Hard Questions and Sustainable Solutions with Chris Nelder

Chris Nelder has been writing about the issues surrounding sustainability for over a decade and he makes a very important point that my blog also makes. It is that we have the solutions at hand. They are turning out to be cost effective. We can get on with it and solve our problems.

The fact remains that our leadership do not grasp solutions and lead their implementation. Instead they struggle to preserve position and avoid failure through real action. Much change has happened only in the face of crisis when the population itself is moving to a solution allowing the leader to merely jump in front.

This is the result of intellectual weakness among the leadership. It should be obvious to my readers that the best way to stimulate the economy out of its present malaise is to swiftly build out a national power grid and to supply finance guarantees for wind and geothermal in particular. We need them both and we need them now to supply the energy needed to supply power for the onslaught of electric cars. The arguments in favor of this course of action are compelling and easy.

Yet today our president is a man who cannot understand building wealth, or even be expected to understand compound interest particularly well let alone be handed a wrench to fix something. He must make decisions based on input from a flock of naturally risk adverse advisors. Reagan may not have known that star wars was twenty years early, but his advisors certainly told him, but he understood that the USA could afford an impossible mission while the USSR would be flummoxed.

The USA faces a building crisis in energy that is slowly taxing the American people into a poorer lifestyle. It must be fixed and it can be fixed. What are we waiting for? We are waiting for technically competent leadership. It is high time for show me because everyone is now confused as to where we are all headed. The leftist agenda has been allowed to float like a balloon but is naturally fading as the usual realities settle in.

We badly need to see the pragmatic side of this presidency.




Hard Questions and Sustainable Solutions

By Chris Nelder Friday, August 21st, 2009


The more I probe the hardest questions about the future of energy and our best shot at sustainability, the more I am convinced that the real questions are not about technology, but about human nature.

We have all the technology we need to make homes that produce their own energy. We know how to build high-efficiency rail and sailing ships. We know how to grow food organically and sustainably. We have the science to create economic systems that internalize all effects and operate in a beneficial manner. We've had the quantitative knowledge for decades that we would eventually go into resource and environmental overshoot.

We certainly have the technology to build an all-electric infrastructure entirely powered by renewables. We will crack the storage problem and all the other technical problems. I have no doubt that the technology also exists to build an all-nuclear solution, or even an all-hydrogen solution.

We have the technology to recycle all our water and reclaim all our waste. We could even control our population. . . if we had the will.

We also know what real sustainability means. I don't think I have ever seen it better put than by my friend Paul Hawken in his book, The Ecology of Commerce:

Sustainability is an economic state where the demands placed upon the environment by people and commerce can be met without reducing the capacity of the environment to provide for future generations. It can also be expressed in the simple terms of an economic golden rule for the restorative economy: Leave the world better than you found it, take no more than you need, try not to harm life or the environment, make amends if you do.

The real problem is we don't want to act that way. Virtually no business in existence meets that standard.
Technology and knowledge simply aren't the issue.

We don't want to think about having to put CO2 back in the ground after we burn fuels. We don't want to worry about the waste from our consumption. We don't like to hear about limits to anything we want to do. We don't want to rearrange our stuff, our lifestyles, so that they are truly sustainable. And we certainly don't like anybody telling us we can't have more kids.

In fact we don't even like to think about it. . . so when the subject comes up, we dismiss it with a flip comment like, "So I suppose you want us all to be living in caves and working by candlelight?"

The upwelling of emotions that this topic inspires — especially fear — usually makes a neutral and scientific discussion out of the question.

And from fear, most people leap to faith: faith in the perfect wisdom of free markets, faith in technology, faith in human ingenuity. No rational discussion needed.

Nor is this aspect of human nature a news flash. ‘Twas ever so. At the suggestion of a smart hedge fund manager buddy, I recently put Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War in my reading queue for clues on how humanity actually performs when presented with serious fiscal and resource challenges.

I know some very smart people who are fully armed with the data on resource depletion and peak oil, and who still choose to believe in a cornucopian future where humanity acts wisely, humanely, justly, and in concert with a view toward long-term planning, solving all of our problems without any serious hardship.

This time, they contend, it will be different. After all, aren't we entering the Age of Aquarius, when humanity finally embraces unity and understanding?

Well, forgive me for being skeptical. The degree of cooperation they envisage has no precedent whatsoever in human history, and there are thousands of examples to the contrary.

In fact I was a bit shocked today when I looked back on my first opus on sustainability ("Envisioning a Sustainable Future"), published in my online magazine Better World 13 years ago, and realized that all of the problems are the same now as they were then, only worse: population, energy, water, extinction, environmental destruction, flawed economic theory, global warming, and humanity's problem with long-term planning.

It gave me pause. A long pause. Are all my efforts, and those of my fellow agitators for sustainability, simply battling human nature? And if so, what good is it?

Tantalizing Technologies and Hard Questions

At this point, 13 years later, the questions are even less tangible: How will people respond to the coming changes? Can the political support for truly sustainable solutions be marshaled? Will the economy hold out long enough to accomplish the transformation? And how will declining energy supply impede our efforts?

Certainly, in theory, we could replace 220 million light ICE cars and trucks with electric models, and heavy transport trucks with a combination of biofuels, natural gas, and hydraulic storage technologies. The technology exists. But will we have the investment and primary energy supply to build them, if we simply let the market and politics guide us?

Consider "Cash for Clunkers." Using data and estimates from the New York Times, I calculate that the program pays off in nine years at $70 oil, and in five years at $120 oil. In terms of effective investment in the future, that's really not too bad. (The photovoltaic systems I designed and sold in my previous career typically paid off in more like 20 years, before incentives.)

Even so, Cash for Clunkers was reviled for swapping out over a quarter-million cars for more efficient ones at a mere cost of $1 billion. What are the chances we'll have the political support to do 220 million vehicles that way? Especially if oil gets more expensive and we start having shortages and more heavy industry failures when oil goes into decline a mere two years from now?

