Or perhaps bone tools is a better characterization. "Dye-sensitized solar cells already exist," Rorrer said. "What's different in our approach are the steps we take to make these devices, and the potential improvements they offer." The new system is based on living diatoms, which are extremely small, single-celled algae, which already have shells with the nanostructure that is needed. They are allowed to settle on a transparent conductive glass surface, and then the living organic material is removed, leaving behind the tiny skeletons of the diatoms to form a template. A biological agent is then used to precipitate soluble titanium into very tiny "nanoparticles" of titanium dioxide, creating a thin film that acts as the semiconductor for the dye-sensitized solar cell device. Steps that had been difficult to accomplish with conventional methods have been made easy through the use of these natural biological systems, using simple and inexpensive materials. "Conventional thin-film, photo-synthesizing dyes also take photons from sunlight and...
April 06, 2009
Heat and Light
And, hydrogen and oxygen. Although there has been significant progress towards the understanding of photosynthesis, just how this system functions remains unclear; vast worldwide efforts have been devoted to the development of artificial photosynthetic systems based on metal complexes that serve as catalysts, with little success. . . The new approach that the Weizmann team has recently devised is divided into a sequence of reactions, which leads to the liberation of hydrogen and oxygen in consecutive thermal- and light-driven steps, mediated by a unique ingredient – a special metal complex that Milstein's team designed in previous studies. Moreover, the one that they designed – a metal complex of the element ruthenium – is a 'smart' complex in which the metal center and the organic part attached to it cooperate in the cleavage of the water molecule. The team found that upon mixing this complex with water the bonds between the hydrogen and oxygen atoms break, with one hydrogen atom...
April 01, 2009
Energy Storage
There are a variety of schemes for using electricity from intermittent sources. They usually end up being convoluted contraptions that have dual power systems - one for use when the sun shines (or wind blows or whatever) and another for use at other (most?) times. One ot the sillier ones I've heard of burns biomass part time and captures sunlight at others. I've argued that a more appropriate use for intermittent power would be for interruptible applications, for example using remote wind and solar systems to produce hydrogen through electrolysis. There seems to be a better way. "We were studying making hydrogen in microbial electrolysis cells and we kept getting all this methane," . . . Microbial electrolysis cells do require an electrical voltage to be added to the voltage that is produced by bacteria using organic materials to produce current that evolves into hydrogen. The researchers found that the Archaea, using about the same electrical input, could use...
March 31, 2009
Zettaflop Computing
The previous post ended with an oblique reference to postbiological humans that only require energy rather than material inputs (after manufacture, assuming little need for repair, etc.) Some calcs about calcs for non-carbon based minds. How efficient could a postbiological civilization be? The current IBM roadrunner does 376 million calculations per watts. If we take my mid-range estimates of computing needs, 10^22 to 10^25 FLOPS, then a single emulation would need 10^13 to 10^16 watts. The total insolation of Earth is about 10^17 watts, so this won't do - there would be space for just a few minds on the entire planet. But current research on zettaflops computing suggest we can do much better. A DARPA exascale study suggests we can do 10^12 flops per watt, which means "just" a dozen Hoover dams per mind. Quantum dot cellular automata could give 10^19 flops per watt, putting the energy needs at 200-2000 watts. That is between 2 and 20 times...
March 21, 2009
Nano-logisms
Philip Small, formerly of Transect Points, seems to have completed his migration to his new weblog at the National Society of Consulting Soil Scientists site. His most recent post links this fascinating paper: Source of Sustained Voltage Difference between the Xylem of a Potted Ficus benjamina Tree and Its Soil which investigates the sustained electrical potential difference between the xylem of many plants, such as trees, and their surrounding soil. The phenomenon was known, but the mechanisms were poorly understood. They conclude from their experiments that "a biological concentration cell likely set up by the homeostatic mechanisms of the tree" are responsible. Consider the implications: We found it difficult to resist speculating that there may be possible practical applications of these findings beyond monitoring pH changes such as a wide variety of trickle chargers for niche, low-power, pulsed, off-grid distributed systems–including forest fire detectors; environmental sensors; and “smart dust” or mesh-networked devices drastically decreasing the need for in-the-field battery...
March 17, 2009
Slow Boat
A post last year linked a PR about some research into the development of low flow energy systems that exploit "vortex induced vibrations." There's more talk of it now and seems worth another look. Aluminum cylinders joined to built-in electromagnets form a ladder-shaped device. As flowing currents swirl past a cylinder, the vortexes that form above and below push and pull the cylinders to generate electricity. . . Flexible plates designed like a fish’s tail could speed up cylinders in very slow-moving water or decrease the cylinder movement, which would help to protect aquatic life. “We may design a tail that’s adjustable and has sensors, but I’m not anywhere near that yet,” Bernitsas said. “Simply, we are not as smart as fish at this point.” I wonder if there could be applications for wind too? Ungainly wind monstrosities are expensive to manufacture, install and service yet they produce a small fraction of their output potential. Perhaps less obtrusive devices...
March 13, 2009
Waving Char
There's been some chatter about Carbonscape, a newish company that has jumped on the biochar bandwagon. Their claim to fame is that they microwave woody materials until they char. FAQ. What is Carbonscape’s particular contribution? For millennia, the process of manufacturing charcoal has remained relatively unchanged. Since this time there have been many applications for charcoal but because it burns hotter and cleaner than wood, the greatest use has often been as a fuel. Excitingly, Carbonscape has developed cutting edge techniques and world leading intellectual property around the technology and processes, revolutionising the conversion of wood waste and other biomass into charcoal. Our proprietary industrial microwave technology means that in spite of the energy used during production, the carbon captured draws down significantly more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than it produces. Each industrial-scale unit converts 40–50% of wood debris into charcoal; one tonne of carbon dioxide can be fixed as charcoal per day. By converting carbon in organic...
March 11, 2009
Spin Battery
Just skip the messy chemical stuff. The device created by University of Miami Physicist Stewart E. Barnes, of the College of Arts and Sciences and his collaborators can store energy in magnets rather than through chemical reactions. Like a winding up toy car, the spin battery is "wound up" by applying a large magnetic field --no chemistry involved. The device is potentially better than anything found so far, said Barnes. "We had anticipated the effect, but the device produced a voltage over a hundred times too big and for tens of minutes, rather than for milliseconds as we had expected," Barnes said. "That this was counterintuitive is what lead to our theoretical understanding of what was really going on." . . . The secret behind this technology is the use of nano-magnets to induce an electromotive force. . . The electrical current made in this process is called a spin polarized current and finds use in a new technology...
March 11, 2009
Energy Kumbaya
There are some things that climate change believers and skeptics agree about. Dr. Easterbrook spoke of his studies of solar activity and climate cycles and his prediction that a decades-long global cooling spell was coming, deeper than the one in the middle of the 20th century. Mr. Jungbauer gave a talk and slide presentation that he said were aimed at providing ammunition for anyone in the policy arena seeking to counter visions of catastrophic global warming pushed by liberal campaigners. . . Dr. Easterbrook, in laying out the dangers of cold spells, noted that the world doesn’t have sufficient energy sources to get through such a period, particularly with the human population heading toward 9 billion. “We want to reduce pollution, increase efficiency, decrease dependence on foreign oil,” he said in a question and answer session. “The difficulty I see is greater demands and fewer resources.” . . . “There are extremists on both sides,” Mr. Jungbauer said. Extremists...
March 11, 2009
Dimmer Switch
One of the flaws in some geoengineering ideas to limit the effects of GHGs is that they work by reducing solar radiation that reaches the earth. Among the ideas being explored is injecting small particles into the upper atmosphere to produce a climate cooling similar to that of large volcanic eruptions, such as Mt. Pinatubo's in 1991. Airborne sulfur hovering in the stratosphere cooled the Earth for about two years following that eruption. Murphy found that particles in the stratosphere reduce the amount and change the nature of the sunlight that strikes the Earth. Though a fraction of the incoming sunlight bounces back to space (the cooling effect), a much larger amount becomes "diffuse" or scattered light. On average, for every watt of sunlight the particles reflect away from the Earth, another three watts of direct sunlight are converted to diffuse sunlight. Large power-generating solar plants that concentrate sunlight for maximum efficiency depend solely on direct sunlight and cannot...
March 05, 2009
Sun Power
The headline claims: Sunlight turns carbon dioxide to methane. Of course it does, plants do it all the time, but this uses a different technology. The chemical conversion of water and carbon dioxide to methane is simple on paper -- one carbon dioxide molecule and two water molecules become one methane molecule and two oxygen molecules. However, for the reaction to occur, at least eight photons are required for each molecule. . . his team used titanium dioxide nanotubes doped with nitrogen and coated with a thin layer of both copper and platinum to convert a mixture of carbon dioxide and water vapor to methane. Using outdoor, visible light, they reported a 20-times higher yield of methane than previously published attempts conducted in laboratory conditions using intense ultraviolet exposures. . . The researchers are now working on converting their batch reactor into a continuous flow-through design that they believe will significantly increase yields. The researchers have filed a provisional...
