Future of Energy Video Extravaganza

The following videos come from the day conference: What Will Turn Us On in 2030 (via Slate). Other videos from the event are available at the conference link above.

Why Nuclear


Why Biofuels?


Craig Venter on Synthetic Biology and the Energy Future


Everything You Heard Here Could Be Wrong


Article: Don't Count Oil Out by Robert Bryce

Opinion: Michael Lynch -- A new sense of energy security to be found in shale oil & gas?

A much discussed article going around the peak oil webosphere -- The Energy Trap. Who can find the faulty assumptions in the argument?

Craig Venter's team is moving on to a pure synthetic biology phase of its research on producing fuels from algae

The quickest way to get abundant fuels from algae is to find the wild strains which produce the most biomass the fastest, and don't bother with oil extraction. Simply pyrolyse the algal biomass and convert to fuels via IH2. Even a total dunce could beat Craig Venter and Exxon Mobil to the punch by about 10 years by taking this approach.

As to the future of energy: All of the above. But go easy on the solar, and it would be best to drop the big wind farms altogether.

Supplying the Needs of Big Energy: Alberta Black Shale Project

The size of this property is mind-boggling. To put it into perspective, the Alberta Black Shale Project is almost the size of Rhode Island.


It's so big, in fact, that it can supply America's nuclear industry, military technologies, electric car market, and renewable energy sectors forever! _EnergyandCapital

Big energy has many requirements in order to prosper. One of the most important needs of big energy, is metals and mineral ores. Energy projects require vast amounts of steel and other metals such as nickel, copper, silver, molybdenum, vandium, etc. Nuclear energy will consume huge quantities of uranium and thorium. And a wide range of energy projects will require rare earth minerals. And now, just in time, we are hearing about a vast mineral deposit in Alberta that could produce energy-vital minerals for hundreds of years.

The Alberta Black Shale Project is a massive polymetallic formation (1,050 square miles) that contains molybdenum, nickel, uranium, vanadium, zinc, copper, cobalt, silver, gold, and an array of rare earths including lithium. It’s a huge and valuable formation.

And it has the potential to be a complete game changer — so much so that the Canadian media is calling it “the mine of the future,” saying the “mineral wealth is virtually limitless.”

And who can blame them?

Recent results from a winter drill program suggest 1.4 to 1.5 billion pounds of polymetallic mineralization consisting of 1.1 billion pounds of rare earth elements worth an estimated $206 billion. _EnergyandCapital

There should be little doubt about the vastness of Earth's mineral and energy complement. The true limitations to the grand human venture are the limits to human innovation, resourcefulness, and wisdom.

Unfortunately, the current governments of the most advanced nations of Earth are embroiled in petty arguments of political correctness, and corrupt power grabbing. Very few are concerned about increasing human cognitive abilities, innovativeness, inventiveness, and vision. All human societies will suffer for this short-sightedness.

Titanium, Uranium, Diamonds, rare earths, and a wide range of industrial ores -- plus vast coal deposts -- are sitting in Alberta's rock.

If dieoff.orgiast greens thought think the oil sands projects are an insult to mother Gaia, what will they think of the Alberta Black Shale Project? Unfortunately for these faux environmentalists, their credibility has been self-decimated by their opportunistic flogging of the pseudoscience of carbon hysteria. The backlash from that grand crusade of "crying wolf" is apt to be painful to them, ultimately.

Current Energy Source Distribution

Image Source

The image and table from wikipedia give an idea of the proportional contribution of different energy sources. Wikipedia tends to underestimate energy reserves of various types such as fossil fuels and geothermal, and to overestimate near-term potential of wind and solar. Even so, one can derive a rough picture of energy consumption and reserves by browsing the link above.

Replacing fossil fuels within the next few decades will be incredibly difficult, short of a breakthrough in fusion energy. Much better to develop clean and responsible methods of using coal, heavy oils, oil sands, oil shale, and nuclear energy--to bridge the next few decades until renewables such as solar, geothermal, and biomass can come into their own.

Fuel type	Power in TW[1]	Energy/year in EJ
Oil	5.6	180
Gas	3.5	110
Coal	3.8	120
Hydroelectric	0.9	30
Nuclear	0.9	30
Geothermal, wind, solar, wood	0.13	4
Total	15	471

Replacing One Cubic Mile of Oil a Year Worldwide

That is how much oil is consumed worldwide yearly--a cubic mile, give or take. How could that much oil be replaced, using other energy sources?