Sure, we can run airplanes on "renewable" synthetic diesel fuel made from green waste such as yard clippings, and early investors in such technologies will make a bundle. Rentech's (AMEX:

RTK) recent announcement that it had signed a deal to provide as much as 1.5 million gallons per year of the stuff to eight major airlines sent the stock soaring over 360% in two weeks.

But 1.5 million gallons per year is nothing, and thanks to the transport and handling cost of green waste, it doesn't scale. If it requires transporting massive amounts of the feedstock with diesel-powered trucks, it isn't sustainable either. Need we even discuss recycled fryer oil?

Similar problems bedevil the alcohol fuels and biofuels, including algae. There are many interesting approaches to both in the lab, but for a long list of reasons (including water availability and the net energy of the processes), they don't scale well. I don't see any of the biofuels making more than a 50% gain from their current paltry levels for a good many years yet — and then we'll be having so many other problems with energy, water, food, and the economy, that the long-term outlook gets very murky.

Sure, we can try to turn to Canada's tar sands and deepwater heavy oil as the good cheap stuff runs out, but a cursory look at their net energy tells us that doing so is an attempt to play the oil game into overtime, not an attempt to do something sustainable. Thinking otherwise is simply

denial.

A straightforward analysis of the data suggest that once we take peak oil, peak gas, and peak coal into account, there may not be enough time left to use cheap fossil fuels for the decades it would take to accomplish a transformation to true sustainability, let alone the human will to do it. And the experience of the last year gives me no confidence at all that the world can smoothly transit this

inflection point in economics.

Yet I want to foster inspiration, not desperation. For most people, hope is as essential to survival as food, water, and air. And there is hope — not for business as usual, but for a much better kind of business. Not for endless growth, but for a more sustainable future.

But I am not one for false hope. I have endeavored to bring a dose of realism to this column for three years now, and I will soldier on. The opportunities to create sustainable solutions and profit from them are probably greater now than they have ever been. It's our task to find them, promote them, invest in them. . . and beyond that, hope for the best.

Until next time,

Chris

Energy and Capital

CO2 Removal

This is interesting as it provides a viable option not presently available. Not necessarily wonderful but not so problematic either. You have a present day coal plant and a retrofit reduces your output but puts the CO2 in a form that can be dealt with. It may still be expensive but it has leveled the playing field between you and a Greenfield power plant.

All that matters because financing new plants will absorb most available capital for the next few years and total rebuilds are typically a lousy financial option.

Of course, we expect most capital to flow into alternative systems and simply prolonging the life of these plants may be the only option. This certainly makes it possible to manage the problem.

Of course CO2 disposal is still the real problem, but I assume this process naturally separates out the nitrogen so it is now as efficient as is possible making geological storage much more attractive. Also modest compression reduces the volume hugely and there are plenty of natural geological traps to exploit. Just keep drilling deeper.

I do not know if it will be much utilized, but well funded facilities will certainly look at this option, just for political reasons. Now if we could only get them to use the chlorine quench method to strip out the Sox and NOx and particulates we would have power plant and metal smelters all running completely clean. It is actually possible, since efficient CO2 removal was the remaining difficulty.

In short, I now think it is possible to operate a thermal metal smelter or steel mill while efficiently capturing all the output gases and particulate and the heat energy while dumping only the nitrogen gas back into the atmosphere and perhaps minor residuals if that. It took about thirty tears to establish proper solutions and will now take just as long for commercial acceptance now that it can be done.

June 23, 2009

CO2 Removal from the Atmosphere

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/06/co2-removal-from-atmosphere.html


Professor Klaus Lackner, Ewing-Worzel Professor of Geophysics in the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering at Columbia University have developed a sorbent that is "close to the ideal," in that it uses a relatively small amount of energy to release the CO2 and is not prohibitively expensive.

"By the time we make liquid CO2 we have spent approximately 50 kilojoules [of electricity] per mole of CO2." Compare that, Lackner said, to the average power plant in the U.S. which produces one mole of CO2 with every 230 kilojoules of electricity.

"In other words, if we simply plugged our device in to the power grid to satisfy its energy needs, for every roughly 1000 kilograms [of carbon dioxide] we collected we would re-emit 200, so 800 we can chalk up as having been successful," he said.

The biggest cost was at the "back-end" of the collector, primarily the technology used to release the CO2 from the sorbent. He said for that reason, on a cost-basis, the "synthetic tree" could not compete with modern coal-fired power plants that are designed to release fewer carbon emissions than their older predecessors. But he said when compared to the cost of retro-fitting an existing coal plant, the "synthetic tree" becomes more viable.

"Each unit would take out a ton of CO2 a day -- which would be the amount of CO2 produced by 20 average automobiles in the U.S.A. And the cost of each unit would be about the cost of a Toyota. So that would mean if you added a five percent surcharge on automobile purchases that money could go to building units to remove the CO2 those vehicles are going to create."

The technology is not being developed as an alternative to the carbon capture and storage methods currently being tested for large-scale use on coal-fired power stations. He's targeting carbon that's already in the air

Energy Market Future

The one certainty that we can have is that the benefits of modern technology will ultimately be available easily and cheaply to each and every human being. At best, a few will cause delay in a rear guard action. The classic example of that is North Korea.

Where the energy will come from is far less certain. Here a USA government report recognizes the inevitable but can only stay focused on fossil fuels. Long time readers know that replacement technologies are been promoted in just about every which way.

I think that fusion energy is far closer than anyone imagines. Some very clever tricks are now been employed because they can actually be modeled and tested. This ability is becoming common place and that means that the best imaginations can advance the technology.

In the meantime, just about any other plausible option has been dusted off and is now been actively pursued and most important, solar technology has dropped into the sweet spot in terms of costing and is now booming.