February 19, 2009
Live Long
And prosper? It’s common to talk (as I sort-of did back here) as if cheap energy solves, if not everything, all the big stuff. But might it just bring more problems in its wake — perhaps by pushing the human population so high that much of the rest of the natural world is pushed out, or perhaps through some other dire and unforeseen consequence? . . . I don’t think that higher standards of living necessarily correlate with worse environmental outcomes. And I don’t think energy breakthroughs will have the same sort of demographic effect that fossil fuelled modernioty has But I am aware that it is an inductive argument. The history of the past few centuries suggests that the phenomenon of the demographic transition is real: from a situation where birth rates and death rates are both high, you move to a situation where death rates drop (leading to an expansion of the population) that is followed after...
January 22, 2009
JITty Energy
The preceding series of post cleared away some mental clutter so that I could get to the point I wanted to make. As noted in Another Pinhole the thought began with a post at Heliophage: It really is about the energy Smart grids strike me as being a bit like just-in-time manufacturing, on which David Brin and James Fallows had some wise words recently. Great system if there aren’t external shocks and you’re sure there never will be; but when Toyota itself is getting less JITty, you know that its not a system to emulate exactly in an absolutely vital modality like energy transmission (and that is before you factor in the possibility that some smart grids might in fact be smartest-guys-in-the-room grids). . . There’s also, to me, a secondary moral/political reason for concentrating on energy. Alex’s post is stuffed full with the first person plural — what we want, what we should do, and so on. That...
January 05, 2009
Hot Rocks
I've long been intrigued by geothermal energy. It is available everywhere and isn't intermittent so it can supply baseload power. But in most places we have to go a mile or more deep to reach rocks hot enough for large scale systems. It's closer in a few places. A routine drilling operation for a geothermal power plant on Big Island, Hawaii encountered dacite magma at a depth of 2.5 km. This is the first contact with magma beneath the surface of the Earth – the finding could ultimately lead to the exploitation of the molten rock as an energy source. “This is like Jurassic Park for geologists, to see this thing in its natural habitat,” said Bruce Marsh of John Hopkins University who, together with Lucien Bronicki of Ormat Technologies and William Teplow of US Geothermal, revealed the findings at the American Geophysical Union's autumn meeting in December. “It’s like seeing a dinosaur frolicking in an open field.” The...
December 18, 2008
Ashes to Forest
Here's an interesting review of the effects of returning wood ash to forests. The ash generated as a by-product of combustion, whether for heat or power generation, has potential use as a fertilizer in forest systems. . . The key determinants of wood ash chemistry are the tree species combusted, the nature of the burn process and the conditions at the application site. Wood ash from hardwood species produces higher levels of macronutrients in their ash than conifers, and the silica content is frequently lower. A furnace temperature between 500 and 900°C is critical to the retention of nutrients, particularly potassium, and determines the concentrations of potentially toxic metals including aluminium in the ash. Fly ash, the lightest component that accumulates in the flue system, can contain high concentrations of cadmium, copper, chromium, lead and arsenic and this ash should not be used as fertilizer. The form of the ash at application is important, with loose ash releasing Ca,...
December 10, 2008
Joe Powered
Millions of people consume energy drinks and have long done so. Coffee is a very common one. It has long been known that spent coffee grounds still contain a lot of energy, but not the sort that can power humans. Coffee grounds release more heat than wood when they're burned, and there are commercial products that use them this way. There was something called a Java-Log that was once popular with some greens (and may still be, this is a years old memory) and the grounds are compressed and pelletized for use in pellet stoves. It's better than wood in several ways. The oils, which is where a lot of the energy is found, can be extracted and used as a liquid fuel. . . . the major barrier to wider use of biodiesel fuel is lack of a low-cost, high quality source, or feedstock, for producing that new energy source. Spent coffee grounds contain between 11 and 20...
December 08, 2008
Trash Crash
I see an opportunity. The economic downturn has decimated the market for recycled materials like cardboard, plastic, newspaper and metals. Across the country, this junk is accumulating by the ton in the yards and warehouses of recycling contractors, which are unable to find buyers or are unwilling to sell at rock-bottom prices. Ordinarily the material would be turned into products like car parts, book covers and boxes for electronics. But with the slump in the scrap market, a trickle is starting to head for landfills instead of a second life. “It’s awful,” said Briana Sternberg, education and outreach coordinator for Sedona Recycles, a nonprofit group in Arizona that recently stopped taking certain types of cardboard, like old cereal, rice and pasta boxes. There is no market for these, and the organization’s quarter-acre yard is already packed fence to fence. “Either it goes to landfill or it begins to cost us money,” Unlike chicken manure, cardboard packing boxes have little...
December 04, 2008
Solar Gas
The headline screams Sun + Water = Fuel Chemists, of course, can already split water. But the process has required high temperatures, harsh alkaline solutions, or rare and expensive catalysts such as platinum. What Nocera has devised is an inexpensive catalyst that produces oxygen from water at room temperature and without caustic chemicals--the same benign conditions found in plants. Several other promising catalysts, including another that Nocera developed, could be used to complete the process and produce hydrogen gas. Nocera sees two ways to take advantage of his breakthrough. In the first, a conventional solar panel would capture sunlight to produce electricity; in turn, that electricity would power a device called an electrolyzer, which would use his catalysts to split water. The second approach would employ a system that more closely mimics the structure of a leaf. The catalysts would be deployed side by side with special dye molecules designed to absorb sunlight; the energy captured by the dyes...
November 30, 2008
Focus
Politics is a trivial pursuit. It focuses tightly on irrelevancies while paying no heed to larger and longer term issues. It has to do so since power is won and lost due to such skirmishes. The complaint that publicly traded businesses live or die by quarterly performance figures and so have little incentive for longer term investment is perhaps even more true of governments. Government is, after all, a business too. Fluctuations in stock prices make or break business executives, and popularity polls do the same for politicians. The recent scramble to attract the attention of Democrats - now that they have regained political power - provides many examples of this. The economy as a whole may be troubled but it's boom times for sales of Presidential knee pads and sanitary lubricants to supplicants hoping to be granted boons in return for their obeisance, an opportunity that they have been denied for some years. One example comes from James...
November 24, 2008
Energy Mates
Two technologies that seem to be made for each other. On October 24th the Danish Minister for the Environment Troels Lund Poulsen officially inaugurated the new pyrolysis plant at Barritskov Gods supplied by Stirling Denmark. The plant is the worlds first pyrolysis plant based on a Stirling engine and will provide heat and power to the facilities. Furthermore, the plant will produce a valuable charcoal for soil improvement and CO2 sequestration. The plant has been designed by Stirling Denmark based on the SD4 engine and on research on pyrolysis at DTU, Denmark. The plant will initially run on wood chips from recycled wooden crates, but the plant is expected to be able to handle many different types of biomass. I wasn't very clear about the details presented on the Danish page. Translation still seems to require human effort. But the ideas are compelling. After some initial input heat the gases given off by pyrolysis can more than sustain the...
November 21, 2008
Hydrokinetic
This makes sense. VIVACE stands for Vortex Induced Vibrations for Aquatic Clean Energy. It doesn't depend on waves, tides, turbines or dams. It's a unique hydrokinetic energy system that relies on "vortex induced vibrations." Vortex induced vibrations are undulations that a rounded or cylinder-shaped object makes in a flow of fluid, which can be air or water. The presence of the object puts kinks in the current's speed as it skims by. This causes eddies, or vortices, to form in a pattern on opposite sides of the object. The vortices push and pull the object up and down or left and right, perpendicular to the current. . . The working prototype in his lab is just one sleek cylinder attached to springs. The cylinder hangs horizontally across the flow of water in a tractor-trailer-sized tank in his marine renewable energy laboratory. The water in the tank flows at 1.5 knots. . . Just a few cylinders might be enough...
November 03, 2008
Deformity
The world bears the severe burden of a medical tragedy. Huge numbers of humans walk about with their heads on backwards, unable to see where they are going and so become obsessed with where they have been. With technology - Goldberg or Heath contraptions involving mirrors and video feeds - they are able to look ahead but have distorted and restricted fields of view. Objects seen in the mirrors are larger or closer than they appear to be. It isn't clear if this is a genetic defect or predisposition, or if it is solely a result of environmental factors. Perhaps like most other things it's a bit of all. We can sympathize with the afflicted and help develop prostheses that improve their world views, but we must be firm with them. They are working with bad data and the opinions they form are mistaken. I mention this since it is relevant to the previous post about energy and the...