So, what would it take to replace the amount of energy in a cubic mile of oil Roughly 4.2 billion wind turbines, 91.2 solar panels, 2,500 nuclear power plants or 200 Three Gorges Dams, according to Menlo Park, Calif., nonprofit research institute SRI International.

In other words, no single category of renewable energy is growing anywhere near the speed it needs to bear the full brunt of displacing carbon-emitting fossil fuels anytime soon.

...While there is no doubt that wind, solar and geothermal have ample energy to power the planet--the sunlight that hits Earth in a single hour contains enough energy to fuel the human population for a year--they will need years to mature before they reach anything approaching their potential....The U.S. spends roughly $1 trillion each year--approximately 10% of gross domestic product--on the fuel needed to power 114 million households, 82 billion square feet of commercial building space, 130 million cars, 95 million trucks and the countless computers, ovens and alarm clocks that drive the metabolism of the modern economy. If there is a cheap and clean energy source out there, odds are someone--looking in the right place--will find it. __Forbes

Fortunately, the catastrophic global warming theory promoted by Al Gore--and used by the US Congress to hamstring the US energy industry--is turning out to be so much pig excrement. Which means that as soon as US voters understand what Barbara Boxer, Nancy Pelosi, and crew are doing to them, they can vote the miscreants out of office and hopefully replace them with no-nonsense pro-energy people.

The delays of an inept Congress are pushing the US into a corner, energy-wise. Every form of energy requires time and money to develop, and scale up to useful size.

North America is sitting on enough oil-equivalent (trillions of barrels) to last it hundreds of years at current consumption. But within a decade or two, better forms of solar and geothermal energies--to say nothing of better nuclear energy plants--will be available to provide electrical power for the grid. Oil equivalent resources only really need to last about 30 years. By then, algae biodiesel, synthetic biology energy, and biomass energy will be mature enough to replace most liquid fuels now consumed.

Predicting doom is okay for children who have no useful skills. But grownups will dig in and work, to see to it that doom does not actually fall on civilisation.

Problems to Solve: Solar Thermal, and Algae

Solar thermal and algal biofuels are both promising approaches for replacing fossil fuels. Solar thermal can supply large quantities of electricity for cleaner air, and better utilisation of an electrical ground transportation fleet. Algal biofuels can provide non-fossil liquid fuels for aviation, ground, sea, and rail transport that keep the commercial infrastructure of modern societies functioning.

First, a list of problems solar thermal needs to solve to meet its enormous promise:

1. Supply of high tech turbines
2. Cooling the heat engines
3. Keeping mirrors and panels clean
4. Protecting against eco-saboteurs
5. Transmission lines
6. Endangered species laws
7. Indigenous peoples concerns

And there will always be other unexpected problems cropping up all the time.

See here for more.

Next, algae biofuels production currently have costs running over US $20 per gallon. That is not at all competitive with petro-fuels. What needs to be done?

In Florida, PetroAlgae said that it hoped to reach its commercial production stage next year, as algae producers begin to differentiate over varying methods of getting past the algae “shade wall” and other issues in achieving commercial scale. The shade wall refers to algae’s tendency to bloom so rapidly in large scale deployments that it blocks its own sunlight, while ventures such as GreenFuels have worked on excessive algae bloom problems in a pilot test with Arizona Public Service.

...# The University of New Hampshire Biodiesel Group said it would cost $308 billion to build enough algae farms to replace gasoline with algae-based biodiesel, and $47 billion per year to run the production system for 140 billion gallons, or $0.34 per gallon before transportation and retail costs. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory said it would take an algae field of up to 15,000 square miles. Producers and researchers are disagreeing over the wisdom of closed bioreactors versus open algae ponds. Proponents of reactors point to the control of the process, while companies such as Aquaflow Bionomic point to the affordability of open ponds.
# In California, tests on Soladiesel from Solazyme were conducted by the Southwest Research Institute concluded that algae-based biodiesel has superior performance under cold weather conditions than biodiesel derived from other feedstocks.
# The National Algae Association held its first meeting, which sold out as hundreds of algae investors and producers convened in Texas in April to discuss new ventures, and paths to profitability.
# In the Netherlands, AlgaeLink announced a new process for extracting algae oil without using chemicals, drying or an oil press. The company said that its patent-pending technique uses 26 kilowatts of power to produce 12,000 gallons of algae oil per hour, with a yield of 50 percent from the initial algae paste. __Much more at BiofuelsDigest

It will not be quick and easy. Replacing a petro-fuels infrastructure that took a century to build will take time and enormous capital expenditure. The innovations and inventions necessary to solve all the problems we know about now will require a lot of time and mental energy. The problems we don't yet know about will require even more.