The real question is ‘will the world use less fossil fuel energy’ and the answer to that is an emphatic yes. First because we really have little choice in the matter as that is been dictated by Mother Nature and secondly because the cost of alternatives is rapidly approaching the cheapness of conventional oil. Most of the cost issues are about scale and that is quickly happening. Wind is a great example of bigger, better and cheaper. While this is happening the cost of a barrel of oil is inexorably inching higher. At some point they will pass each other for good.

May 28, 2009

Will the World Use Less Energy?

The U.S. government doesn't think so, and forecasts oil prices as high as $200 per barrrel
By Katherine Ling

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=world-use-less-energy-oil-prices&sc=DD_20090528

World energy consumption is forecast to increase by 44 percent from 2006 to 2030, with almost two-thirds of that coming from developing countries and fossil fuels that continue to dominate energy supply, according to the Energy Information Administration's 2009 outlook report [pdf] released today.

Developing countries are projected to increase demand by 73 percent by 2030 in the outlook's base reference case -- EIA's analysis under current laws and policies -- whereas developed countries will grow by 15 percent, the report says.

Oil prices will return to $110 per barrel in 2015 and go up to $130 per barrel in 2030 in the base reference case, although in the high-price reference case they could reach $200 per barrel, depending on supply, EIA said. In the high-price reference case, potential supply reaches 90 million barrels per day, but in the low-price reference case, supply reaches 120 million barrels per day, according to the outlook. All three projections' prices are significantly higher than in the 2008 outlook.

Liquids -- including biofuels -- will continue to be the primary energy source in the world's transportation sector unless there are "significant technological advances" and despite several policy changes, EIA said.
Unconventional resources such as oil sands and biofuels will become increasingly competitive, accounting for about 13 percent of the world's liquid supply by 2030, the report said. The United States will particularly see an increase in biofuels, mostly in advanced cellulosic rather than corn-based ethanol, acting Administrator Howard Gruenspecht said at the report's release event in Washington.

World natural gas and coal consumption will also continue to rise, especially in developing countries, the report says. China is expected to triple its coal-fired generating capacity by 2030, according to the report.

The United States will continue to grow as an important supplier of natural gas, projected to increase to 5.3 trillion cubic feet as unconventional gas plays such as the Marcellus Shale account for more than 50 percent of U.S. production by 2030, EIA said.

EIA predicts "much brighter prospects" for natural gas supply, keeping prices at about $8 per million British thermal units by 2030, compared with the International Energy Agency's outlook, which predicts $16 per million Btu by 2030, Gruenspecht said. He added that if hydraulic fracturing drilling is constrained -- as has been suggested by some lawmakers -- it could seriously affect the nation's ability to reach the unconventional natural gas. U.S. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said last week that the agency may look into the environmental impact of the process, which some environmental groups say releases harmful chemicals into drinking water (E&E Daily, May 20)

"I think there is no question that gas growth in the United States in unconventional [plays] is all dependent on hydraulic fracturing," Gruenspecht said. "If one envisions a world where hydraulic fracturing is off the table, that would really change" the outlook, he said.

While the EIA report finds renewables are the fastest growing source of electricity, "coal and natural gas still fuel nearly two-thirds of the world electric generation in 2030," the report says.

Gruenspecht also noted that while EIA is still analyzing the current House Energy and Commerce Committee climate bill, the target of cutting 17 percent of carbon dioxide emissions below 2005 levels likely will not significantly alter the EIA's energy outlook.

"One could imagine you could comply with the 2020 proposal of a 17 percent cut just using offsets and not a significant change in use of energy at all," Gruenspecht said. "It doesn't necessarily cause huge changes in projections because a lot of countries are showing a huge energy demand. ... I'm not sure they are as committed to making these changes," he said.

Vaclav Smil on Fossil Fuel Legacy

This article by Vaclav Smil does a superb job of quantifying the logistical reality of making a transition to alternative power sources. He emphasizes the sheer weight of legacy infrastructure that will not be replaced on a whim.

He is right to observe that our civilization is fueled by coal primarily and nuclear as a secondary. It is also true that we have plenty of coal to last us for a long time yet.

Our static energy sources are not going to run out anytime soon. That needs to be remembered. Our vulnerability has always been in transportation fuels and in the fact that both fuels produce a huge amount of CO2 which is undesirable.

That is why the push to transition to electric cars is gaining momentum and is capable of doing it all within a generation.

That is also why a distributed solar and wind energy system is so important in terms of individual energy use. The advent of cheap nanosolar systems allows every household to entertain energy independence including electric cars. We are not there yet, but it is achievable.

As that is been achieved, the power grid will transition to industrial power support for which it is needed.

All this will be augmented by increasing use of industrial grade batteries that collect power surpluses everywhere for industrial use. In fact, these batteries will in time squeeze most of the inefficiencies out of power production and transmission. That will approach doubling the overall capacity.

Moore’s Curse and the Great Energy Delusion

By Vaclav Smil From the Magazine: Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Filed under: Big Ideas

Our transition away from fossil fuels will take decades—if it happens at all.

During the early 1970s we were told by the promoters of nuclear energy that by the year 2000 America’s coal-based electricity generation plants would be relics of the past and that all electricity would come from nuclear fission. What’s more, we were told that the first generation fission reactors would by then be on their way out, replaced by super-efficient breeder reactors that would produce more fuel than they were initially charged with.

During the early 1980s some aficionados of small-scale, distributed, “soft” (today’s “green”) energies saw America of the first decade of the 21st century drawing 30 percent to 50 percent of its energy use from renewables (solar,wind, biofuels). For the past three decades we have been told how natural gas will become the most important source of modern energy: widely cited forecasts of the early 1980s had the world deriving half of its energy from natural gas by 2000. And a decade ago the promoters of fuel cell cars were telling us that such vehicles would by now be on the road in large numbers, well on their way to displacing ancient and inefficient internal combustion engines.