November 03, 2008
Bunker Up
I've been mocking the hide-under-the-bed-and-cover-your-head thinking of the politics of limits for a long time. Idiotic policies like Kyoto and a gaggle of spiritually kindred national policies - especially but not uniquely in Europe - simply blink reality. By 2020, China's burning of fossil fuels could annually emit carbon dioxide equal in mass to 2.5 billion metric tonnes of pure carbon and up to 2.9 billion tonnes, depending on varying scenarios for development and technology, the new report states. By 2030, those annual emissions may reach 3.1 billion tonnes a year and up to 4.0 billion tonnes. That compares with global carbon emissions of about 8.5 billion tonnes in 2007. ...The U.S. Oak Ridge National Laboratory estimated that the United States emitted about 1.6 billion tonnes of carbon in 2007 . . . As Randall figures - "China's increase in carbon dioxide emissions over the next 20 years will exceed current US emissions." This isn't news, it's just a...
October 16, 2008
Solar Max
Another advance in solar power materials research. Researchers have created a new material that overcomes two of the major obstacles to solar power: it absorbs all the energy contained in sunlight, and generates electrons in a way that makes them easier to capture. . . This new material is the first that can absorb all the energy contained in visible light at once. . . Ideally, the electrons flow out of the device as electrical current, but this is where most solar cells run into trouble. The electrons only stay loose for a tiny fraction of a second before they sink back into the atoms from which they came. The electrons must be captured during the short time they are free, and this task, called charge separation, is difficult. In the new hybrid material, electrons remain free much longer than ever before. . . "This long-lived excited state should allow us to better manipulate charge separation," Chisholm said. At...
October 13, 2008
Food Chain
I've stated before that for aquaculture to really become useful the mind set needs to change from raising fish to raising fish food, similar to graziers who call themselves grass farmers though their product is meat and milk. But that may not be the real end product. “Shrimp farmers don’t raise shrimp, they raise algae,” Gary Wood, owner of Desert Sweet Shrimp, explained to Red Orbit. But there’s more to making biodiesel than simply growing algae. Wood is still experimenting to see what strain of algae will work best. While over a dozen startups have raised millions of dollars to perfect their algae production and squeezing methods, Desert Sweet doesn’t appear to have raised a lot of venture capital. The company is just using its shrimp husbandry know-how to help grow its feedstock for its new line of business. Desert Sweet hopes to be able to produce biodiesel for $3 a gallon from its 50 aquaculture ponds. Located in...
September 29, 2008
Captivating
Reducing emissions is a fools game so far as being a response to climate forcing. They can't be reduced enough to matter without better technologies and decades of deployment, and if the models are right (unlikely) a great deal of change is already in the works with existing concentrations. That only leaves removal. "The climate problem is too big to solve easily with the tools we have . . . David Keith and his team have developed a number of innovative ways to achieve the efficient capture of atmospheric carbon" . . . Keith and his team showed they could capture CO2 directly from the air with less than 100 kilowatt-hours of electricity per tonne of carbon dioxide. Their custom-built tower was able to capture the equivalent of about 20 tonnes per year of CO2 on a single square metre of scrubbing material – the average amount of emissions that one person produces each year in the North American-wide...
September 26, 2008
Magnificent
But, inadequate. France makes almost all its electricity with nukes, when a generation and a bit ago it made almost none. . . growth in French nuclear power from 1977 to 2003 was an extraordinary 4000%. France now exports nuclear power to other parts of Europe; its generating industry has an excellent safety record, and it has made EDF a very big powerful company capable of buying up the UK’s nuclear industry. . . So what did that extraordinary national rebuilding actually achieve? According to the Stern review fossil fuel emissions in France during the 25 years of that 4000% increase fell, on average, by less than 1% a year. Emissions from the generating sector dropped 6% a year, which is about 80% over the 25 years, which is great — but the rest of the economy kept growing and burning fossil fuels in cars and heating systems and factories and all that. So the carbon saving overall was...
September 18, 2008
Green Gasoline
As opposed to ethanol. The key to the breakthrough is a process developed by both Dumesic and Cortright called aqueous phase reforming. In passing a watery slurry of plant-derived sugar and carbohydrates over a series of catalysts-materials that speed up reactions without sacrificing themselves in the process-carbon-rich organic molecules split apart into component elements that recombine to form many of the chemicals that are extracted from non-renewable petroleum. According to Dumesic, a key feature of the approach is that between the sugar or starch starter materials and the hydrocarbon end products, the chemicals go through an intermediate stage as an organic liquid composed of functional compounds. "The intermediate compounds retain 95 percent of the energy of the biomass but only about 40 percent of the mass, and can be upgraded into different types of transportation fuels, such as gasoline, jet and diesel fuels," said Dumesic. "Importantly, the formation of this functional intermediate oil does not require the need for...
September 17, 2008
Heavy Oil
"This would be the technology that would crush peak oil for several decades and allow an orderly transition to a post oil world". It´s called the CAPRI system and it´s been designed to do the job of a refinery at the bottom of Petrobank´s patented THAI (toe-to-heel air injection) wells at the company´s pilot project near Christina Lake in northeastern Alberta. In the THAI system, an air pressure-driven combustion front loosens heavy oil as it slowly works its way forward, and the freed oil flows under gravity through slots in horizontal collector pipes, then is gas-lifted to surface processing systems. . . For the CAPRI pilot, the horizontal pipes have been uniquely configured such that after passing through the slots, the hot crude will pass through a bed of catalyst and on through slots in a concentric inner pipe before being lifted. The cracking to be achieved by CAPRI will be a step further in the upgrading process already...
August 17, 2008
Take 3
This seems to be a third system for producing solar hydrogen. "A manganese cluster is central to a plant's ability to use water, carbon dioxide and sunlight to make carbohydrates and oxygen. Man-made mimics of this cluster were developed by Professor Charles Dismukes some time ago, and we've taken it a step further, harnessing the ability of these molecules to convert water into its component elements, oxygen and hydrogen," Professor Spiccia said. "The breakthrough came when we coated a proton conductor, called Nafion, onto an anode to form a polymer membrane just a few micrometres thick, which acts as a host for the manganese clusters." "Normally insoluble in water, when we bound the catalyst within the pores of the Nafion membrane, it was stabilised against decomposition and, importantly, water could reach the catalyst where it was oxidised on exposure to light." This process of "oxidizing" water generates protons and electrons, which can be converted into hydrogen gas instead of...
August 13, 2008
Civics Lesson
Arnold -> Robert Higgs: If we were talking about bananas, everybody would see immediately the foolishness of seeking “banana independence.” Nobody would fall for half-baked arguments about our addiction to foreign bananas or our love affair with banana bread. It’s obviously uneconomic to grow millions of bananas in this country; it could be done, but doing it would entail much greater costs than buying them from producers in places better suited to their production (that is, places where they can be produced at lower opportunity cost). Arnold notes: In Oil Econ 101, I wrote, The problem with sponsoring terrorism is not that oil revenues are the source of funds. The problem with sponsoring terrorism is that it is grossly immoral. Whether you are an anti-war liberterian like Higgs or a xenophobe about Islamic radicals like me, the economics always comes out the same: choosing the high-cost energy path is not in the interest of American citizens. It would be...
August 10, 2008
Ambient Energy
We are bathed in energy and everything we do spews more energy into our surroundings, often as heat. Waste heat it is called, meaning that it isn't wanted where it is and we don't have a way to use it effectively for something else. Not often at any rate. If we had an efficient way to capture such heat - infrared radiation - it would be very useful. traditional solar cells can only use visible light, rendering them idle after dark. Infrared radiation is an especially rich energy source because it also is generated by industrial processes such as coal-fired plants. "Every process in our industrial world creates waste heat," says INL physicist Steven Novack. "It's energy that we just throw away." . . . researchers studied the behavior of various materials -- including gold, manganese and copper -- under infrared rays and used the resulting data to build computer models of nanoantennas. They found that with the right...
August 04, 2008
OTOH
Tyler quotes Will (a) energy is not scarce . . . (b) a well-functioning price system will shift energy consumption to (cleaner) alternative energy sources . . . (c) the initial high price of alternative energy will temporarily slow growth, but competition and technological progress will eventually push prices below the historical trend . . . (d) environmental quality is a global public good, but; (e) this is most likely to be secured as a consequence of growth Ho Hum. Nothing novel or insightful here, just common sense, but common sense isn't as common as one could wish. There are bad points to this good sense. In Tyler's words: What worries me is that first sentence: "energy is not scarce" -- it also could have been written "destructive energy is not scarce." A world where we solve our energy and environmental problems is also a world where small groups or lone individuals have great power to destroy. Bad, but...
