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Guest Post: The Scientific Challenges To Replacing Oil With Renewables
So, assuming the Peak Oil camp is on to something, what's the likelihood for a disruption-free transition to another energy source that can replace the energy output we currently enjoy from oil? There's no shortage of promising claims from new laboratory experiments, and there is a lot of optimism in political and entrepreneurial circles that renewable, alternative forms of energy (wind, solar, biofuels, etc) may be able to fill the "energy gap" in time. How realistic are these hopes?
Not very, says Robert Rapier, energy specialist and Chief Technology Officer of Merica International.
The problem is one of return on invested energy. It is extremely difficult to create fuels with the same energy-density Nature has concocted over thousands of millennia without using up as much (or more) energy in the process.
When you think about what oil is then you understand why these biofuels companies have a tough time of making it work. I mean, oil is accumulation of millions of years of biomass that has accumulated. Nature has applied the pressure, it’s applied the heat and it has cooked these into very energy-dense hydrocarbons. Now, what we are trying to do in real time is speed all this up. Somebody has to plant the biomass, somebody has to grow the biomass where nature did it in the first place. We have to transport it, we have to bring it into a factory, we have to get it in that form, we have to convert it from biomass into some fuel. We are adding energy and labor inputs all along and then finally we get a fuel out of the back end.
A lot of the time, a lot of these so-called biofuels are very heavily dependent on fossil fuels to begin with. So for some of them it is not even clear that they would be viable if you took the fossil fuels out of the process. When you think about all the labor and energy that goes into making a biofuel from an annual crop it becomes apparent why oil has been the dominant fuel for the last 150 years. It is much easier to go poke a hole in the ground and get that oil out of the ground than it is to go through all the labor of actually producing the fuel. So companies are competing against that.
On top of this, false hope and confusion is frequently created in the marketplace by new companies announcing "breakthroughs" that may indeed work in optimal laboratory environments, but just simply don't under real-world conditions, at scale:
The scale-up issue is the most important issue because in my experience, most technologies get wiped out as they go up in scale. So something you may be able to do in a lab, 90% of those lab ideas don’t work and only 10% will go on to make a pilot plan. And for lab experiments there are going to be all kinds of things: your catalyst didn’t work; your actual process didn’t work....
Let’s say your process did work in a lab. In the lab you are doing all kinds of things that are different than what you would do at a larger scale. Your waste products may not be a problem, you may have a small amount of bi-product that can be thrown away. Lab equipment is smaller and so the heat transfer in that lab equipment is very different than it is as you scale up. The example I give a lot is: think of a turkey. We are coming up on Thanksgiving. If you are cooking one turkey and you imagine an oven with the heating elements on the sides, that is simply one factor and not everybody gets that right: the turkey is too dry, it’s overdone, it’s not cooked enough.
Now imagine taking that turkey and scaling it up to cook, say 1,000 turkeys an hour. You can imagine that the issues there are very, very different than they would be in a smaller oven. You maybe have turkeys in the middle that would still be cold while the turkeys on the outside are burnt to a crisp. So you are trying to get an even heating distribution across this larger oven and it is the same as a reactor. As the reactor goes from lab scale up to larger scale, as you get heat differences and temperature differences inside that reactor you can make different products, different byproducts, more things that you didn’t want to make or not as much of the thing that you did want to make.
And some companies will skip those steps. As you skip the steps, if you think about it – most technologies get knocked out at each step. So normally a company would go from lab scale to pilot scale to demonstration scale to a commercial scale. If somebody is jumping over steps they are greatly reducing the risk or their chance of success...
That will be the case with most of the biofuel companies out there making promises. They get out there; they will build their pilot plant. They will discover that things don’t work as they thought they would and then they will close down.
While it is critical we invest our current resources to finding solutions to the approaching energy gap, it's also essential we approach the situation realistically and with as little magical thinking as possible. Currently, the US is consuming 10 million barrels per day more than it produces domestically. For perspective, our best ethanol refineries can produce around 4,000 barrels per day (at a much lower EROEI). And if we decided tomorrow to begin converting our transportation fleet to full-electric vehicles (i.e. away from liquid fuels), it would realistically take somewhere between 30-50 years to fully build out the infrastructure and retire the combustion-engine vehicles. The short of it is there is going to be no single fuel source that replaces oil, and the transition to a post-Peak Oil future is going to involve a period of "less energy" for society for an undetermined period of time.
I think that we hope and we believe that our energy predicament can be solved by technology. We have seen technological advancement in so many different fields and we expect this is what we are going to see in the energy field. If you look at where computers have come over the last 30 years we expect that to happen with our energy production that the whole society is going to be running off of solar and wind power going forward. I sometimes say there is not always a neat solution to every problem.
We have still got the common cold. It is still with us. That has not been cured despite it being around forever. So not all problems can be solved easily. And the energy problem is one that is not going to be solved easily in my opinion. Our society has grown up on something that was rich, abundant, and pretty easy to get to. We are trying to replace that with something that the energy required to get it and process it and produce it is a lot higher than the energy required to process oil.
There is not going to be one thing that replaces oil. I think there are going to be a lot of different things and, more importantly, I think it is going to take a lot less oil than we are using now. The good news is we have dropped a million and a half barrels a day over the last five years. The bad news is a lot of that is because of the recession; it shows we do have some capacity to reduce our oil consumption. There is still a lot of low hanging fruit in my view. It is going to be painful as we scale down and some of the alternatives are going to have to meet somewhere -- at some level higher than they are today and at some level of oil consumption lower than we are today -- those will have to meet.
Click the play button below to listen to Chris' interview with Robert Rapier (runtime 52m:46s):
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Every human being: 7 billion-ish.
Space in Texas: 269,000 square miles-ish.
So. Greater than 26,000 people per square mile...
In other words, each person would have about 1,000 square feet of space. This assumes there is only human beings and no plants, animals, water, buildings, etc.
Sounds like paradise...
I think you Malthusians missed his point.
You've forgotten that you can build vertically.
does E<>gh in Texas? Are the fucking laws of physics suspended on your stovetop?
Just because you can cram large amounts of people into Texas doesn't speak of the amount of land required to feed, cloth, and house them. Not to mention maintaining the luxurious standard of living that everyone in the developed world has grown accustomed to. Don't forget that just 300 years ago sugar, chocolate, aluminum, salt, and thousands of other products were luxuries reserved only for the kings, barons, and lords. Compare our lifestyle to the average human 300 years ago, and you'll realize fossil fuels have allowed us all to be quite literally richer than kings.
As another poster mentioned overpopulation isn't about saturating landmass with people its about the carrying capacity of the planet, which can be measured by soil erosion, overfishing, anoxic zones in the ocean, coral bleaching, species extinction, loewr grade ores for all resources, peak oil, increasing global unrest, deforestation, etc.