We should always work from the local and regional scale first. This scale is easier to visualize and innovate on than the national and global scales.

We need to have an idea of what it would mean to solve the national and international scale of problems. But only as a point of reference. The local and regional scales should always come first.

Peak Oil: Meet the TAO of Oil by Leonardo Maugeri

Only around 2,000 new field wildcats (wells made for exploring the presence of hydrocarbons in the subsoil) have been drilled in the entire Persian Gulf region since the inception of its oil activity, as against more than 1 million in the United States. TAO

Leonardo Maugeri's 2006 book, "The Age of Oil (TAO)," is an indispensable look at the past, present, and future of the role of petroleum. Written in two parts, TAO first looks at the human history of oil along with current events of oil. The second and final section of TAO looks at the question of whether the world is at or near "peak oil."

In April 1977, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) delivered a highly influential report stating that the growth of world oil demand would soon outpace production because of constraints on OPEC potential and the impending peak of Soviet Production. By the 1980s, the report argued, oil would be scarce and very expensive....

Maugeri points to three categories of reserves used when referring to future oil reserves.

• Proven Reserves---defined as the amount of oil and gas in place in known reservoirs that can be estimated with "reasonable certainty" to be commercially recoverable under current economic conditions....profitable recovery of at least 90 percent.
• Probable Reserves---the probability of profitable recovery falls to 50 percent
• Possible Reserves---profitable probability of recovery no less than 10 percent.

Maugeri points out that:

During the last 25 years more than 70% of exploration has taken place in the United States and Canada, mature areas that probably hold only 3% of the world's reserves of crude. The Middle East, on the other hand, has been the scene of only 3% of global exploration, even though it harbors 70% of the earth's reserves. In the Persian Gulf, holding 65% of the region's reserves, fewer than 100 exploration wells were drilled between 1995 and 2004. During the same period, 15,700 such wells were drilled in the U.S. Forbes

Future advances in the technologies of production, and refinement--as well as improved efficiencies of utilisation--have the potential to move reserves from the "possible" and "probable" categories up to the "proven reserves" classification. Future advances in discovery technology have the potential to expand all reserves significantly.

A recent declaration by the International Energy Agency that world petroleum production had peaked in 2006--had passed "peak oil"--was based on an analysis of world petroleum production, without considering either world petroleum reserves or seriously considering the many reasons why world petroleum production might peak from time to time without signaling any type of "peak oil." (Like the IPCC, the part of the IEA that produces reports touching on politics, eg "peak oil," may well have been infiltrated by bureaucrats and contributors with a fixed agenda.)

Maugeri concludes his book with a look at "resource nationalism," the gloomy reality that most of the world's known conventional petroleum resources exist in territories controlled by dictators and autocrats--Russia, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Libya, etc. For this reason, oil prices are likely to remain quite high--unless market forces arising from new discoveries and production outside the autocratic zone force the dictators of oil to compete once again.

Remember, nationalised resources do not tend to attract the latest technology in discovery, production, and refinement. That means that a lot of resources remain in the ground.

Despite its long history as an oil producing region, the Persian Gulf is still relatively virgin in terms of exploration. Only around 2,000 new field wildcas (wells made for exploring the presence of hydrocarbons in the subsoil) have been drilled in the entire Persian Gulf region since the inception of its oil activity, as against more than 1 million in the United States. p. 221 TAO

More from Maugeri at National Geographic, Forbes, and Foreign Affairs.

Access to Energy Archives

Access to Energy is a decidedly "in-your-face" optimistic pro-technology energy news and views website/newsletter.

The first 25 years of Access to Energy are available online in archive form. These articles, essays, editorials, and news reports are presented from a point of view that has been extincted from university campuses, out of political correctness. Fortunately, the internet is a wild-west style wide open information space where you can still find most points of view.

If the monkeys who run universities ever get control of the internet, you can expect a "Ministry of Information" style overseeing of a once-free information space. For an idea of what such a MOI would be like, read George Orwell's 1984.

If your mind is still open after reading this far, congratulations. There may be hope for you yet. In that case, check out the archives to ATE.