July 31, 2008
Solar Hydrogen
Again. But this seems to be a different technology. The key component in Nocera and Kanan's new process is a new catalyst that produces oxygen gas from water; another catalyst produces valuable hydrogen gas. The new catalyst consists of cobalt metal, phosphate and an electrode, placed in water. When electricity — whether from a photovoltaic cell, a wind turbine or any other source — runs through the electrode, the cobalt and phosphate form a thin film on the electrode, and oxygen gas is produced. Combined with another catalyst, such as platinum, that can produce hydrogen gas from water, the system can duplicate the water splitting reaction that occurs during photosynthesis. The new catalyst works at room temperature, in neutral pH water, and it's easy to set up . . . James Barber, a leader in the study of photosynthesis who was not involved in this research, called the discovery by Nocera and Kanan a "giant leap" toward generating clean,...
July 30, 2008
Low Light
Biofuel hopefuls tout Miscanthus . . . again. Miscanthus x giganteus outperforms current biofuels sources – by a lot. Using Miscanthus as a feedstock for ethanol production in the U.S. could significantly reduce the acreage dedicated to biofuels while meeting government biofuels production goals, the researchers report. . . Using corn or switchgrass to produce enough ethanol to offset 20 percent of gasoline use – a current White House goal – would take 25 percent of current U.S. cropland out of food production, the researchers report. Getting the same amount of ethanol from Miscanthus would require only 9.3 percent of current agricultural acreage. . . "What we've found with Miscanthus is that the amount of biomass generated each year would allow us to produce about 2 1/2 times the amount of ethanol we can produce per acre of corn" . . . In trials across Illinois, switchgrass, a perennial grass which, like Miscanthus, requires fewer chemical and mechanical inputs...
July 21, 2008
Solar Hydrogen
This seems interesting. He [Stanford Ovshinsky, inventor of the nickel metal hydride (NiMH) technology used for building batteries] points out that by storing hydrogen reversibly in disordered solids, this solves the problems of storage, kinetics (speed of uptake and release) and cycle life. To this end, Ovshinsky and his colleagues have created a family of hydride compounds capable of real-world applications. Underpinning this is the vast catalytic surface area found in these materials, which means that when fabricated into thin film, continuous web, multi-junction devices, they can use the entire spectrum of sunlight to break up water to generate hydrogen, which is stored within the material ready for later use. Instead of a solar cell which generates electricity it generates hydrogen, from water, and stores it internally. I wonder how long it takes to refuel itself after hydrogen depletion? That's not the only question that comes to mind....
July 13, 2008
Mass Confusion
A chief defect of the environmental movement is that it is a movement, a political approach to environmental issues. Problems that need to be analyzed with insight into physical reality are subject to the whims of those having no useful grasp of the issues but who have all manner of ungrounded beliefs. To them, scientific factoids are talking points, ammunition for a virtual war between competing factions and fractions. Entrepreneurs take this as their market reality and pander to the various fantastical notions. Some entrepreneurs are bureaucrats, some are capitalists. Some are both. Since physical reality plays almost no part in this drama we can find posers who claim to care for the environment who advocate organic agriculture, biofuels, and carbon reduction credits though these things are antithetical. The classic case is the "engineer", "designer", or other politicized urban denizen advocating the use of corn stover for energy production, but the confused notion that there is excess biomass crops...
July 11, 2008
Think On It
"blaming speculators for high prices has always seemed to me like blaming the thermometer for how hot it is"...
June 19, 2008
Flash Carbonization
The earlier post Fast Pyrolyzers discussed an interesting paper, The Charcoal Vision: A Win–Win–Win Scenario for Simultaneously Producing Bioenergy, Permanently Sequestering Carbon, while Improving Soil and Water Quality, that advocated a superior method of generating bioenergy in more environmentally benign ways. The technologies involved were only briefly mentioned. Fast pyrolyzers rapidly (~1 s) heat dry biomass (10% H2O) to ~500°C and thereby thermally transform biomass into bio-oil (~60% of mass), syngas (~20% of mass), and charcoal (~20% of mass). The energy required to operate a fast pyrolyzer is ~15% of the total energy that can be derived from the dry biomass. Modern systems are designed to use the syngas generated by the pyrolyzer to provide all the energy needs of the pyrolyzer. Bio-oil is an energy raw material (~17 MJ kg–1) that can be burned directly to generate heat energy or easily shipped to a refinery for processing into transportation fuels and various co-products (Bridgwater et al., 1999). Charcoal...
May 29, 2008
Biofuel Savior
A little over 3 years ago I discussed high oil algae, noting that it's one of the very few biofuel ideas that made any sense. However, there's still no output. But after all the hype—and there's been plenty of it—the fact remains that nobody has yet proven they can cheaply and reliably transform the stuff from a thick, green slurry to a finished fuel capable of making a dent in America's 870 million–gallon-per-day petroleum habit. "I get a lot of people telling me that they've got thousands of gallons, but when I actually ask for a sample I can get maybe two," says Jennifer Holmgren, director of the University of Phoenix (UOP) renewable energy and chemicals division, which is working to refine jet fuel from feedstocks that include algae. "Google some of the numbers, and you've got people claiming that right now they're producing 35,000 gallons per acre per year, and they'll be producing 100,000 gallons—and that's just impossible,"...
May 26, 2008
Soil Mining
Tad Patzek, who along with David Pimentel has been a scourge of airy-fairy ethanol schemes, does an interview. “Okay, grass, we are going to cut you every year, year after year. Remove everything that we cut and burn it elsewhere.” Unfortunately, when you do so not only do you remove carbon, but you remove nutrients with the grass and these nutrients are gradually depleted from the soil and of course the whole system stops producing. There is a fundamental problem with removing all biomass from an ecosystem because that ecosystem stops functioning and in order for you to make it function, you have to resupply it back with the nutrients and that of course takes an enormous amount of fossil fuels. So we are back to square one. This is a basic problem with many of the cellulosic ethanol schemes that tout the productivity of grasses with low fertility requirements compared to highly domesticated grasses such as maize. The...
April 28, 2008
Take II
Green is the new gold. Mendel will make use of Monsanto’s crop testing, breeding and seed production to develop high-yield, low-input perennial grasses to serve as a feedstock for cellulosic biofuel production. . . Monsanto is able to aggressively invest in next-generation biofuels as first-generation biofuels have created windfall profits for the company. Monsanto tripled its profits last year, due in large part to the corn ethanol boom. Now Monsanto needs to move into cellulosic ethanol, as food-based biofuels, especially corn, have taken a beating. There have been numerous frozen ethanol refinery projects and the public backlash in the food vs. fuel debate has further dampened food-based ethanol investments. Though it will probably take a few years to develop and pay off, Monsanto’s play into cellulosics will likely further increase that profit growth. Then, after a while, there will be a new round of frozen ethanol refinery projects and public backlash when people finally grok the consequences of growing...
April 22, 2008
Techno-Pessimism
Those who oppose progress do their best to prevent it, and have done so for decades. They now use the lack of progress during those decades as an argument against the possibility of future progress. It's worth noting that if we had to build today's energy infrastructure working under the current regulatory and NIMBY burden, it probably could not be done. So it shouldn't be surprising that building a new energy infrastructure is proving so hard. There's a reason why many of us think deregulation is a big issue and it's not because we want to see people poisoned by Chinese botchagaloop. Opposition to nuclear energy is one glaring example of the problem cited here in the past, but there's a general drag on progress from a crufted up bureaucracy. Each petty fiefdom diligently pursues its regulatory opposition to everything it can grab, since that's what pays the wages. They make careers out of obstruction and delay, and use...
April 19, 2008
Cartridge Reactors
A.K.A. nuclear batteries. Hyperion Power Generation, a startup based in Santa Fe, N.M., is working on a self-contained compact nuclear power reactor unit that it says is “about the size of a typical backyard hot tub” . . . Because the device is small, portable and self-contained, the company says it can be delivered where it is needed and then sent back to the factory for refueling every five years. That makes it a good fit for remote, rural locations that are disconnected from the power grid. The technology can also bring down the cost of nuclear power significantly, says the company — a 30 percent reduction over traditional nuclear in capital costs and a 50 percent reduction in operating costs. It's good to see some nuclear progress. Toshiba's talk about nuclear batteries two or three years ago was interesting, but seeing VC money go to new ventures is more so. Hyperion says the device’s self-contained and portable design...