>> just 300 years ago sugar, chocolate, aluminum, salt, and thousands of other products were luxuries reserved only for the kings, barons, and lords.
I agree with most of your post but I have to point out salt has been a staple of the common man for quite some time. Although not common, sugar and chocolate were also available to non royalty.
ah, the good ol' days
The problem with the jmc's of the world is that at a time when we have a crisis approaching he is off spouting some dumbass factoid he read on yahoo news with no context and peole that for some reason believe what he says will in return, spout this bullshit and on and on...
If you don't copy and paste this as your status then you will become as stupid as JMC8888, and turn into a frog.
stupidest thing ever said. You can't divide square miles by people and come up with "comfortable."
My hair is a good source of oil!
Yes, E-cat seems to be the one recent potential game changing energy breakthrough that nobody seems to know about. They are sort of calling it a Cold Fusion breakthrough but there are still unawnsered questions surrounding it. If it is what they claim it to be, it could be one of the Holy Grail oil replacements paving the way for very cheap electricity resulting in electricity taking over as the power of choice for everything from home heating to transportation.
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Andrea_A._Rossi_Cold_Fusion_Gener...
http://www.e-catworld.com/
E-cat is almost certainly a fraud created only to bilk gullible investors. I wouldn't give it too much thought.
What does the earth's largest energy distribution network do every night? It slows to less than 50% capacity. They have to shunt electricity. What can you use to generate electricty? Everything. Anything. From Tesla's Wardenclyffe tower to browns gas to geothermal to cold fusion. On and on and on with suppressed generating technologies. And the infrastructure to distribute it already in place. Yeah oil will run out some day but keeping us dependant on oil reserves that are larger than the earths entire gross worth is the name of the game. "Peak oil" is to oil dependancy as TBTF is to banking. A mind fuck.
But you have to take heart in the fact that some visionary men maneuvered TPTB into installing a grid that will eventually be their demise. When (not if) the secrets of electricity are revealed to all, life will instantly change. THEY want to forestall it because they think it will be damaging to the human spirit. As Gandhi said the only true sin is wealth without work. Man needs to be in a different place before juice is free, or a litter of 20+ no-necked crotchfruit will be the norm.
Tesla's revenge. The ancient TPTB fucked with him, he then invented the over land power grid as a lark, TPTB adopts an overly complex system without having the will power or the brains to review the proposed infrastructure. Here we are 100 years later losing 30% of the electrical load to the infrastructure itself with massive loss in transmission of the electricity because it looked cheaper.
I've often suspected that Thomas Midgely Jr. was another one of the "fuck you world" engineers. He invented CFC's and Leaded gasoline and would go on tours to illustrate how safe and useful both technologies were. From the 1940's until...well currently, we are still using both these nasty pieces of work across the planet.
There are around 8 other inventions most of you are using right now that are more dangerous than anything Midgely ever invented. For the sake of my curiousity I'm going to shut my mouth as I've been studying the effects of them for the better half of 15 years as a hobby after bumping into secondary studies on them. And no I'm not watching cell phones or wireless routers. They are slightly more mundane than that, 90% of you used one of the technologies this week. The other seven maybe once every couple of weeks. All I can say is the results are very interesting.
Whatever happened to the nuclear strike you were runing around yelling about a couple months back CPL?
The most dangerous thing on earth stares at each one of us every morning.
Our wives?
uh...dipshit...OTHER ENGINEERS used leaded gas because it WORKED.
It solved valve wear issues and increased octane.
EVERYTHING is a conspiracy in you morons' minds and nobody apparently could EVER figure out the stupidity of these inventions, huh?
grid losses are 7%.
Even 50KVA transformers are better than 98.5% efficient these days.
And the infrastructure to distribute it already in place.
Sorry, it's really old and poorly maintained.
Recycling fuel from nuclear weapons and building Toshiba 4S, 10/50 MW like smallish scale, automated, assembly line like nuclear reactors is one possible way. Those are similar to nuclear submarines reactors, relatively easy to control unlike mammoth 1500 MW giants. That is about 12000 Airbus 380s at full power at cruising altitude (125 kW each). The scale is truly off the charts with those giants.
125 * 1.4 = 175 HP. I doubt an Airbus 380 runs on 175 Horsepower. Also, Plutonium is extremely dangerous.
What would you do, make ultracapacitor powered airplanes with nuclear powered charging stations at each airport?
Those 4 engines on an A-380 generate a lot more than 125KW at full power. 125KW is only 167 horsepower, about what a (single engine) Cessna 172 has.
Slight miscalculation :) 188 MW together. So 8 Airbusses. (Each of the 70 high pressure turbine blades in a Trent 900 produces about 900hp (670 kw)).
1200 airbuses vs 8?
Slight miscalc?
Economist?
There is no control of fission, the argument is specious.
How many nuke plants would we need to keep up with energy demand right now? Thanks for playing.
"Assuming the 'peak oil' crowd is on to something..."
Well that's about as PC as one can stand. There IS a finite amount of oil and we are likely passed peak production. Oil will be much more expensive going forward, count on it. Hell, the price might even surpass bottled water, but that's a whole other issue... sarcasm off.
I used to believe that too until I met a Russian scientist who showed me how the Earth continues to make oil. His information (and the info from many others like him) has yet to be debunked. It's not dead dinosaurs we're driving.
Its the rate that the earth makes the oil. That rate is not likly to be increased anytime soon.
Only one question: At what rate? If the regeneration rate is so slow as to be meaningless (my contention) then it's meaningless.
I think methanogenic production of oil is pretty much a given - algae based oil production is simply doing using boilers and a lot of genetically modified algae what non-modified algae does, and there is almost certainly a layer of methanogenic "scum" probably 10-20 miles down that produces hydrocarbon wastes. The problem is energy investment and time. Most of the oil in the US came from the mid-Jurrasic, when you had warm shallow freshwater seas that covered much of North America that were the ideal breeding ground for algae. Most of the coal came from the early Triassic when the same conditions applied - it's just had longer to cook. No doubt that the Gulf of Mexico right now is doing the same thing, as algae produced on the surface dies, falls to the ocean floor, then gets covered by other algae and silicate. If the GOM becomes landlocked (say in 30-50 million years) and evaporates, then it too will have even more oil in it than it does now.
The problem is that you're talking about millions of years of direct applied sunlight, gradually heavier overlaying layers converting kinetic energy (pressure) into heat. That's free energy (lots of it) that, to replicate in existing systems, requires that we provide ourselves. At an EROEI of 100/1, Pennsylvania crude in 1880 was a great bargain. At an EROEI of 1/1, not so much.
I'm somewhat skeptical about global warming, but I have very little doubt about peak oil, and if in fact peak oil IS an issue, then global warming won't be.
Youre Russian friend sounds like a fucking retard. Youre right its not dinosaurs..its plankton..jesus fucking christ. These kind of comments are why I cant take any financial advice from most on this blog.