These are the realities of 2008: coal-fired power plants produce half of all U.S. electricity, nuclear stations 20 percent, and there is not a single commercial breeder reactor operating anywhere in the world; in 2007 the United States derives about 1.7 percent of its energy from new renewable conversions (corn-based ethanol, wind, photovoltaic solar, geothermal); natural gas supplies about 24 percent of the world’s commercial energy—less than half the share predicted in the early 1980s and still less than coal with nearly29 percent; and there are no fuel-cell cars.

This list of contrasts could be greatly extended, but the point is made: all of these forecasts and anticipations failed miserably because their authors and promoters ignored one of the most important realities ruling the behavior of complex energy systems—the inherently slow pace of energy transitions.
It is delusional to think that the United States can install in 10 years wind and solar generating capacity equivalent to that of thermal power plants that took nearly 60 years to construct.

“Energy transitions” encompass the time that elapses between an introduction of a new primary energy source oil, nuclear electricity, wind captured by large turbines) and its rise to claiming a substantial share (20 percent to 30 percent) of the overall market, or even to becoming the single largest contributor or an absolute leader (with more than 50 percent) in national or global energy supply. The term also refers to gradual diffusion of new prime movers, devices that replaced animal and human muscles by converting primary energies into mechanical power that is used to rotate massive turbogenerators producing electricity or to propel fleets of vehicles, ships, and airplanes. There is one thing all energy transitions have in common: they are prolonged affairs that take decades to accomplish, and the greater the scale of prevailing uses and conversions the longer the substitutions will take. The second part of this statement seems to be a truism but it is ignored as often as the first part: otherwise we would not have all those unrealized predicted milestones for new energy sources.

Preindustrial societies had rather simple and fairly stationary patterns of primary energy use. They relied overwhelmingly on biomass fuels (wood, charcoal, straw) for heat and they supplemented their dominant prime movers(muscles) with wind to sail ships and in some regions with windmills and small waterwheels. This traditional arrangement prevailed in Europe and the Americas until the beginning of the 19th century, and it dominated most of Asia and Africa until the middle of the 20th century. The year 1882 was likely the tipping point of the transition to fossil fuels, the time when the United States first burned more coal than wood. The best available historical reconstructions indicate that it was only sometime during the late 1890s that the energy content of global fossil fuel consumption, nearly all of it coal, came to equal the energy content of wood, charcoal, and crop residues.

The Western world then rapidly increased its reliance on fossil fuels and hydroelectricity, but in large parts of Africa and Asia the grand energy transition from traditional biomass fuels to fossil fuels has yet to be completed. Looking only at modern primary energies on a global scale, coal receded from about 95 percent of the total energy supply in 1900 to about 60 percent by 1950 and less than 24 percent by 2000. But coal’s importance continued to rise in absolute terms, and in 2001 it even began to regain some of its relative importance. As a result, coal is now relatively more important in 2008 (nearly 29 percent of primary energy) than it was at the time of the first energy “crisis” in 1973 (about 27 percent). And in absolute terms it now supplies twice as much energy as it did in 1973: the world has been returning to coal rather than leaving it behind.

These are the realities of 2008: coal-fired power plants produce 50 percent of U.S.electricity, nuclear stations 20 percent, and there are no operating commercial breeder reactors.

Although oil became the largest contributor to the world’s commercial energy supply in 1965 and its share reached 48 percent by 1973, its relative importance then began to decline and in 2008 it will claim less than 37 percent of the total. Moreover, worldwide coal extraction during the 20th century contained more energy than any other fuel, edging out oil by about 5 percent. The common perception that the 19th century was dominated by coal and the 20th century by oil is wrong: in global terms, the 19th century was still a part of the millennia-long wooden era and 20th century was, albeit by a small margin, the coal century. And while many African and Asian countries use no coal, the fuel remains indispensable: it generates 40 percent of the world’s electricity, nearly 80 percent of all energy in South Africa (that continent’s most industrialized nation), 70 percent of China’s, and about 50 percent of India’s.

The pace of the global transition from coal to oil can be judged from the following spans: it took oil about 50 years since the beginning of its commercial production during the 1860s to capture 10 percent of the global primary energy market, and then almost exactly 30 years to go from 10 percent to about 25 percent of the total. Analogical spans for natural gas are almost identical: approximately 50 years and 40 years. Regarding electricity, hydrogeneration began in 1882, the same year as Edison’s coal-fired generation, and just before World War I water power produced about 50 percent of the world’s electricity; subsequent expansion of absolute production could not prevent a large decline in water’s relative contribution to about 17 percent in 2008. Nuclear fission reached 10 percent of global electricity generation 27 years after the commissioning of the first nuclear power plant in 1956, and its share is now roughly the same as that of hydropower.

These spans should be kept in mind when appraising potential rates of market penetration by nonconventional fossilfuels or by renewable energies. No less important is the fact that none of these alternatives has yet reached even 5 percent of its respective global market. Nonconventional oil, mainly from Alberta oil sands and from Venezuelan tar deposits, now supplies only about 3 percent of the world’s crude oil and only about 1 percent of all primary energy. Renewable conversions—mainly liquid biofuels from Brazil, the United States, and Europe, and wind-powered electricity generation in Europe and North America, with much smaller contributions from geothermal and photovoltaic solar electricity generation—now provide about 0.5 percent of the world’s primary commercial energy, and in 2007 wind generated merely 1 percent of all electricity.

The absolute quantities needed to capture a significant share of the market, say 25 percent, are huge because the scale of the coming global energy transition is of an unprecedented magnitude. By the late 1890s, when combustion of coal (and some oil) surpassed the burning of wood, charcoal, and straw, these resources supplied annually an equivalent of about half a billion tons of oil. Today, replacing only half of worldwide annual fossil fuel use with renewable energies would require the equivalent of about 4.5 billion tons of oil. That’s a task equal to creating de novo an energy industry with an output surpassing that of the entire world oil industry—an industry that has taken more than a century to build.