April 17, 2008
No Picnic
Not enough sandwiches. The first annual BioMass conference, attended by biofuels researchers, manufacturers, equipment suppliers, and farmers, is underway here at the Minneapolis Convention Center. Do you suppose that they have interest? Yes, he acknowledges, the demand for biofuels derived from traditional food crops like corn has contributed to a rise in global food prices, but so has increasing demand for food from burgeoning populations in China and India. Clearly those Chinese and Indians need to eat less. No, wait . . . The large rise of world food prices came after food prices had been either stable or declined for many years. Although incomes in China and India, countries that account for almost 40 percent of the world's population, did grow rapidly during this decade as well as during the 1990's, global consumption of corn, wheat, and rice grew more slowly since 2000 than during the five years earlier. But continuing, with interest . . . Nobody plants...
April 10, 2008
Fast Pyrolyzers
Philip is excited again. Crop residues, although often referred to as agricultural waste, are in fact a vital component of soil agroecosystems. Crop residues contain substantial amounts of plant nutrients (primarily C, N, K, P, Ca, and Mg), and if crop residues were harvested every year these nutrients would have to be replaced by increased fertilizer use. Many soil organisms utilize crop residues as their primary substrate, and these organisms are responsible for nutrient cycling, building of biogenic soil organic matter, and maintaining levels of soil organic C. Crop residues are critically important for building and maintaining soil structure, which facilitates root penetration and the movement of both air and water in soils. And, crop residues on soil surfaces enhance water infiltration, which increases available water to growing plants, and decreases the destructive effects of raindrop impact and surface runoff, which are the dominant causes of soil erosion. If all aboveground crop residues were removed year after year, the...
April 08, 2008
Better Ethanol
No, really. But not soon. Ethanol is not great. Even Al Gore had to eventually concede he had made a mistake in promoting it for almost two decades once it became common knowledge that driving food prices up for a costly, energy-negative alternative to gasoline that didn't improve the environment was a bad idea. . . Wrong. Again. And not for the last time. Isn't his teflon getting a little thin by now? Researchers are tinkering up what seem to be Goldberg (Robinson?) contraptions to keep the faith. Cows, with help from bacteria, convert plant fibers, called cellulose, into energy, but this is a big, expensive step for biofuel production. In the commercial biofuel industry, only the kernels of corn plants can be used to make ethanol, but this new discovery would allow the entire corn plant to be used – so more fuel can be produced with less cost. . . “The fact that we can take a...
March 20, 2008
Hot and Juicy
In the nanotech thermoelectric sense. Using nanotechnology, the researchers at BC and MIT produced a big increase in the thermoelectric efficiency of bismuth antimony telluride — a semiconductor alloy that has been commonly used in commercial devices since the 1950s — in bulk form. Specifically, the team realized a 40 percent increase in the alloy’s figure of merit, a term scientists use to measure a material’s relative performance. The achievement marks the first such gain in a half-century using the cost-effective material that functions at room temperatures and up to 250 degrees Celsius. The success using the relatively inexpensive and environmentally friendly alloy means the discovery can quickly be applied to a range of uses, leading to higher cooling and power generation efficiency. “By using nanotechnology, we have found a way to improve an old material by breaking it up and then rebuilding it in a composite of nanostructures in bulk form,” said Boston College physicist Zhifeng Ren, one...
February 29, 2008
More Heat Mining
A year ago an MIT-led study of enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) was discussed. See full report: The Future of Geothermal Energy (pdf). Things are progressing. last week, the DOE tapped Ormat Technologies of Nevada to test MIT's conclusions. To build the nation’s first commercial-scale EGS site and demonstrate its viability to power America. And not just in regions blessed with bubbling-at-the-surface, energy-rich geysers. But all over. It may be worth repeating part of that old press release from last year. the electricity produced annually by geothermal energy systems now in use in the United States at sites in California, Hawaii, Utah and Nevada is comparable to that produced by solar and wind power combined. And the potential is far greater still, since hot rocks below the surface are available in most parts of the United States. Even in the most promising areas, however, drilling must reach depths of 5,000 feet or more in the west, and much deeper in...
February 28, 2008
It's Bob's Fault
You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. The cold weather drove residents to crank up the heat, but the lack of wind to turn turbines pushed the state’s electric grid into emergency mode. On Tuesday night, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas cut off power for 90 minutes to those customers who had agreed to accept power interruptions. And it was a full three hours before everything was back to normal. All of which proves that while, cheap, clean and renewable, it’s pretty hard to know which way the wind will blow. Or, if the sun will shine etc. The CO2 to liquid fuel conversions discussed in Mutant Tupperware, which need added energy to function, seem a better way to use intermittent power sources than connecting them to the grid. When the grid gets starved all sorts of havoc ensues. It may be that the CO2 to liquid systems can't tolerate interruption well either,...
February 18, 2008
Mutant Tupperware
No, it's not about eco-moms. Klaus Lackner, professor of geophysics and director of the Center for Sustainable Energy at the Columbia University Earth Institute, once said: "Technology in general and energy at its base ultimately define the carrying capacity of the Earth for humans" . . . Lackner and Sachs, however, see vast room for progress in meeting the world's growing energy needs without threatening to destabilize the Earth's climate. In particular, they identify carbon capture and sequestration as an important part of any future plan to address the problem. Even better . . . The idea is simple. Air would be blown over a liquid solution of potassium carbonate, which would absorb the carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide would then be extracted and subjected to chemical reactions that would turn it into fuel: methanol, gasoline or jet fuel. This process could transform carbon dioxide from an unwanted, climate-changing pollutant into a vast resource for renewable fuels. The closed...
January 15, 2008
Natural Lubricants
Speaking of bio-fuelishness Soybeans produce about 50 gallons of oil per acre per year, and canola produces about 130, he said. Algae, however, produces about 4,000 gallons per acre a year, and he predicted it will go far beyond that. He said algae requires only sunshine and non-drinkable water to grow. If, as stated in the previous post, it takes 450 pounds of corn to fill an SUV with ethanol, then using average US yield data (140 bushels/acre @ 56#/bushel) you can fill that SUV 17 1/2 times or so per acre per year. The fuel tank size of that SUV isn't stated, but 22 or 23 gallons is common. Using those assumptions that's 400 gallons of ethanol per acre. That seems small compared to 4,000 gallons of oil from algae per acre. Ethanol and such oils aren't the same, there's still a lot of data massaging needed for a precise comparison, but algae looks pretty good by comparison,...
January 12, 2008
Figure Of Merit
I noted my fascination with thermoelectrics in Ambient Energy. Not for the first time. Run over to Introduction to Thermoelectrics if you want to brush up. An intriguing thread of the history of thermoelectrics is the switch from metals to semiconductors since they have a prized attribute: a higher ratio of electrical conductivity to thermal conductivity than metals. It seems that they are very much better than we knew before. The Nature paper describes a unique “electroless etching” method by which arrays of silicon nanowires are synthesized in an aqueous solution on the surfaces of wafers that can measure dozens of square inches in area. The technique involves the galvanic displacement of silicon through the reduction of silver ions on a wafer’s surface. Unlike other synthesis techniques, which yield smooth-surfaced nanowires, this electroless etching method produces arrays of vertically aligned silicon nanowires that feature exceptionally rough surfaces. The roughness is believed to be critical to the surprisingly high thermoelectric...
January 11, 2008
Bigger Pictures
Advocacy is the dark art of misinforming by omission. Advocates seek factoids and narrow analyses that support their biases, then trumpet their biases as factual. Ronald Bailey quotes researchers at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. The US is the world's leading producer of soy, but many American soy farmers are shifting to corn to qualify for the government subsidies. Since 2006, US corn production rose 19% while soy farming fell by 15%. The drop-off in US soy has helped to drive a major increase in global soy prices, which have nearly doubled in the last 14 months. In Brazil, the world's second-largest soy producer, high soy prices are having a serious impact on the Amazon rainforest and tropical savannas. "Amazon fires and forest destruction have spiked over the last several months, especially in the main soy-producing states in Brazil," said Laurance. "Just about everyone there attributes this to rising soy and beef prices." High soy prices affect the Amazon...
January 10, 2008
Power Drinks
The illusion of action and competence is what politics is about. Offering a tangible plan that promises this tax incentive, that fact-finding commission, this reinvestment project, this funding for retraining doesn’t reach people who perceive the present as a slum left behind by a low-rent version of Benjamin’s angel of history. In fact, all it does is convince them that the candidate with the plans is one of those folks with his hands on the levers, one of them who always seems to come out on top. . . There isn’t a policy package that can straightforwardly address some of the underlying structural changes in the global political economy that affect Peoria as surely as they affect Shenzen. Your wonkish arms are too short to box with that god. I don’t think anyone is the master of these changes, even though some people and social classes and systems have way more power to direct what is happening than others....