Plankton well it all makes sence now, thanks worker bee , maybe it was plankton eating mutant whales, or plankton eating dinosaurs.
I have read about this as well. There seems to have been a cluster of articles on this a few years back. So far I haven't heard anything disproving this, but does make sense that the location of some of these oil reserves are simply too deep to come from biomass. Thinking about it though, how silly for us to think that oil is from decomposing t-rex(es?).
Seems some on this board are sure that abiotic or other mantle produced oil must be a myth, and if not, the flow of any new oil produced from the earth is not significant enough to force them out of confirmation-bias mode of thinking.
Tough to know the real facts when there's so much money at play....
Wow! this again. You have not read very much if you've not found something that debunks it.
I'll just leave this here...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghhgUmGBjX8&feature=player_embedded
and some food for thought..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tr2fzgiIegg
I'm glad to hear this company is going to spend years paying hundreds of scientists to develop these technologies, and then manufacture them, and then deliver and install them for me, at no charge to me at all. That's fantastic!
Sorry, just a thing I have with people using the word "free", particularly with regards to energy. Looks like some promising stuff, but I'd like to see numbers.
Read: The Eco Technic Future
Anyone interested in a historically-rooted, wonderful read and thought experiment on this very topic needs to either get the book-on-tape or the book, The Ecotechnic Future. It talks about the transition from Peak Oil to an ecologically sound but technological future and the demands of the transition.
I guess the real question is, do our leaders want us to have cheap and plentiful energy? Wasn't it Henry Kissinger who was quoted as saying:
"If you control the oil you control the country; if you control food, you control the population".
US energy policy since 2000 has been flexible: burn more oil faster.
Monster SUVs became legal to drive with low mileage profiles as 'trucks', even though they were really passenger cars. Burn, baby, burn. Cardboard McMansions with huge unused space and big windows built in energy friendly locations: deserts, mountain tops, snow country. And lastly but perhaps mostly: Armed services drinking oceans of fuel without any regard for efficiency to float monster carriers and their groups, air-conditioned tents in the desert, and monster SUVs moving cans of Coors in 120 degree heat.
US energy policy since 2000 has been flexible: burn more oil faster.
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
No. The US has triggered the consumption game way before the 2000s.
US citizenism is all about consuming faster to reach depletion first.
US citizenism is all about putting an end to the age of abundancy so that the good old days of scarcity are back.
Such is the path taken in this US driven world.
That's right. I was just commenting on policy since 2000. In the 1970s after the first oil shock there was an attempt to conserve: a national speed limit, thermostat temperature limits (which people and businesses followed), fuel efficient cars and re-insulating buildings.
The slanted roof of Citigroup Center in New York City is a lasting symbol of all that went wrong: it was supposed to be for future solar panels, in the spirit of that time. The building was completed in 1977. Here we are 35 years later. US energy policy joined US economic policy in ignoring facts, building a delusion and going boldly in the opposite direction
>> after the first oil shock there was an attempt to conserve: a national speed limit, thermostat temperature limits (which people and businesses followed), fuel efficient cars and re-insulating buildings.
And they've been cursing Jimmy Cartter roundly every since. It is oh so ironic that if we'd taken some of Carter's humility to heart as a nation we'd still be the greatest nation on earth. We're still close, except instead of the greatest, we're the greediest.
I put geothermal and solar on my 3500 sq. ft. house. Electric bill $16.00 last month and no gas bill. Heating the house in Minnesota that cheap. Best investment ever!
Im MN too, but I live close to the metro area. Hate to make the investment and then have to leave the house in the event the SHTF. Otherwise, I'd do the same thing. Geothermal, with enough solar to run the geo if the power goes out.
Good for you.
Some friends in WI put in geothermal when they built their big new super insulated place (soy foam spray on.) They placed high quality insulated windows and solatubes for natural light in strategic places. I rarely turn on a lamp there in the daytime.
No solar yet.
Their utilities bills are about $32 bucks a month for electric. Not sure about their propane usage which they claim is low comapred to neighbors.
Total energy costs could even be even lower if they did some wood heat with a Woodstock soapstone stove and put in a solar hot water.
@ Johnnymustardseed, Beam me up Scotty, flattrader
I very much doubt any of you are using Geothermal energy. Have you drilled a 1000 metre deep hole in your land or do you live in Jellystone?
What you think is a geothermal source of heat is actually solar heating. "The engineering and scientific communities prefer the terms "geoexchange" or "ground source heat pumps" to avoid confusion with traditional geothermal power"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_heat_pump
Wind, solar, biofuels are all worthless crap, that if fully developed, couldn't produce the output necessary for 1920's Earth consumption, without major problems.
Really the only way forward is fusion. That's it. It's possible, but needs to be actually DONE. Decades long development, before implementation, needs to be funded. Our bright minds need to have this as an option, instead of just wall street insurance and statistical scams.
People with solar power on their homes, better be worried about their house catching on fire, because they cause a ton of fires....just in time for fire station reductions, and the fact that many firefighters, don't like to be electrocuted while putting out a fire. All so you can pay 20 years worth of electricity costs, to save a couple undred a month. Big outlay, long time to actually pay off.
Glass-Steagall
"Really the only way forward is fusion."
Fusion may or may not ever be practical but for the period starting ten years from now to 60 years from now the only alternative is probably fission. The safest and most cost effective way of producing fission power is probably in modular pre-fabricated plants in the 100 Mega watt to 250 mega watt size (think nuclear submarine or aircraft carrier power plant).
If we can generate power for $0.10 per kwh all is well.
If the all found cost is $1.00 per kwh we are probably fucked.
Thorium reactors look like a more solvable problem.
We will probably move to thorium but it seems a bit futher out in the future. Uranium based techology is here now.
That's assuming the price of electricity does not rise, as oil goes up and more electric cars are rolled out. As solar panels get cheaper and electricity rates increase, the payoff time rapidly shrinks.
Any source for your claim that solar panels cause "a ton of fires"?
Which oil company do you whore for?
....""People with solar power on their homes, better be worried about their house catching on fire, because they cause a ton of fires....just in time for fire station reductions, and the fact that many firefighters, don't like to be electrocuted while putting out a fire. All so you can pay 20 years worth of electricity costs, to save a couple undred a month. Big outlay, long time to actually pay off. ".....
Electrical fires don't happen on the grid?
Big outlay, long time to recoup. I agree. But I'm making about 14% on my investment AND
My favorite part.........
No power company or government can decide when to turn me off.
Freedom
It is worth every penny.
"No power company or government can decide when to turn me off."
...Until your lose your job because a global economic crash, and your unable to pay your mortgage or the property taxes. Then it all goes bye-bye!