The scale of transition needed for electricity generation is perhaps best illustrated by deconstructing Al Gore’s July 2008 proposal to “re-power” America: “Today I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years. This goal is achievable, affordable, and transformative.”

Nuclear fission reached 10 percent of global electricity generation 27 years after the commissioning of the first nuclear power plant.

Let’s see. In 2007 the country had about 870 gigawatts (GW) of electricity-generating capacity in fossil - fueled and nuclear stations, the two nonrenewable forms of generation that Gore wants to replace in their entirety. On average,these thermal power stations are at work about 50 percent of the time and hence they generated about 3.8 PWh (that is, 3.8 x 1015 watt-hours) of electricity in 2007. In contrast, wind turbines work on average only about 23 percent of the time, which means that even with all the requisite new high-voltage interconnections, slightly more than two units of wind-generating capacity would be needed to replace a unit in coal, gas, oil, and nuclear plants. And even if such an enormous capacity addition—in excess of 1,000 GW—could be accomplished in a single decade (since the year 2000, actual additions in all plants have averaged less than 30 GW/year!), the financial cost would be enormous: it would mean writing off the entire fossil-fuel and nuclear generation industry, an enterprise whose power plants alone have a replacement value of at least $1.5 trillion (assuming at least $1,700/installed kW), and spending at least $2.5 trillion to build the new capacity.

But because those new plants would have to be in areas that are not currently linked with high-voltage (HV)transmission lines to major consumption centers (wind from the Great Plains to the East and West coasts,photovoltaic solar from the Southwest to the rest of the country), that proposal would also require a rewiring of the country. Limited transmission capacity to move electricity eastward and westward from what is to be the new power center in the Southwest, Texas, and the Midwest is already delaying new wind projects even as wind generates less than 1 percent of all electricity. The United States has about 165,000 miles of HV lines, and at least 40,000 additional miles of new high-capacity lines would be needed to rewire the nation, at a cost of close to $100 billion. And the costs are bound to escalate, because the regulatory approval process required before beginning a new line construction can take many years. To think that the United States can install in 10 years wind and solar generating capacity equivalent to that of thermal power plants that took nearly 60 years to construct is delusional.

And energy transitions from established prime movers to new converters also take place across time spans measured in decades, not in a decade. Steam engines, whose large-scale commercial diffusion began with James Watt’s improved design introduced during the 1770s, remained important into the middle of the 20th century. There is no more convincing example of their endurance than the case of Liberty ships, the “ships that won the war” as they carried American materiel and troops to Europe and Asia between 1942 and 1945. Rudolf Diesel began to develop his highly efficient internal combustion engine in 1892 and his prototype engine was ready by 1897. The first small ship engines were installed on river-going vessels in 1903, and the first oceangoing ship with Diesel engines was launched in 1911. By 1939 a quarter of the world’s merchant fleet was propelled by these engines and virtually every new freighter had them. But nearly 3,000 Liberty ships were still powered by oil-fired steam engines. And steam locomotives disappeared from American railroads only by the late 1950s, while in China and India they were indispensable even during the 1980s.

A decade ago the promoters of fuel-cell cars were telling us that such vehicles would by now be on the road in large numbers.

Automobilization offers similar examples of gradual diffusion, and the adoption of automotive diesel engines is another excellent proof of slow transition. The gasoline-fueled internal combustion engine—the most important transportation prime mover of the modern world—was first deployed by Benz, Maybach, and Daimler during the mid-1880s, and it reached a remarkable maturity in a single generation after its introduction (Ford’s Model T in 1908).

But massive automobilization swept the United States only during the 1920s and Europe and Japan only during the 1960s, a process amounting to spans of at least 30 to 40 years in the U.S. case and 70 to 80 years in the European case between the initial introduction and decisive market conquest (with more than half of all families having a car). The first diesel-powered car (Mercedes-Benz 260D) was made in 1936, but it was only during the 1990s that diesels began to claim more than 15 percent of the new car market in major EU countries, and only during this decade that they began to account for more than a third of all newly sold cars. Once again, roughly half a century had to elapse between the initial introduction and significant market penetration.

And despite the fact that diesels have been always inherently more efficient than gasoline-fueled engines (the difference is up to 35 percent) and that modern diesel-powered cars have very low particulate and sulphur emissions, their share of the U.S. car market remains negligible: in 2007 only 3 percent of newly sold cars were diesels.

And it has taken more than half a century for both gasoline- and diesel-fueled internal combustion engines to displace agricultural draft animals in industrialized countries: the U.S. Department of Agriculture stopped counting draft animals only in 1963, and the process is yet to be completed in many low-income nations.

Finally, when asked to name the world’s most important continuously working prime mover, most people would not name the steam turbine. The machine was invented by Charles Parsons in 1884 and it remains fundamentally unchanged 125 years later. Gradual advances in metallurgy made it simply larger and more efficient and these machines now generate more than 70 percent of the world’s electricity in fossil-fueled and nuclear stations (the rest comes from gas and water turbines as well as diesels).

There is no common underlying process to explain the gradual nature of energy transitions. In the case of primary energy supply, the time span needed for significant market penetration is mostly the function of financing, developing, and perfecting necessarily massive and expensive infrastructures. For example, the world oil industry annually handles more than 30 billion barrels, or four billion tons, of liquids and gases; it extracts the fuel in more than 100 countries and its facilities range from self-propelled geophysical exploration rigs to sprawling refineries, and include about 3,000 large tankers and more than 300,000 miles of pipelines. Even if an immediate alternative were available, writing off this colossal infrastructure that took more than a century to build would amount to discarding an investment worth well over $5 trillion—but it is quite obvious that its energy output could not be replicated by any alternative in a decade or two.