December 30, 2007
Beautiful Horses
The previous post contained an incidental assertion that several developing world nations were "on a fast track to surpassing the West as economic powers". Perhaps not. China's economy, said the [World} bank, is smaller than it thought. About 40% smaller. China, it turns out, isn't a $10-trillion economy on the brink of catching up with the United States. It is a $6-trillion economy, less than half our size. For the foreseeable future, China will have far less money to spend on its military and will face much deeper social and economic problems at home than experts previously believed. India's economy is also 40% smaller than previously thought. This is significant for the long running discussion of ways for the world to deal with the implications of GHG emissions. Emissions from those large but not so prosperous nations are still growing, but they have less ability to clean up than we thought. We didn't think they had much emissions wiggle...
December 20, 2007
This Is Hot
But not too hot. The new reactor, which is only 20 feet by 6 feet, could change everything for small remote communities, small businesses or even a group of neighbors who are fed up with the power companies and want more control over their energy needs. The 200 kilowatt Toshiba designed reactor is engineered to be fail-safe and totally automatic and will not overheat. Unlike traditional nuclear reactors the new micro reactor uses no control rods to initiate the reaction. The new revolutionary technology uses reservoirs of liquid lithium-6, an isotope that is effective at absorbing neutrons. The Lithium-6 reservoirs are connected to a vertical tube that fits into the reactor core. The whole whole process is self sustaining and can last for up to 40 years, producing electricity for only 5 cents per kilowatt hour, about half the cost of grid energy. Toshiba expects to install the first reactor in Japan in 2008 and to begin marketing the...
December 18, 2007
Light Sponge
The theoretical limits of solar cell efficiency seem to keep increasing. I discovered a perfect crystalline structure. That is a very rare sight. While being a perfect crystalline structure we could see that it also absorbed all light. It could become the perfect solar cell, says Martin Aagesen. The discovery of the new material has sparked a lot of attention internationally and has led to an article in Nature Nanotechnology. I've read fictional stories about conflicts between groups about "light stealing". Buildings that are powered by solar cells in building exterior surfaces are vulnerable to being shaded by new construction. Such buildings were also unpleasant if not dangerous to be around since they sucked both heat and light from the environment to an extent that people outside found distressing. What does "absorbed all light" really mean? I suppose they'd be dead black. It would seem that dust, dirt and other things would mar the perfection and decrease efficiency. Maybe...
December 11, 2007
Ambient Energy
One of my foundational perspectives is that we live immersed in a simmering soup of gasses, liquids and particles. When I walk my pastures each day I have a strong sensation of being submerged, like a lead booted diver on the seabed, but less so. The simmering bit is important. It's hot, even when it's cold. The world sizzles with energy. A big focus here at the IEEE’s IEDM conference has been on devices for energy harvesting—sometimes called energy scavenging. Essentially, they can produce their own electricity from ambient sources. This “free energy” comes from solar, vibration, pressure and temperature gradients, as well as human power . . . The repurposing of motion energy for devices is hardly new—self-winding watches have been using human movement for years . . . The real heady stuff came in the form of nanogenerators. Two types were discussed at the conference, and required putting on your physics thinking cap for full impact. The...
November 23, 2007
Equated Falsely
I think that the main source of confusion about fossil fuels and agriculture is that so many equate energy with fossil fuels. They aren't the same thing. You can string together a series of factoids that purport to show that food is oil, but all you have really shown is that food is energy. Duh! I became fascinated with the connection between our food supply and energy when I first learned of the problems that North Korea was having feeding itself. (see here). This data showed me something amazing about modern society, we don't live in the information age, we don't live in the industrial age, we live in the agricultural age. Without food, we have no industry or information. Unfortunately many don't understand this. Nor do they understand that today the modern farming system is merely a means to turn petroleum into food, via mechanized planting and harvesting, and the use of petroleum based insecticides and fertilizers which...
November 21, 2007
About Nitrogen
Perhaps it would be useful to unpack some of the claims made in the earlier post More Snakes The real issue is energy. Birkland-Eyde used hydro-electric power from remote Norwegian hydro facilities. They had plenty of electricity but no grid to get the power to population centers. Using it on site to make industrial chemicals which could be more easily shipped to town was smart. We have other such situations. Geothermal energy in Iceland is an example. They can make plenty of electricity but can't ship it to customers. They also have plenty of water and air so they could make nitrates if the price is right. In short, the energy issue and the nitrate issue are linked, as environmentalists claim in their muddled way, but fossil fuels are irrelevant except in an economic sense. A dearth of cheap and abundant fossil methane will not result in a decline in agricultural production, it will result in yet another change...
November 08, 2007
Snake Oil
Did you ever wonder where that term came from and how it came to mean a phony miracle cure? Snake fat was considered a remedy for various ailments by some Native American tribes. Enterprising and often itinerant peddlers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, especially in the west, concocted a variety of miracle cures boasting snake oil as the primary active ingredient, though the special preparation was a patented secret. In 1917 the US government tested Stanley's snake oil, the creation of one Clark Stanley aka "The Rattlesnake King", and found it to a mix of mineral oil, beef fat, pepper, turpentine and camphor. In the "old world" snake oil has been used for centuries. Richard Stoughton's Elixir was patented in England in 1712, and the Chinese have used it for even longer. There's some possibility that the Chinese version actually had some value since it was derived from water snakes whose fat was high in eicosapentaenoic...
September 16, 2007
Fantasy Land
Politics isn't about reality, it is peurile struggles between interest groups. IN the debate over global climate change, there is a yawning gap that needs to be bridged. The gap is not between environmentalists and industrialists, or between Democrats and Republicans. It is between policy wonks and political consultants. Among policy wonks like me, there is a broad consensus. The scientists tell us that world temperatures are rising because humans are emitting carbon into the atmosphere. Basic economics tells us that when you tax something, you normally get less of it. So if we want to reduce global emissions of carbon, we need a global carbon tax. Q.E.D. The idea of using taxes to fix problems, rather than merely raise government revenue, has a long history. The British economist Arthur Pigou advocated such corrective taxes to deal with pollution in the early 20th century. In his honor, economics textbooks now call them “Pigovian taxes.” Neither taxes nor trading systems...
August 11, 2007
Semi-Sensible
A fatal flaw for the biorefinery concept, discussed a bit in Boutique Fuels, is that to produce significant quantities of fuel would require huge amounts of space, and that space is premium space that has more important tasks to do. There are other flaws. Chief among them is that the processes are inefficient. That can be improved. “Critics of corn ethanol like to say the process isn’t very efficient,” Mr. Brown said. “Part of that is because your products aren’t just fuel.” Finding other high-value applications, he added, lets producers “justly say, this is not a waste stream; it adds to the profitability of the plant.“ Back in Peoria, Mr. Vaughn is also looking at making products from distillers’ dry grain, including another biofuel. The grain is more than 10 percent oil, and one ton of it can yield 30 gallons of biodiesel. Interest in the biorefinery model is not limited to research scientists and start-up companies. Archer Daniels...
June 14, 2007
Chemistry . . .
is starting to get interesting. Glucose, in plant starch and cellulose, is nature’s most abundant sugar. “But getting a commercially viable yield of HMF [hydroxymethylfurfural, a promising surrogate for petroleum-based chemicals] from glucose has been very challenging,” Zhang said. “In addition to low yield until now, we always generate many different byproducts,” including levulinic acid, making product purification expensive and uncompetitive with petroleum-based chemicals. . . The solvent, called an ionic liquid, enabled the metal chlorides to convert the sugars to HMF. Ionic liquids provide an additional benefit: It is reusable, thus produces none of the wastewater in other methods that convert fructose to HMF. Metal chlorides belong to a class of ionic-liquid-soluble materials called halides, which “in general work well for converting fructose to HMF,” Zhang said — but not so well when glucose is the initial stock. In fact, attempts at direct glucose conversion created so many impurities that it was simpler to start with the fructose,...
May 22, 2007
Better Biofuel
OK, ethanol sucks, but there may be a better way to use all that corn and cane. Using synthetic biology approaches, Zhang and colleagues Barbara R. Evans and Jonathan R. Mielenz of ORNL and Robert C. Hopkins and Michael W.W. Adams of the University of Georgia are using a combination of 13 enzymes never found together in nature to completely convert polysaccharides (C6H10O5) and water into hydrogen when and where that form of energy is needed. . . Polysaccharides like starch and cellulose are used by plants for energy storage and building blocks and are very stable until exposed to enzymes. Just add enzymes to a mixture of starch and water and "the enzymes use the energy in the starch to break up water into only carbon dioxide and hydrogen,"Zhang said. A membrane bleeds off the carbon dioxide and the hydrogen is used by the fuel cell to create electricity. Water, a product of that fuel cell process, will...