I very much doubt you making 14% on your investment, especially if you include the outlays you made to purchase the equipment, labor, and future costs associated with replacment parts. Batteries, inverters, have a lifespan of about 5 to 7 years. Bought cheap Thin-Film panels? (failure in 10 years or less). Payback on Solar electric systems is 30 years.
Maybe is you stole the equipment you have a much quicker return on your investment.
Lol
I lost my "job" years ago
Built the house with my money, not the banks.
Installed it myself.
Got the 30 year kyocera panels. Magnum inverters.
Cost of electric here in California is crazy high.
Stopped paying about 2500/month for electric
You are right about the batteries .
I got no bone to pick and I'm not selling panels or anything.
High cost of electric here justifies the cost. Probably not everywhere.
And I don't steal. So fuck off.
The problem is not on solar power, it is typically on lithium batteries, lithium and its relatives (sodium being hte worst) burn with... water! yes it does. But new generation solar panel can use Titanium oxide.
The silver/gold market is manipulated, bank assets are manipulated, diamonds has been controlled for ages. What makes you think that oil is not manipulated to the same degree or more. Peak oil is another myth to control price structures. Man made global warming was another made up story that persists. Unfortunately Myth or not doesn't matter since they control the supply and the data for the story. Until you have an alternative there is an effective monopoloy with a cover story of dimishing supplies. Lucky us.
So you believe that by the year 2430, we will be able to extract oil equivelent in mass to the entire planet Earth, every single day, if it wasn't for myths and manipulation? How?
Here is how I got there. Around 2010 we were producing about 75 million barrels of oil per day (some rounding used). From the year ~1870 onwards, global oil production grew steadily at an average of 7 percent.
using the Rule of 72, this means that 72/7 ~= 10 years to double production.
If we keep doubling oil production every 10 years going forwards, by 2430 we end up producing ~329,853,488,332,800 Million barrels per day (330 Sextillion barrels). Each barrel weighs ~139 Kilograms. This gives us a total weight of about 3.43872262 × 1024 KG PER DAY. The planet weighs ~5.9742 × 1024 kilograms.
Peak Theory simply means that any physical thing cannot double in growth forever. If you think this is incorrect, please state why. If you find an error in my math, let me know.
Keep in mind we are talking about conventional oil extracted from the ground. Importing oil from Titan does not count.
Matt we all know that math is controlled by the bankster class to control the movement of logic around your mind. The trilateral commision invented math to obscure the true reality of the universe...bankster whore!
Matt and Worker Bee
1. Math is a Descriptor, NOT Causation. In the human arena, exponentials peak like locusts and then collapse.
2. By the year 2430 we won't be worrying about oil as an energy source anymore than a caveman gathering wood could have conceived of drilling miles into the ground.
"1. Math is a Descriptor, NOT Causation. In the human arena, exponentials peak like locusts and then collapse."
So you agree that global oil production cannot grow at 7 percent per decade forever? You believe that in the real world, exponential growth is finite and ends with a decline?
Congratulations, you agree with Peak Oil Theory.
The greatest shortcoming of the human race is the inability to understand the exponential function.
We worship growth
At 1.3% population growth, in 2400 years human mass would equal the mass of the earth
In 750 years there would be one person per square meter of every bit of dry land mass on the planet.
Please watch video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5iFESMAU58
Dapper Dan
1. See my comments above
2. It is the RATE of population growth that matters. And the rate of growth is falling- look it up. There are far more sources of nightly entertainment than rolling the old girl over in the middle of the night.
Give my regards to Malthus next time you visit.
Kayman
If the rate of population growth is slowing, its a sign we are near the PEAK.
Kayman..Congrats you have said exactly nothing.
dude, it gets better...we're going to extract DOUBLE the mass of the earth from the earth every day in 2440
Payne,
If this was truly a conspiracy of the oil companies don't you think they'd be shouting about peak oil from the rooftops? As it is, it's very hard to get any oil company (or any oil-producing country) to acknowledge that it MIGHT be a problem. The status quo works only if you have a guarantee that all the inputs to that status quo can remain relatively constant, and energy is THE primary input.
Brent Sweet Crude has been hovering well above $100 a barrel now since late 2009, and is to a great extent the real benchmark of global oil prices (WTI can be relatively easily manipulated by opening/closing the strategic petroleum reserves, which is why its value in the market as an indicator is more limited). 85% of the oil now produced is directly controlled by national producers rather than corporate ones, and they in general have NO interest in raising the interest, as their AAA bonds are generally predicated upon their oil reserves as collateral. If the real Saudi numbers were known (I've seen solid estimates that place their oil reservates at perhaps 25% of their stated capacity) then their ability to finance lavish life styles, by expensive military aircraft for protection and create diversions for the masses would evaporate. The same applies elsewhere. Given that corporate oil companies are for the most part now frozen out of direct control of production (they increasingly make their money on processing and/transport), they are also not going to come forward and discuss the elephant in the living room for fear of losing even those contracts.
This means that most of the "Peak Oil" conspiracists that you're talking about are ... hmmm, engineers, oil analysts, geologists, physicists. They aren't going to get money from the Oil Companies for talking about it (indeed, may very well lose grants and the like from those same oil companies if they do) so the ones who are coming forward about it are generally people that are pointing to the very large meteor in the sky and saying that we may just be in trouble here.
Get out of here with your logic and thinkyness!
A whisper campaign is far more effective than the Oil companies using "in-your-face" advertizing with their names plastered on the message.
This "Peak" oil concept is always presented as some sort of Absolutism. Invention will keep ahead of the Bogeyman of Peak Oil. Ask your Mother.
Technofantasy bullshit Kayman..Please enlighten us..what source of energy will replace the 15 trillion watts we currently use? Let me guess.. you dont know but it will be something because the free market will sort it out blah blah blah
How does photosynthesis exhibit coherence under normal conditions?
"Two years ago, researchers led by then-University of California at Berkeley chemist Greg Engel found coherence in the antenna proteins of green sulfur bacteria. But their observations were made at temperatures below minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit, useful for slowing ultrafast quantum activities but leaving open the question of whether coherence operates in everyday conditions.
The Nature findings, made at room temperature in common marine algae, show that it does. Moreover, similar results from an experiment on another, simpler light-harvesting structure, announced by Engel’s group last Thursday on the pre-publication online arXiv, suggest that photosynthetic coherence is routine."
http://tiny.cc/9tf7s
Our MIT engineers should be studying biomimicry and reverse engineering nature rather than creating risk models for hedge funds and creating laser weapons.
In my opinion, this is the "end goal" of technological development, successfully reverse-engineer natural processes (ie. photosynthesis) which took billions of years to develop. In a McKenna / novelty theory sort of way, can we as humans develop in thousands of years what it took nature to do in billions?
Can we learn from nature and apply its lessons?
If we see ourselves as separate and above nature as many "dominator" type world-views do (cough::Christianity::cough) .. we are already lost. The great Carl Sagan had much to say on this topic ...