Renewable conversions now provide about 0.5 percent of the world’s primary commercial energy, and in 2007 wind generated merely 1 percent of all electricity.

In the case of prime movers, the inertial nature of energy transitions is often due to the reliance on a machine that may be less efficient, such as a steam engine or gasoline-fueled engine, but whose marketing and servicing are well established and whose performance quirks and weaknesses are well known, as opposed to a superior converter that may bring unexpected problems and setbacks.

Predictability may, for a long time, outweigh a potentially superior performance, and associated complications (for example, high particulate emissions of early diesels) and new supply-chain requirements (be it sufficient refinery capacity to produce low-sulfur diesel fuel or the availability of filling stations dispensing alternative liquids) may slow down the diffusion of new converters.

All of these are matters of fundamental importance given the energy challenges facing the United States and the world. New promises of rapid shifts in energy sources and new anticipations of early massive gains from the deployment of new conversion techniques create expectations that will not be met and distract us from pursuing real solutions. Unfortunately, there is no shortage of these unrealistic calls, such as the popular claim that America should seek to generate 30 percent of its electricity supply from wind power by 2030.

And now Al Gore is telling us that the United States can completely repower its electricity generation in a single decade! Gore has succumbed to what I call “Moore’s curse.” Moore’s Law describes a long-standing trend in computer processing power, observed by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore, whereby a computer’s power doubles every year and a half. This led Gore to claim that since “the price paid for the same performance came down by 50 percent every 18 months, year after year,” something similar can happen with energy systems.

But the doubling of microprocessor performance every 18 months is an atypically rapid case of technical innovation. It does not represent—as the above examples of prime mover diffusion make clear—the norm of technical advances as far as new energy sources and new prime movers are concerned, and it completely ignores the massive infrastructural needs of new modes of electricity generation.

The historical verdict is unassailable: because of the requisite technical and infrastructural imperatives and because of numerous (and often entirely unforeseen) socio-economic adjustments, energy transitions in large economies and on a global scale are inherently protracted affairs. That is why, barring some extraordinary commitments and actions, none of the promises for greatly accelerated energy transitions will be realized, and during the next decade none of the new energy sources and prime movers will make a major difference by capturing 20 percent to 25 percent of its respective market. A world without fossil fuel combustion is highly desirable and, to be optimistic, our collective determination, commitment, and persistence could accelerate its arrival—but getting there will demand not only high cost but also considerable patience: coming energy transitions will unfold across decades, not years.

Vaclav Smil is the author of Energy at the Crossroads and Energy in Nature and Society (MIT Press). He is Distinguished Professor at the University of Manitoba.

Electric Cars go Nuclear

This excellent piece by Courtney over at the Stocksorbonds blog is a good read. I have personally over the years been a staunch advocate of letting supply and demand do their thing while were it is possible to grease the tracks a bit. It truly takes long term government mandated money to shape a nascent industry. I do not like that, because I understand human greed and stupidity far too well.

Yet when we point out flaws, the fact is, is that they are obvious and simply cannot last. As has been so well put, we will insist on trying every wrong way possible before we relent and do the right thing. Part of this is the limitation of human intelligence. A well thought out plan must be presented and sold to folks with the capacity to act as actuator. Being human they grasp the outline and charge off on the program with serious shrinkage. Most plans fail to survive the experience.

I have just told you about the potential for cattails. It truly requires a major planning program and the solicitation of private joint venture partners, to say nothing of a new land classification scheme. That is the minimum needed. Instead we will first get a serious of ill equipped adventures that may add to the knowledge but not speed the development of the industry very much. In the end, it will be a very important industry.

A classic example of industry and governments getting together was the development of the Canadian tar sands. The original investment was made in the late seventies and is only realizing its potential now. A mere human being cannot live to that time frame.

This article helps scope out the future size of the nuclear industry, which is now ramping up to dominate grid power all over the globe. It is about to become a dynamic industry again, with or without the US market. Recall that most countries are small and simply lack energy options. A reactor gives them national energy independence and France has shown them the value of that.

Grid power is about to become very valuable because the electric car, with all its limitations is the current best option for private urban transportation. We have much better batteries, and obviously the manufacturers are producing high voltage systems with the necessary torque for performance. Those two little tricks can produce a perky little golf cart weight vehicle that screams about town.

Mass production is about to kick in to produce an inexpensive electric car that will surely beat out a bicycle so beloved by the purists. As Courtney points out, China is cranking out millions of electric scooters. We are a little more spoiled.

It would not be astonishing if over the next decade, we see an almost complete shift over to personal electric transportation. This is very bullish, but it is naturally cheaper to build out and obviously will be much cheaper to run. Right now it is only slightly inconvenient.

Re: THE PUZZLE IS ALMOST COMPLETE

There is nothing evil in the least about petitioning the government to do what is right. Doing so is one of the very basic freedoms offered to us by our constitution. Day after day pollution continues to kill. Something should be done. The problem is that politicians fall in love with power. They seek to tailor regulations in a way that will "earn" campaign contributions from the "winners". Politicians convert the goal of protecting the environment into the goal of producing campaign contributions. Politicians on the other side also win by not solving problems but by preventing solutions from being implemented.

We have made an awful lot of bad choices. Much of the damage from past bad choices can never be fixed. We can do better.

By mandating the use of ethanol and then subsidizing some of the richest people in the world to produce the stuff, we waste our time effort and energy and we create frustration, distrust, high prices for food and even starvation of poor people. Seventy percent of the farmers in Iowa and 78% of the farmers in North Dakota receive subsidies while the average Joe pays through the nose for fuel and food. US farmers are the richest farmers in the world. Some are New York City farmers who collect the subsidies without ever setting foot on the land. It is one thing to support a crop stabilization co-op and quite another to pay massive subsidies at the height of the agricultural profit cycle. The Cap and Trade system has been designed to split the difference. It will give existing businesses oligopoly power and campaign contributions to incumbent politicians. Big business and big government win but the consumer pays through the nose.