May 20, 2007
Biofuel Offsets
Lars Smith makes an interesting point. The demand for biofuels is driving the destruction of forests and the emission of greenhouse gasses. . . If CO2 offsets make sense in aviation (a rather large “if”), then people who use biofuels in their cars should buy offsets to make up for the CO2 emission caused by the deforestation taking place when biofuel plantations are established. This is, as Lars notes, absurd. All of the convoluted carbon wheezes - subsidies, mandates, credits, taxes etc. - are making things worse. Lars has a better idea. A sensible first step would be to get rid off all subsidies for biofuels....
May 04, 2007
Cheaper Solar
No deposit, no return. UNSW researchers have devised a way to deposit a thin film of silver (about 10 nanometres thick) onto a solar cell surface and then heat it to 200° Celsius. This breaks the film into tiny 100-nanometre "islands" of silver that boost the cell’s light trapping ability, thereby boosting its efficiency. . . "Most thin-film solar cells are between eight and 10 percent efficient," says Dr Kylie Catchpole, a co-author of the study, "but the new technique could increase efficiency to between 13 and 15 percent." . . . [R]esearchers . . . have reported a 16-fold enhancement in light absorption in 1.25-micron thin-film cells for light with a wavelength of 1050 nm. They have also reported a seven-fold enhancement in light absorption in the more expensive wafer type cells light wavelengths of 1200 nm. Though this is a solar energy story I was struck by the nano nano aspect. It seems that we continue to...
March 31, 2007
Hot Rocks
Lars Smith wonders: Is geothermal energy the next big thing? On Iceland, an investment fund, Geysir Green Energy, was recently established with an initial $100 million investment for the purposes of investing in geothermal energy. Given Iceland’s experience in this field, this can been seen as an initial step towards commercializing Icelandic experience and technology worldwide, e.g. that of the company Enex. Other companies in this field, Calpine Corporation Ormat Technologies It isn't clear if the technologies will be adopted with enthusiasm since money often flows to projects that are subsidized whether they make any sense or not without subsidies. Geothermal makes sense, but may not capture political minds and hearts. I think it will eventually come into its own, but perhaps not soon. See Heat Mining for some discussion of recent work on enhanced geothermal systems (EGS)....
March 17, 2007
ABCs
For several years now there have been some who have noted the consequences of development in the world's large population centers such as China, India and Indonesia. Their spew, especially particulates and aerosols, has been changing the climate and weather patterns in the southern hemisphere. By affecting insolation the rain patterns are changed, and there are global implications. More than three-quarters of the particulate pollution known as black carbon transported at high altitudes over the West Coast during spring is from Asian sources, according to a research team led by Professor V. Ramanathan at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego. I poached this link from Randall who sums up. The Kyoto Accord and similar climate change agreements will not accomplish much as long as the fossil fuels are cheaper than non-fossil fuel energy sources. The Asian economic juggernaut is radically reshaping the old world order where the United States and Europe were the two biggest users of energy...
March 04, 2007
Simon Says
People are ingenious. They seem to have a real knack for finding and making stuff. Within the last decade, technology advances have made it possible to unlock more oil from old fields, and, at the same time, higher oil prices have made it economical for companies to go after reserves that are harder to reach. With plenty of oil still left in familiar locations, forecasts that the world’s reserves are drying out have given way to predictions that more oil can be found than ever before. In a wide-ranging study published in 2000, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that ultimately recoverable resources of conventional oil totaled about 3.3 trillion barrels, of which a third has already been produced. More recently, Cambridge Energy Research Associates, an energy consultant, estimated that the total base of recoverable oil was 4.8 trillion barrels. That higher estimate — which Cambridge Energy says is likely to grow — reflects how new technology can tap into...
February 21, 2007
Cobbled Together
I can imagine several circular systems using this technology. Using corncob waste as a starting material, researchers have created carbon briquettes with complex nanopores capable of storing natural gas at an unprecedented density of 180 times their own volume and at one seventh the pressure of conventional natural gas tanks. . . The briquettes are the first technology to meet the 180 to 1 storage to volume target set by the U.S. Department of Energy in 2000 . . . Standard natural gas storage systems use high-pressure natural gas that has been compressed to a pressure of 3600 pounds per square inch and bulky tanks that can take up the space of an entire car trunk. The carbon briquettes contain networks of pores and channels that can hold methane at a high density without the cost of extreme compression, ultimately storing the fuel at a pressure of only 500 pounds per square inch, the pressure found in natural gas...
January 24, 2007
Real Reality
Understanding how democracies really function, and the constraints this imposes on grand schemes, was discussed a bit in Staying Alive. This is the problem with the current enthusiasm for Pigou taxes. As Don Boudreaux said last month: Even if global warming is a reality, another reality -- one with a much more consistent track record throughout history and across different countries -- is the perversity of political incentives. Given these perverse political incentives (not to mention the inevitable scrawniness of government's access to information and knowledge), I don't trust government to impose and administer a Pigouvian tax with sufficient disinterestedness and skill to make such a tax a plausible policy option. After the recent SOTU and the expected increased convolution of regulation, Greg Mankiw, the grand high Pigouvian, asks: . . . if this tangle of regulation is the alternative, isn't it time for them to reconsider? Boudreaux once again clarifies the issue. I'd be happy to replace all...
January 24, 2007
Shades of Grey
You might be thinking about ethanol again today since it is being hotly pursued by power and money, even more so than yesterday. Tiffany Groode sets us straight. Using a technique called life cycle analysis, she looked at energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions associated with all the steps in making and using ethanol, from growing the crop to converting it into ethanol. She limited energy sources to fossil fuels. Finally, she accounted for the different energy contents of gasoline and ethanol. Pure ethanol carries 30 percent less energy per gallon, so more is needed to travel a given distance. While most studies follow those guidelines, Groode added one more feature: She incorporated the uncertainty associated with the values of many of the inputs. Following a methodology developed by recent MIT graduate Jeremy Johnson (Ph.D. 2006), she used not just one value for each key variable (such as the amount of fertilizer required), but rather a range of values...
January 24, 2007
Heat Mining
We're sitting on a lot of energy. A comprehensive new MIT-led study of the potential for geothermal energy within the United States has found that mining the huge amounts of heat that reside as stored thermal energy in the Earth's hard rock crust could supply a substantial portion of the electricity the United States will need in the future, probably at competitive prices and with minimal environmental impact. . . The study shows that drilling several wells to reach hot rock and connecting them to a fractured rock region that has been stimulated to let water flow through it creates a heat-exchanger that can produce large amounts of hot water or steam to run electric generators at the surface. Unlike conventional fossil-fuel power plants that burn coal, natural gas or oil, no fuel would be required. And unlike wind and solar systems, a geothermal plant works night and day, offering a non-interruptible source of electric power. . . Toksöz...
December 06, 2006
Moon Struck
First, go to the moon. NASA is betting on the Moon after the agency announced last night its plans to build a permanent lunar base—one that may be used to prepare a manned trip to Mars. Despite a lack of resource-stocked ice sheets at the Moon's top and bottom, NASA hopes to send manned missions by 2020 to the the open-sourced outpost at one of the lunar poles, where the base can harness increased sunlight. . . “The agency is betting that on the Moon, we’ll find not only scientific but economic opportunity: extracting water from lunar ice for rocket fuel, even processing lunar dirt to find oxygen to breathe,” says Jones. “The big question is: Can we locate those resources and get at them in time to show there is a payoff waiting on the Moon? Proving the answer is ‘yes’ is the key to staying on the Moon once we go back.” Well, how about helium-3? Researchers...
November 28, 2006
Winterlude
The days are short and temperatures have dropped. It almost freezes at night now. I know that's not very impressive for those in colder climes, but it makes life harder. I'm not a big weather wimp, but it finally broke me down. I lit a fire in the wood stove this morning, the only source of heat. It was a revelation. I had forgotten the simple pleasure of radiant heat, the contrast of facing a heat source, being warm on the front and cold on the back, making the heat all the more precious for its obvious scarcity. It gave me an unexpected and arguably unjustifiable sense of well being. Even the smell of dust burning off the stove as the iron heated up seemed comforting. It isn't that it is a good smell, it's that it's friendly. I know that by spring I will be far more than tired of it, and that there will be exasperating times...