I've been following this research for a while now - cracking photosynthesis would be huge, but a society where photosynthesis was the primary energy drive would be so radically different from what it is now that it's not really conceivable for most people, and would pretty much spell the end of the dominionist model. If we can stay cohesive as a species for about the next 200 years or so, we may very well be able to enter the photonic age (photosynthesis, optical bio-computing), but it's going to take a while societally to get there.
I love how he takes a huge steamer all over the "renewables will save us" argument first.
http://fora.tv/2011/10/26/Reinventing_the_Leaf_Future_Sources_of_Fuel
Post of the week.
After 18 years of development I have perfected a perpetual motion machine. I need investors to help me put it into production. You seem like the sort of guy who would be willing to invest in a cutting edge product like that. What do you say?
Did you name this a bull market? Cramer is that you?
If you are thinking about chaining the moon to the earth and letting it pull a generator, it wont work. Had that dream a hundred times. It always ends in disaster when the moon slows down and ..... You don't know what it's like to wake up in the middle of a dream thinking you are responsible for killing mankind by dropping the moon on our head. Then you have to launder the sheets. Just saying
What about replacing the IMF with China?
http://www.euractiv.com/europes-east/chinese-central-bank-replace-imf-uk...
Chinese central bank to replace IMF in UkraineUkraine is set to rely on Chinese funds after Kyiv surprisingly announced it was turning away from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to help finance its struggling economy.
The Central Bank of China has offered a credit line to Ukraine, the Ukrainian daily Kommersant reported today (21 November).
Local economies, local food production and walkable communities, thats the solution
The average thunderstorm can power a city for a year. So energy production is all ready takeing place its just storage and distribution. You can even create an obital power station with a nanotube line to the ground that would generate electricity.
There are plenty of solutions that would employ hundreds of millions, its the inital costs that are the problem. Or maybe its the the will and forsight.
Easy to come up with theoretical solutions. Much harder to reproduce them in th real world due to infrastructure. Liquid hydrocarbon has a production, storage, distribution and retail infrastructure that took nearly a century to complete. There are always the dirty details.
Start doing shit more effiecently first, instead of a 1 tonne car, how about a 300kg car, much eariesr to push. Instead of crap that only last 3months how about making stuff that last longer the the attention span of a toddler. I am so sick of crap that breaks, and needs replacing just as the warranty expires. I can't even find anything decent to buy, shiny shit breaks just as fast as the cheaper version. All this break and replace is great for GDP but fuckn crap for my wallet. Im not replacing my 15 year old TV it still works just fine, it has outlasted 3 DVD players, and 4 satalite decoders. No shitty plastic toys with batteries for the kids this year. Unless it's metal or wood and built to last I'm not buying. I refuse to exchange my labour for crap. So much energy is wasted on things with less then a 12month time horizon. That's just another reason we are fucked.
your fuckin 15 yr old TV wastes massive energy
@ Trav You're talking shit. The 15 year old TV has a lower power consumption. Try sticking your hand on top of the air vents on a flat screen TV. Heat heat and more heat. And this doesn't take into account the power consumed to make the TV or even worse, replacing it more often than every 15 years.
CRT 34-37 inch 198.5 Watts
LCD 34-37 inch 211.1 Watts
Plasma 34-37 inch 263.9 Watts
http://www.carbonfootprint.com/energyconsumption.html
Natural Gas is clean, plentiful and an efficient form of energy that can replace petrol based gasoline while also providing energy to homes and business. We can leave oil to the petrol based chemicals and plastics.
Who ever figures out how to make the change of NatGas to oil is going to be the next Rockefeller.
umm. just install natural gas nozzles on your devices
Nat Gas is plentiful at CURRENT levels of consumption, have the current fleet of vehicles and infrastructure somehow swtich over to Nat Gas which alone would be a heroic impossible act, but if you did that, that same plentiful supply dwindles down to a decade or two. Not to mention the meek energy return on invesment in fracking and other "un-conventional" extraction methods.
it isn't clean. It is cleaner than oil, which is cleaner than coal. Welcome to an fracjquake near you.
and dirty water
http://cngcarskits.com/
You're all gonna be serfs and drones in the new world worder anyway so forgeaboudit and party.
Better to burn out than fade away
Prepare for riots in euro collapse, Foreign Office warns
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/8917077/Prepare-for-riots-in-eu...
You can't answer this question without knowing the numbers. These are here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil
I suggest you buy the book referenced in the site. Here are the short answers:
1) What's the likelihood for a disruption-free transition to another energy source that can replace the energy output we currently enjoy from oil?
Short Answer: Slim to none.
Longer Answer: World supply chains for goods and services are dependent on money, oil and each other. Cheap transportation for physical goods, worldwide is critically dependent on ONE power source (i.e. cheap oil). Even continued oil production depends on cheap oil. When oil gets too expensive or too scarce, these supply chains will break. This break may be "permanent" from the point of view of anyone living today.
2) Is this solvable?
Short Answer: Yes
Longer Answer: It won't be solved by purely capitalist societies. Purely capitalist entities like corporations act a lot like bacteria colonies. They respond to the immediate monetary environment (which you need) but often don't think ahead very far, or very well (Lehmans, AIG, Enron). That's what governments are for. China, for all it's horrendous flaws and faults is in a better position to address this because they can override short-term needs for long term gain. A system of purely electric trains that run on hydropower might not make economic sense right now, but will serve admirably in a situation in which petroleum is no longer viable as a fuel source.
Maybe the supply chains will need to get shorter again if transport energy becomes too expensive. Maybe America can even make some of the manufactured goods she used to, eh?
Why isn't America's rail transport system electrified? It seems that a lot of diesel is used unnecessarily.
As energy gets more expensive, people and businesses will find ways to use less. Some of this will come from conservation and some will come from innovation.
Nigel Farage- Unelected puppets of a German-dominated EU (Cavuto, Fox News)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_sYcpSLxWI&feature=player_embedded
The utter lack of understanding on this board is amazing...I always notice in these debates that people that see peak oil coming use quantitative analysis while the deniers use "well something will come along and fix it!" How many ,geoligist,oil experts and otherwise keenly aware and intelligent people have to prove mathematicly that peak oil is happening? This argument has really devolved into a young earth v geology debate...so sad. None of your techofantasy solutions are scalable..period. None of your abiotic bullshit is true...and even if it was, we are still using oil faster than it can be pumped..period. For all of your preperation talk and your buy gold blahblahblah..youve missed the frieght train barreling toward you.
What do you know to judge this board? Having people in my family working as a supplier to ITER program, i can tell you that fusion is no solution very very complex, but there are huge improvements in generation 4 fission based nuclear, unbelievable that some are considering stopping nuclear because of FUKUSHIMA. How many people died because of civil nuclear vs wars because of oil. Oil industry is sending investors on goose chase with bio fuel, wind andsolar when theirbiggest threat is generation 4 nuclear.