Government has gotten too big and the profit from lobbying has gotten out of hand. We can set up appropriate regulations without constantly robbing from Peter, enriching Paul and paying off politicians in the process.

Nuclear power gave us all a scare. It took about 25 years, but the fear has largely subsided. As a result, there are nuclear power deals being made daily. The big one was the agreement between Russia and the USA. Russia will build 45 nuclear plants over the next 22 years, producing a very large amount of low cost electricity. I believe the total built by Russia will be several times the 45 called for in the agreement. Once the process gets started, who can guess the total number? In the USA, we would need to go from 104 plants to about 700 plants to reach the market share that exists in France today.

The total number of plants that will be built in the rest of the world will be greater than the number built in Russia and the USA combined. In the past few days, Jordon has executed 123 agreements with France and the USA. Japan just renewed its agreement with the USA. India is in a battle royal over its prime ministers agreement with Bush. Around the globe, and particularly in the Middle East, it is like a nuclear power race is on. The backlog for nuclear power components is great. The major components are sold out for several years to come. The doubling of the price of oil in the past year has made nuclear and many other methods of producing energy very profitable.

Over the past 25 years, trillions of tones of coal have been burned because we have not been willing to drill for cleaner burning oil and because we have not been willing to build nuclear power. Billions of barrels of oil have been consumed because we have not drilled for cleaner burning natural gas. We could put every acre of land into production of ethanol and still hardly make a dent in our energy needs. The amount of resources needed to build enough wind mills would be incredible.

Drilling does much less environmental damage as other methods. With trillions of cubic meters of gas just a short distance off our coast lines, it makes no sense to damage the environment by tilling vast tracks of fertile land or dotting the countryside with noisy windmills made of steel and concrete.

The country has gotten into a group think mode that has resulted in the suspension of belief in the basic laws of supply and demand. Supposedly knowledgeable people are constantly saying things like the corn used in cars does not drive up the price of food because it is a different kind of corn than we eat. They say putting corn in cars does not effect the price of rice because most rice is grown in other countries. They say subsidies do not distort markets but makes them better. They even say that using double the amount of steel and concrete in a wind farm is not a consideration in comparing wind energy to nuclear energy.

Your point about the scaring of land and the damage to water resources is a good one. Yes, the total costs of mining and burning coal have not been factored into the cost of the energy produced. Determining the exact cost is impossible. A commission needs to be established to estimate externalities to the best of their ability with the support of the scientific community and the congress should only vote up or down. The externalities should be taxed and the revenues should go to eliminate taxes on earnings. We need incentives to produce less pollution and incentives to produce more work and investment.

Again, we do not want to take away our right to petition the government, but we want to reduce the necessity for it. Decade after decade the congress was unable to close extra military bases because representatives fought for local pork. Most everyone agreed there were too many bases but no one was willing to volunteer to have their base closed. A commission established which bases should be closed they were.

Right now, we use energy as a political football. Everyone has their own ideas about how to "fix the problem". The incentives to come up with good solutions are huge. If the externalities created by mining and burning coal were included in the price, we would burn less coal. However, I believe it will not be long before someone comes up with the best method for microbes to digest the coal and burp out clean burning methane gas. Thirty years ago, we grew 16 bushels of corn per acre. Today, we grow as much as 250 bushels of corn per acre; Monsanto projects that we will double yields in 5-7 years; 30 times the yield in 40 years! "Bugs" are already eating coal and oil and producing methane. A number of scientists have given us good reason to believe the natural process can be sped up many times, perhaps 10,000 times.

Once people realize that the natural process of producing energy is a renewable process, they will stop wasting so much time and effort on weak substitutes. Of course, improvements in batteries could change the dynamics of wind, solar, nuclear and other power solutions. The Chinese will buy upwards of 14 million electric scooters this year not to protect the environment but because the electric scooters cost less to make than the gasoline powered scooters. With about 30 nuclear power plants coming on line over the next 12 years, China will be able to charge as many scooters as the public will buy.

Governments and capitalist are willing to gamble. There will be winners and losers but the consumer will ultimately win. History has shown that free markets generally make fewer mistakes when allocating resources than do governments. Free markets drive down prices, whereas governments frequently drive up prices. Government is needed to set up the least amount of rules as are necessary. We should trust the people to do the rest.

Synthetic fuels and other options

Without question, the great economic problem confronting the world today is the pending collapse, yes I said collapse, of oil supply. I do not believe that we can even buy an additional year or postpone this event in any way shape or form. You have to believe surplus pumping capacity exists that has not already been tapped by the advance of oil from $20 per barrel to $90 per barrel. What were they waiting for? The point that I am making, is that this resource is mythical.

We now have maximum production and no elasticity while demand has yet to decline in a meaningful way. These are painful words to write, but the folks we rely on to keep our civilization ahead of things are in deeper denial than anyone. The developed world needed to support the massive diversion of resources into solving this problem about ten years ago. It will now be done in a crisis environment. George Bush may even be able to slip out of office just ahead of the angry peasants. This is one of he greatest policy failures in history, but then no one wanted to believe it was so, including ourselves, dear reader.

Even if all the political constraints on oil exploration world wide disappeared tomorrow, the reprieve would be brief. And to be perfectly honest, the sooner we replace the fossil fuel economy, the better it is for all since that will also end the buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere. We still have several trillion barrels of oil in the ground available for other uses if justified. They are simply becoming far to expensive to chase from a energy cost point of view. It is pretty hard to justify spending a barrel to earn a barrel unless it is used for something other than fuel.

Faced with the same constraints in the past, South Africa and wartime Germany were able to produce synthetic fuel using coal and natural gas as a feedstock. The coal can be replaced by wood chips to great effect. This is not necessarily the best solution but it is certainly the one proven solution with all the technology extant and deliverable. The main challenge will be to maximize the use of wood chips as feedstock world wide. The Fischer - Tosch process does work.