September 19, 2006
Fertilizer Engine
We've heard lots about fertilizer bombs since the federal building in OK city blew up, but not so much about fertilizer as a fuel for internal combustion engines. Hydrogen Engine Center will work together with Sawtelle & Rosprim to design and build the world’s first Ammonia-Fueled Irrigation Pump System . . . Plans include integrating HEC’s ammonia-powered engines with Sawtelle’s pump technologies and expertise . . . Ammonia (NH3), also known as anhydrous ammonia, which the agricultural industry has relied on as a fertilizer for many years, contains no carbon, stores like propane and is the second most prevalent chemical in the world. Ammonia contains more hydrogen per cubic foot than liquid H2. . . An infrastructure for ammonia is already in place, as transporting and storing the fuel is much like that of propane. Usage and safety regulations for ammonia are already in place, therefore, the process of obtaining a permit to use ammonia is usually relatively simple....
July 15, 2006
More Anti-Corn
Add this study to the ones cited in the previous post. American imports of oil could be eliminated by 2030, a new study by an interstate consortium asserts, if the nation turns to an aggressive program of energy efficiency and commercialization of four already-demonstrated technologies for making transportation fuels. . . But for the strategy to work, the study said, an expansive investment of private funds would be required, with encouragement from “appropriate fiscal, regulatory, and institutional support mechanisms” for 20 years. The study also suggested that the current push to produce ethanol from corn as a fuel supplement is largely misplaced. "Encouragement"? Subsidies, mandates and regulations in other words. We would be wise to eliminate such encouragement in order for more sensible decisions to be made about energy, but businesses would have to have confidence that the "encouragement" would not be resumed at some point, so that they could formulate long term plans and make investments that would...
July 15, 2006
STFU
Pseudo-environmentalists and other dingy greenish confused types get tetchy when you point out that their ideas are nonsense. It has become dead common to see posts insisting that critics stop criticizing lame ideas. University of Minnesota researchers published a paper saying that "even if every acre of corn were used for ethanol, it would only create 12 percent of the ethanol needed for U.S. motoring fuel. Researchers at Magleve Research Center of the Polytechnic University of New York wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post that went even further, stating that even if all U.S. farmland were used to produce ethanol, we couldn't produce enough fuel for transportation. . . Instead of wasting your keystrokes slamming biofuel for not being panacea, talk about the other solutions to the problem -- conservation through increased use of mass transportation, better fuel efficiency, other alternative fuels (Fischer-Tropsch diesel, tar sands oil), and possibly producing hydrogen from renewable resources. No answer is complete,...
July 12, 2006
Cool Power
This won't be cheap, easy or quick but it's an exceedingly interesting idea. Cryogenic, superconducting conduits could be connected into a "SuperGrid" that would simultaneously deliver electrical power and hydrogen fuel. . . A five-gigawatt Super-Cable is certainly technically feasible. Its scale would rival the 3.1-gigawatt Pacific Intertie, an existing 500-kilovolt DC overhead line that moves power between northern Oregon and southern California. Just four Super-Cables would provide sufficient capacity to transmit all the power generated by the giant Three Gorges Dam hydroelectric facility in China. Because a Super-Cable would use hydrogen as its cryogenic coolant, it would transport energy in chemical as well as electrical form. Next-generation nuclear plants can produce either electricity or hydrogen with almost equal thermal efficiency. So the operators of nuclear clusters could continually adjust the proportions of electricity and "hydricity" that they pump into the Super-Grid to keep up with the electricity demand while maintaining a flow of hydrogen sufficient to keep the...
July 06, 2006
Bio-Fuelish, Again
Last year, and many times before, I took issue with the idea of bio-fuels. Several posts (see Lose-Lose for a recent one) have excoriated bio-fuels since they are produced from crops, adding more pressure to an already troubled world agricultural system that must double its production in the next few decades to feed a couple of billion more people and raise the nutrition of a billion food insecure people already here. The continuing degradation of environments from industrial agriculture and the biodiversity losses from expansion make it pretty clear that "dirt burning", as bio-fuel use is sometimes called, is self-punking. This cure for the various symptoms of fossil fuel use is as bad or worse than the disease. That was far too gentle. . . . as we've looked at biofuels more closely, we've concluded that they're not a practical long-term solution to our need for transport fuels. Even if all of the 300 million acres (500,000 square miles)...
July 04, 2006
Waste Not
The idea of regulating behavior, either with blue laws or taxes, just seems dumb. Looking at the activity from a broader perspective often reveals opportunities for increased benefits. When you are concerned about a negative consequence of a behavior, look for those opportunities rather than reaching for the hammer to force behavior change. You'll get willing cooperation rather than surly resistance. The coal in the ground in Illinois alone has more energy than all the oil in Saudi Arabia. The technology to turn that coal into fuel for cars, homes and factories is proven. And at current prices, that process could be at the vanguard of a big, new industry. . . But there is a big catch. Producing fuels from coal generates far more carbon dioxide, which contributes to global warming, than producing vehicle fuel from oil or using ordinary natural gas. And the projects now moving forward have no incentive to capture carbon dioxide beyond the limited...
June 25, 2006
Bag Brides
A newly important part of the a-maize-ing story is ethanol subsidies. [Insert usual subsidies rant] It's been somewhat amusing to see many of the old critics go buns up for ethanol given that it makes no difference to the environment or the economy if the maize subsidies end up feeding pigs or making ethanol. Some main stream push back has begun. A few agricultural economists and food industry executives are quietly worrying that ethanol, at its current pace of development, could strain food supplies, raise costs for the livestock industry and force the use of marginal farmland in the search for ever more acres to plant corn. "This is a bit like a gold rush," warned Warren R. Staley, the chief executive of Cargill, the multinational agricultural company based in Minnesota. "There are unintended consequences of this euphoria to expand ethanol production at this pace that people are not considering." Mr. Staley has his own reasons to worry, because...
June 12, 2006
Nuclear Madness
One of the starkest examples of the foolishness of climate poseurs is their wheezing opposition to nuclear power. It is arguable that to some extent anti-nuclear ideologues created the climate problems we have by derailing scientific and social progress on energy generation for decades. But it isn't just climate impacts that were exacerbated by this muddle headed opposition since the environmental impacts of fossil fuel reliance are legion. Continuing opposition to nuclear power at this late date is intellectually dishonest. The two most frequent issues cited - and lied about - are waste disposal and fuel aqusition. First waste disposal. "There are engineering questions about the massive storage repository proposed for the Nevada desert. Certainty about its ability to keep groundwater supplies safe falls off after about 10,000 years—while the facility needs to function as planned for several hundred thousands of years." The quote is from an interesting article on global warming and ways of dealing with it in...
May 31, 2006
A Miracle
I once saw a cartoon, perhaps a Larson, with an older man in a white lab coat at a chalkboard explaining a long equation with many terms, pointing at a section of the (nonsense) equation. The caption read "And then a miracle occurs". It often seems that there are many white coated folks who expect miracles. Ecosystems containing many different plant species are not only more productive, they are also better able to withstand and recover from climate extremes, pests and disease over long periods of time. . . "This is exciting because it shows that biodiversity can be used to produce a sustainable supply of biomass for biofuels," Tilman says. Gee, that's all there is to it? Fertility, moisture and all that don't matter? Biodiversity of global ecosystems has decreased as global population has increased because diverse ecosystems such as forests and prairies have been cleared to make way for agricultural fields planted with monocultures, buildings and roads....
March 31, 2006
Fire Down Below
I'm fascinated by odd-ball energy systems; geothermal, gravitational, and even nuclear though it is well developed in some places and seems poised for a comeback from a prematurely presumed death. The focus on solar energy in all its forms - everything from fossil fuels to bio-fuels as well as wind and PV - neglects some massive pools of energy that seem almost available. Some recent news about geothermal energy caught my eye. Some 90% of all homes in Iceland are heated by geothermal energy; and a number of power stations are also producing electricity from steam at around 240C, extracted from boreholes between 600 and 1,000m deep. But now, the plan is to go much deeper. Omar Friedleifsson of the Iceland Geosurvey is leading the consortium of energy companies in the Iceland Deep Drilling Project. Last year, they drilled down to a depth of 3,082m and since then have been conducting flow tests. Later this year, they will put...
March 15, 2006
Bridge to Nowhere
One of the stories wind power sceptics love to tell is about how Germany invested so much in wind without considering how to get the power from remote sites to consumers. When the dust settled Germany had spent so much on power transmission infrastructure that it would have been cheaper to burn their abundant coal and plant trees to reduce GHGs. This isn't a unique situation, it is common. Some entrepreneurs have made a proposal to address it. Last month a Dublin-based wind-farm developer, Airtricity, and Swiss engineering giant ABB began promoting a bold solution to the continent's power grid bottlenecks: a European subsea supergrid running from Spain to the Baltic Sea, in which high-voltage DC power lines link national grids and deliver power from offshore wind farms. When the wind is blowing over a wind farm on the supergrid, the neighboring cables would carry its power where most needed. When the farms are still, the cables will serve...
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