Genius we need 15 trillion watts of power right now, today, to keep up with demand..how many nuke plants do you need? Ill help..Build a plant a DAY until 2050 to keep up with 15 TRILLION WATTS..oh but wait..youve used all that energy to build plants plus population has exploded...its called an energy trap. Im not against nuclear,Im against peopple not understanding the scale of the problem we face. So go ahead keep using those RnD dollars to figure out fushion,meanwhile we are still in an energy trap and the population is still growing exponentially.
http://fora.tv/2011/10/26/Reinventing_the_Leaf_Future_Sources_of_Fuel
The world has on schedule to build another 100 nuke plants to get to 250. China has 50 on schedule. Ok, here is a piece on Q4, I hope you also read french. http://lpsc.in2p3.fr/gpr/gpr/publis-rsfE.htm
France produces 78.8% of its electricity from Nuclear. Generation I and II used to have large pile of plutonium waste and other waste with very long half life. THe generation 4 designed, will go use the Plutonium and burn the waste. Yes, it can actually burns plutonium, you have can have as a lows as only 15% of the mass left with residues of only a few hundred years (900 years to be precise) half life versus the old stuff with half life of 10,000 - 100,000 years.
Ok, now Thorium reactors can accomodate up to 3 Gig of plant capacity (no atmospheric pressure issues). That means we need 5000 of them if ALL the new energy is coming from Thorium. Thorium is very very abundant and hte efficiency is such (85%) that essentially we are going to have fuck like rabbits to run out of it. If we build one every day, that is 13 years, assuming we get all new energy from Thorium.
The issue is that those will not come before 2020-2025. Than if we build one every 3 days on teh planet, we will need build that stuff for 40 years. We can not have only thorium, we will not grow that much anyway, population will have to stagnate (it did in the past). Assuming we grow and if 3/4 is coming from nuclear we will be able to be done by 2055.
We better get going and fast.
You can use Plutonium in existing 1970s reactors, its called MOX. They did it at Fukushima; that worked out swell.
Fukushima is absolutely not generation 4, it is a water reactor. G4 uses the waste FROM Fukushima. www.energyfromthorium.org
My point is that Plutonium is way too dangerous to be used as a fuel. How can you gaurantee that the reactor will always be impervious to nuclear strikes, earthquakes, meteors and human error? The answer is you can't. Plutonium, besides being highly radioactive, is also very toxic. Having tons of it in a reactor imposses significant risk on anyone in a large radius from it.
I read a variety of different blogs and websites, and it seems to me that understanding of the energy dilemma is better understood by ZHers than on most other sites. Folks on peakoil and the oil drum and some other specialized sites are very familiar with the problems and the math, but the shill and troll action on those sites is almost as bad as here, in some cases worse.
You make an interesting observation about the difference in perspective between those who can work out the numbers and those who practice/encourage wishful thinking. I'm definitely one of the former. For anyone who hasn't seen this chart produced by Lawrence Livermore Labs, it's a breakout of US energy sources and their end uses. It's a fascinating graph that actually contains an enormous amount of information that provides both a qualitative and a quantitative picture of energy in the US. Looking at the transportation sector, it is obvious that shortages of oil or price shocks will be disastrous. There is almost no developed alternative. The other nice thing about this chart is that it breaks out the wasted energy, what they call rejected energy, which amounts to 58% of all energy consumed. So we are running at an overall energy efficiency of 42%. Another interesting tidbit: total consumption was 94.6 quads in 2009, or 28 trillion kWh. This is a really big number, and it is not going to be replaced with solar, wind, geothermal, or even nuclear, and in any event, none of these sources addresses the transportation dependence on oil.
Had we continued what started in the '70s as a natural response to the oil embargo (being creative about achieving energy needs and restructuring our lives accordingly), we might have been able to develop a workable infrastructure. But at this late hour, with the peak of oil past and about to enter the slide, I just don't see it happening.
You would not have posted this at the Hedge as recently as 4 months ago....
There was a time when PO'ers were in the definite minority here....
Definitely. I have seen an evolution of thought here, and I think that's how it works. People are becoming more informed, and it's not a liberal bias, it's just the facts.
BTW, I love your posts. You are obviously a very informed fellow :-)
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/return-debtors-prisons-colle....
THE RETURN OF DEBTORS PRISONS: Collection Agencies Now Want Deadbeats Arrested
Nikola Tesla would have given the world free energy if JP Morgan didn't destroy his Wardenclyffe Tower in early 1900s.
wasn't Wardenclyffe Tower purely for distribution? how was the power being produced? My understanding is that Tesla was working on wireless power transmission, but there was no way to meter it (anyone could tap in and take it). Might work for communists, or in a police state where you can monitor everyone all the time to prevent theft.
Tesla bought his electricity from the local utility in Colorado springs .. no magic there. He did invent polyphase power when rewinding the Manitou Springs hydro generator after burning out the winding with one of his experiments....
Any kid graduating with a BS in electrical engineering today knows more about electricity that Tesla could've dreamed of. How come nobody's been able to reverse engineer any of these wonder devices since him?
The f'n guy was brilliant for his time, but he couldn't walk on water.
Re: Tesla, Exactly, but the typical EE doesn't have the creativity of NT. That being said, there have been literally thousands since NT that have knowledge and the requisite creativity to engineer anything NT came up with.
http://fora.tv/2011/10/26/Growth_Has_an_Expiration_Date
The assumption that economic growth will continue ad infinitum is one of our most dangerously wrong assumptions.
I think the concept in this chart is related
http://tiny.cc/x68mq
You may be interested in this
Mr. Soddy’s Ecological Economyhttp://tiny.cc/mth5a
And
Rethinking Growth
http://tiny.cc/hsov1
For a "real life" example. When doing discounted cash flow analysis, the terminal cash flow is valued as a perpetuity with 2-3% growth rate (essentially it grows at that rate into infinity) - perpetual growth at 2-3% is a pipedream.
“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”
Albert A. Bartlett
And it is the greatest shortcoming of economists and other "planning types" to be blind to the primacy of physical processes, namely thermodynamics, energy flow through the economy, and what that means within the context of growth.
Part of the problem is that most people have only known the post-WWII period, and they think that this period represents some kind of "normal" that can be preserved and perpetuated, if only we apply enough technology and human ingenuity. But this is not necessarily so.
The astonishing advances in humankind's collective standard of living during the last 6 decades are directly attributable to two things: cheap energy and cheap credit. Both are ending, so it's probably not wise to predict the future based on linear projections from here.
Oh Im intrigued.....are you going to tell me now how we can grow forever here on space ship earth?
Not at all, you misunderstood me, we are on the same page.
I was simply pointing out the fact that economists have no knowledge concerning physical processes and how those laws take primacy over the soft laws of economics. To put it bluntly, we need some more physics in our economics.