The two other solutions which are high pressure depolymerization and algae oil culture are in the beginnings of full development and therefore as yet unproven. No one has sorted out the algae equation quite yet and it may well take hundreds of trials to sort out the cheapest and most stable production protocol. The initial focus of depolymerization has been toward select high quality waste to prove out the viability.

The technical viability of the process, as reported seems to stand up although the pilot plant economic model appears to be unsustainable primarily because the high value waste turned out to have high value. To redirect this effort into the conversion of wood chips is the best direction for this approach. The massive potential supply, the absolute uniformity of the feedstock and the production of a high quality crude, allows the process to be standardized and made cost efficient.

The only problem is that several years of aggressive development needs to be already done. Your wish to live in exciting times is about to be granted.

The progress of static grid power

I read recently that we will need to add another 900 nuclear reactors over the next fifty years to meet global demand. The current count is 435. That is a huge number. There will also be a lot of coal burners brought on line besides. The key point of all this, is that all our static grid power must be produced in this manner.

Here, we actually do not have a meaningful fuel supply problem for a century or two at least, although it is going to get more difficult. That is why uranium is at $75 a pound from $10.

As I have posted, the residential reliance on grid power is open to displacement by both geothermal systems or super efficient solar systems. I notice that a company has started producing solar shingles using silica wafers. What took so long?

This is all good, except that that is only a portion of grid power demand. The major portion is industrial and commercial. This sector has already done handstands over the past thirty years to minimize its reliance on grid power while the residential market is even now just beginning.

There is really no better way for them to generate power that they have not already put to work.

Of course, since stable grid power by way of nuclear and coal is available on demand, it will continue to be the supply of choice.

The two available major alternatives are tidal generation, very much in its infancy and deep geothermal, rapidly coming up to speed. There are a number of bit players such as wind power, while becoming economic have other drawbacks slowing their implementation on a similar scale.

I personally love deep geothermal which is quietly going from strength to strength as we discover the tricks of dealing with deep hot caustic environments. Our real strength, however, is the simple fact that one hundred years of drilling technology can take us into the type of geology we need. Our oil industry service industry is almost ready for this challenge.

Even sedimentary rocks are getting hot at fifteen thousand feet. We can reach twice that although from a oil industry perspective there is little point because costs are climbing on a power curve and it is eventually too hot for hydrocarbons. In other words, drilling below the hydrocarbon zone should put you into the geothermal zone. This is a bit of a simplification and a gross understatement of the difficulties that will prevent us from rushing out and actually doing it that way any time soon.

Iceland is at least teaching us how to do it. And we are currently focusing on the quiescent volcanoes. This is actually an unlimited source of power.

In the more difficult cooler hot zones, we still retain the option of using the good old Rankin cycle engine (reverse refrigeration) to generate brake horsepower.

Right now we are perfecting our knowledge.

Acid Rain in a Pipe

One of my frustrations watching the so called march of technology is that the whole problem of smoke stack pollution is readily solvable. Yet we have stayed with old systems, if any are used at all, that only partially ameliorate the problem. We have even exported our smelters offshore and wink at the horrific and noxious pollution thrown into the atmosphere.

Our coal burners currently use a fluidized bed that is charged with limestone. The limestone reacts with the sulphur to produce gypsum while absorbing some heat. This is good for about 60% of the sulphur and little else. Most such gypsum ends as waste. Not a great solution.

In the late seventies I met a technologist who had the simple insight that since natural ozone produces acid rain in the first place, it may be possible to achieve the same result in the stack using the best and fastest oxidizer possible. That is chlorine gas. He patented the idea and became its champion.

He met me and I persuaded him to run proper bench tests under the auspicious of the University of British Columbia. This ensured that the results would be credible. After that he continued to champion the protocol with little additional progress, in part due to his own business perspective.

What we developed was a very promising protocol.

The flue gas, whether from a smelter or a coal burner is well over 600 degrees when it exits the combustion chamber. It is also traveling fast. At this point water is sprayed into the gas stream along with chlorine gas. This produces hydrochloric acid in the gas stream. This acid reacts preferentially with the SOx first and secondly the NOx converting them into first sulphuric acid and then nitric acid. And the surplus hydrochloric acid is sponged up by the CO2 to produce some carbonic acid. These acids continue to additionally react with any metals in the flue stream converting them into salts that are usually soluble.

Our bench tests confirmed the implied stoichemistry of the reactions and showed a complete reduction of the SOx and NOx in the flue gas.

The spent flue gas was then sent through a water quench to sponge up any excess chlorine and to strip the heat, acids and salts out of the stream. This also would collect most of the particulate. The end result is a clean stack gas that is primarily CO2 and nitrogen.

In the heyday of the Acid Rain scare, a literature search search isolated over 150 separate strategies been explored, all stuck with slower reaction speeds than we could easily achieve with chlorine gas.

What I have just described is an aggressive reaction protocol that can be tuned nicely to be fast and efficient. The capital cost to implement this procedure is minor for a new plant and likely very doable as a retrofit for older facilities. We are only engineering a reaction chamber for the flue gas.

The waste is in the form of a hot solution of acids and salts in addition to the particulate already handled. The solution mix would be run through a small acid plant that would recover the chlorine, and produce both sulphuric acid and nitric acids as salable products. The salts would also presumably be recovered at least as a blend for later processing off site.

The total consumables for a typical power plant would be around one carload of chlorine gas per year.

Of course, even the scientifically literate shy away from the word chlorine, making this protocol a hard sell. But it is the real solution to our second major source of atmospheric pollution.

As an aside. Ozone is likely as good. The problem is producing pure ozone. The plasma arc produces mostly nitrous oxide rather than ozone which is very counter productive. Other methods of producing ozone are costly compared to chlorine.