From the article I posted ...
"That’s what I expect. I mean, we’re faced with two impossibilities. On the one hand, it’s politically impossible to stop growth. On the other hand, it’s biophysically impossible to continue it ad infinitum. So, which impossibility is fundamentally impossible? Well, you know, I’ll take my chances with trying to change the politically impossible, because I don’t think I can change the biophysically impossible"
My apologies..Im a dick. We are in quite the conundrum..thats why I dont think their is really a "solution". We will not stop growing until we are forced to do so. This whole problem means a decrease in complexity basically. And I think that our complexity is the reason we are in this situation in the first place. Complexity got us here and it keeps us from solving the problem at the same time. What a tiny little blip modern civilization will be on a geological time scale.
Not true - families stop growing once there is minimal threat to the security of the family. see the population growth in the West.
I believe population growth in the west declined more due to cultural changes than lack of an external threat.
Women having fewer children and later in life, rather than starting at 15 and having 8 kids; the choice to use contraceptives, etc. that is not wide spread in many cultures.
There are serious barriers to this changing; some religions, for example, forbid the use of contraceptives. Without a change in culture, I don't think reproduction rates will fall much in some areas. Population Growth is contrained by available food and water, which is a major reason there is so much starvation in some places.
Nobody seems to be mentioning that energy is only one aspect of oil... It's also used in almost everything we consume today, in one form or another.
Pesticides, pharmaceuticals, food, plastics... Once we find a way to transfer to renewable energy sources, we'll also need to look at how we manufacture many of the products we use daily.
Renewable energy can't replace the physical medium :(
The oil won't run out, it'll just get more expensive as there is less of it.
Pesticides are unneeded. oil doesn't belong in food. work is being done on alternate methods of producing the other products, like plastics, without using oil. will of course be more expensive and have other limitations.
More plastic recycling would be nice; stop expanding the Great Pacific Garbage Heap and its smaller siblings.
Turns out the temporary "solution" to peak oil - abundant fracked natural gas - is worse for climate change than coal due to leaked methane. This recent Radio Ecoshock podcast is a must listen:
http://209.217.209.33/~esnet/downloads/ES_111123_Show_LoFi.mp3
In June of 2003, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) [1] scheduled an event (which was cancelled) titled: "Origin of Petroleum -- Biogenic and/or Abiogenic and Its Significance in Hydrocarbon Exploration and Production" [2], here is an excerpt from the invitation:
"For half a century, scientists from the former Soviet Union (FSU) have recognized that the petroleum produced from fields in the FSU have been generated by abiogenic processes. This is not a new concept being reported in 1951. The Russians have used this concept as an exploration strategy and have successfully discovered petroleum fields of which a number of these fields produce either partly or entirely from crystalline basement. Is this exploration strategy limited to the petroleum provinces in Russia or does such a strategy have application to other petroleum provinces like the Gulf of Mexico or the Middle East? Some believe this is a possibility for fields in the Gulf of Mexico, and others argue for application to fields in the Middle East." [3]
An event did take place in June of 2005 titled "Origin of Petroleum", here is a list of abstracts that were considered during the conference [4]:
http://www.searchanddiscovery.com/documents/abstracts/2005research_calga...
My intention is not to the challenge the author, rather to keep all options open. Research into the origins of petroleum is still very active [5-10] (too many to reference). The natural sciences have thrown a few surprises in the last 30 years, it would be a great shame to dismiss some truly credible ideas before they have been properly scrutinized.
Peak oil may be a credible hypotheis, however further research is required to determine the origins of petroleum and consequently the validity of peak oil theory.
--
[1] AAPG: http://www.aapg.org/index.cfm
[2] See: http://www.mail-archive.com/fogri@iagi.or.id/msg00802.html
[3] See: Seabed Fluid Flow: The Impact on Geology, Biology and the Marine Environment by Alan Judd and Martin Hovland (Page: 157, Section 5.4.4 Hydrothermal and abiogenic petroleum). Google Books: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=RhFfigXasLQC
[4] Complete list of past AAPG conferences: http://www.aapg.org/education/hedberg/past/index.cfm
[5] https://dco.gl.ciw.edu/january2011southafrica
"The setting was appropriate given the discovery of abiogenic hydrocarbons and radiolytic H2 in the deep fractures of the Witwatersrand Basin"
[6] http://www.springerlink.com/content/y62605127g688133/
[7] http://revistes.iec.cat/revistes/index.php/IM/article/viewArticle/6199
[8] http://spiedigitallibrary.org/proceedings/resource/2/psisdg/7819/1/78190...
[9] http://www.pnas.org/content/89/13/6045.abstract
[10] http://www.hku.hk/press/news_detail_6633.html
"In today's issue of the journal Nature, astronomers report that organic compounds of unexpected complexity exist throughout the Universe. The results suggest that complex organic compounds are not the sole domain of life but can be made naturally by stars."
The article in Nature: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v479/n7371/full/nature10542.html
Awesome..now just speed up your abiotic process to meet current and future demand..thank you. next
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/story/2011-11-26/pakistan-nato/514080...
Pakistan demands U.S. vacate suspected drone base
What took them so long? How many Pakistani civilians have been killed by drones? About 50% of US supplies to Afghanistan flow through Pakistan. That supply line has been stopped.
It cost $400 a gallon for the Pentagon to deliver a gallon of gas to Afghanistan. Now it will cost $1000 a gallon. But our tanks are fuel efficient - they take only 3 gallons a mile. Just $3000 a mile to go in a tank instead of the bargain $1200 a mile for fuel before.
Jet fighters can easily use 10,000 gallons per hour -so that cost will go up from $400,000 to a nice round $1,000,000 per hour - your money hard at work.
Yes, deflation is in the cards as we ramp up a military solution to Syria and Iran.
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/63407-400gallon-gas-another-cost-of-war-in-afghanistan-
Nato/USa Just killed 20 Paki army guys as Collateral damage. They are just sooo good at that.
Natural gas has my vote. They burn it off at oil wells because it's a nuisance? how fucked up is that? I love cooking with natural gas.
That isn't renewable though. D'oh!
Alright, solar then. Just enough capacity to run my air conditioner here in Florida. Say a 30k BTU unit. What kind of solar kit would it take for that?
Well, first you should insulate your house so you don't need to run an air conditioner all the time. How many hours does it need to run to keep the house comfortable? What temperature do you consider comfortable?
Unless the temperature is over 95 degrees F, you don't NEED the air conditioning, you just want it; its a luxury, like SUVs, and driving on freeways to go shopping at strip malls.
If we go with 24 KwH per day, as per http://www.enmax.com/Energy/Res/Greenmax/Conservation/AirConditioning.htm
Well, you can get panels for as little as $0.50 per watt; installation seperate; depends on if you can do it yourself or if you pay someone to do it, and how much you pay them.
If we assume about 8 hours of sunlight for Florida in summer, you'll need 3 KW of production, so $1500 for the panels themselves. Maybe a $5000 project overall, I don't really know, depends on what permits you need, if you need a liscensed person to install it, etc; I know Florida is a bit crazy with their regulations and beauracracy.
Are you talking about being off-grid, or net metering? With net metering, you over-produce in the day, and the meter spins backwards, then goes forwards at night.
FPL has net metering:
http://www.fpl.com/residential/savings/net_metering/index.shtml
Being off-grid would cost more, since you need batteries to store the energy.
Thank you for responding, Matt.
Dude. 90 degrees F is a luxury? Maybe as the operating temp of the CPU in my computer! I was thinking more in the range of low 70's during summer. The information you've provided is very helpful. Thanks again, Bro.
you'll be soon drinking it from your taps when frack gas bursts out from reservoirs and when earthquakes erupt due to earth's multiple skin fracture. Pandora's box.
Imagine my surprise today when I read the suggestion that if the US copied Europe and how it uses oil, then the US could be a net exporter of oil.
Guys there is a technology, it exists but it will not come in time to avoid inflation, so we will have maybe a 5-10 years disruption top. It is a nuclear techology, no proliferation, not light not heavy water, it is not fusion, it is using molten salt it run for 4 years between 1965 and 1969 on 10MW. After the success of this experiment, the inventor (who patented ALSO the light water reactor) went to ask money to build a reactorof 2 GW but was killed by the militaro complex influencing the DOE (the technology is non proliferation - too many gamma rays--. Let us if any one is asking what it is. It is not using either any uranium isotope nor any plutonium, it is not working with high pressure but works at atmospheric pressure. Oil is doomed bio-mass is doomed. This alternative is scheduled to start at production in China by 2020 (courtesy of US dropping their best ideas), Grenoble in France is working to solve some minor issue on the "plumbing", Russia has a program which has a name of famous composer. Does any zerohedger know what it is? I forgot...
it has 160 TIMES the efficiency of light water reactor, with that you can just get any ethanol you want just as of CO2 in the air, and out of water if electricity is so cheap, you just need C, H, O that is it. Now that would not neccesary because with nano technology you are now able to have huge amount of ion storage per unit of volume. Ok, you might a bit of nickel, or lithium, there are alternatives with lanthanides (BYD) of ever titanium for creating capacitors (battery in plain english). You can make a battery out of titanium or even from graphene. NEVER EVER EVER UNDERESTIMATE THE CAPACITY OF THE NUCLEAR AND MATERIAL SCIENCE GEEKS, THEY CAN FUCKING DO IT, IT WILL NOT COME NOT IN TIME TO SAVE THE ASS OF THE INDEBTED COUNTRIES, but oil will be useless.
Forget about bio-fuels, solar panel of 3rd generationare cheaper using tthe non framed, titanium (titanium has a lot of photoelectric properties, still it is nothing and too expensive but this nuclear technology, boy, it blows all of them out of water and blows out of the water oil. Anyone interested in knowing the name of this technology.
the french had a sodium reactor on experimental basis; "phoenix", they gave it up; Super phoenix also was abandoned.
I know super Phoenix is a fast neutron ~supergeneratoin~ with better neutron efficiency, it is uranium based .
Its a dead end, liquid sodium is so inflammable as to be unbelievable, and supergeneration makes plutonium, so we are maximising dangers along this route in case of tech default; Fuku cubed type. No boner, its being dismantled but it shows the madness of the french technocracy trying to replace it with EPR huge reactors, which is old 3rd generation hype-up.
The fundamental economic sleight of hand in France's nuclear program and so loudly touted KW efficiency, in price terms, is that for Forty years they have NOT included old reactor decommissoning costs NOR safe nuclear waste handling; other than deep embeddedment type disposal in land or sea. Now every new reactor, post Fuku, will HAVE to include these costs PLUS xtra add-on costs of decommissiong of existing reactors unaccounted for in previous pricing structure. And this is inspite of TMI data back in 1979; when decommissing a China Syndrome prone situation killed all further nuclear construction in the US market.
Not in France, not in Japan. How dumb can you get and how far can you reach out to cheat and fudge the economic figures. Ask Areva and EDF in France and TEPCO in JApan!
I know super Phoenix is a fast neutron ~supergeneratoin~ with better neutron efficiency, it is uranium based .
You can talk all you want the truth is that there isnt ANYTHING more energy(BTU) dense than oil, get over it, you don't get to have everything you want just because you want it. And yes when we get to a place where it takes 1.1 barrels to get 1 barel people will start to die shortly afterward. We dont get to apply calculus to this problem and make it go away. Billions of years of natural process is smarter than us, I'm sorry. All of this alternative energy investing is very optimistic and fuzzy and makes the sheeple go back to sleep, but it isnt going to work. Its a scam but whatever go buy your prius and buy all those fuzzy little green products at all your favorite stores if it makes you feel better, at least you feel better. But DO NOT sit up on some little stump and talk down to me because i didnt fall for it and try to buy my way into more sustainable tomorrow. Go buy yourself some virtuousity today by donating a goat to some village in Africa when you cant even go down to your local soup kitchen and donate some time. Thats not very fun is it?
ahahahahah you go to school and we talk again, do you know tthe ratio of a covalent chemical bond energy versus a neutron break-up? Of course if you use 0.5% of the Uranium fuel, not great (light water reactor), but if you use 85% of the fuel with Generation 4 reactor?
ratio is ..... about 10.^6. Yes Sir.
EROEI isn't everything. The world is infested with NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) people, so even at a negative energy return, its more acceptable to build a nuclear plant in Northern Alberta to extract tar sand, and sell oil, then it is to build new nuclear power plants in populated areas.
Of all places, Thailand actually has quite good natgas station network. What I heard, the conversion kit is less than 1500 dollars per car. It will take about 10 minutes to fill up a car through gas hose but otherwise there is little difference. A lot of minibuses, trucks and taxis seemed to use there natgas. Big trucks have large gas bottles (6 usually) filling the space between the cabin and first container.
tesla's works and papers were all confiscated by the u.s. gov't - edison stole just about everything he invented through gov't intervention,... hated competition -
30 -35 years to implement an infrastructure is total 'bs' -
every decade,... since the 60's we put off til tomorrow. why? because we're a controlled collective of selfishness - 'wanna-be-aristocrats', that never once thought of their own ox getting gored in one's backyard!
well there it is - dead carrion stinking up the neighborhoods - all confused and bewildered by the 'writing-on-the-wall' that's divided a once great country now more than ever - acrimonious, and avarice for our children's own future
how pathetic
the alternatives are plentiful where energy is concerned - natural gas - thorium nuclear - tar`sands - tidal/thermal power, etc., etc. -
so please don't insult the intelligence of the board with your nonsense
jmo