Fighting Political Peak Oil and Resisting Other Carbon Hysteria

The graphic below illustrates what happens when third world bureaucrats and dictators mis-manage a world-class oil field.

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Mexico's Supreme Court has given PEMEX permission to contract with private hydrocarbon development corporations, in an attempt to clean up the mess that Mexico's government has made of Cantarell and other fine fields. But just as in other oil dictatorships, Mexico's bureaucrats have destroyed a most valuable resource. It will cost dearly to even partially remedy their mistakes. Political peak oil -- from Mexico to Venezuela to Ecuador to Libya to Russia, etc etc.

Meanwhile, new oil and hydrocarbon discoveries are being made around Africa, offshore of Brasil, in Colombia, in Argentina, and elsewhere around the world. The North American technologies applied to unconventional hydrocarbons are certain to set off a tsunami of new hydrocarbons development worldwide.

Arabian nations are planning to develop their unconventional gas reserves -- which will more than double their current reserves. Russia will almost certainly follow the same plan eventually.

Warren Buffet and Bill Gates are taking a close look at coal resources in Wyoming. Coal is another vast hydrocarbon resource which is much underutilised -- particularly in the light of new cleaner technologies which can make good clean use of even the cheapest, lowest-quality coal.

US Natural Gas Reserves Doubled! in New Study

It seems that the US EIA and other official estimators of US natural gas reserves have badly underestimated the total US capacity. If a new study by the American Clean Skies Foundation is accurate, the US has enough natural gas reserves to last 100 years!

Aubrey K. McClendon, chairman of ACSF and chairman and CEO of Chesapeake Energy Corporation. "New technologies have allowed the rapid emergence of gas shales as a major energy source, representing a truly transformative event for U.S. energy supplies. American producers can clearly supply enough natural gas to meet today's uses and become an economical source of transportation fuel in the form of CNG or greater supplies of electricity for plug-in hybrids for generations to come."

"The assessments and estimates on natural gas supply are very impressive and have, frankly, caught industry forecasters off guard," shared Rick Smead, one of the study's co-authors and overall project manager for NCI. The study found that while all three unconventional gas sources have increased production over the past decade, natural gas production from shale formations is growing exponentially, increasing from 0.3 trillion cubic feet (Tcf)/year of production in 1998 to 1.05 Tcf/year in 2007, a 203 percent increase. "The extent of this ramp-up has not been fully captured by many reserve estimators," said Smead, "probably because their emergence has been too rapid for existing models to capture accurately."

There are approximately 22 shale basins located onshore in more than 20 states in the U.S. including Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, West Virginia, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York and Michigan.

..."Recent technological innovation has transformed the natural gas exploration and production industry, particularly as it pertains to shale," said Dr. Kenneth B. Medlock III, a Fellow in Energy Studies at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy and a professor of economics at Rice University, also a co-author of the NCI report. "The findings in this study indicate significant potential for expanded use of domestically produced natural gas for many purposes, including power generation and even transportation fuel for many years to come." _NextEnergyNews

Newer technologies for converting difficult-to-access coal beds into natural gas fields, and advanced conversion methods for coal-to-gas (CTG) will also expand natural gas supplies far beyond conventional estimates.

To top it off, the up and coming field of biomass renewable natural gas will knock the block off "peak gasers" for the foreseeable future, once production is scaled up.

It may be more fun for the jokers at the oil drum site and the other peak oil sites, to dwell on doom and gloom. If that is what gets them to the promised land, then all power to them. But as for me and most intelligent, energetic, and productive-minded folks I know, it's better to solve problems instead of whining about them.

Producing Renewable Natural Bio-Gas

Biomass can be converted into high quality renewable natural gas which can be used in the same ways as fossil natural gas. Such a process is being set in motion in Texas and in the Netherlands.

The Energy Research Center of the Netherlands has completed an 800 kilowatt-hour pilot-scale gasification plant based on its Milena gasifier technology, which uses an indirectly heated biomass gasification process with high cold-gas efficiency and a high methane yield, and is optimized for the production of substitute natural gas.

According to Christiaan van der Meijden, a researcher with the center’s Biomass, Coal & Environmental Research division, the primary feedstock for the pilot plant is waste wood. “We plan to test other biomass fuels, as well, [such as] sunflower husks,” he said. The green gas produced by the pilot-scale plant will be used to fuel one of several natural-gas-powered consumer automobiles currently available in Europe, he said.

The next step will be to begin construction of a 10-megawatt demonstration plant in 2009. “Several industrial parties are interested and involved in parts of the development,” van der Meijden said. “We have not licensed the Milena technology yet.” However, he added, the technology will become commercially available after the demonstration. _CheckBiotech

Biomass can be converted to liquid fuels by various means, to high density solid fuel by torrefaction, and to high quality synthetic natural gas as explained in the links above.

Given that the planet Earth's biosphere is hugely expandable, it would seem that beyond oil reserves, beyond coal reserves, beyond oil sands and shale oil reserves, beyond undersea methane hydrates, the Earth's capacity to produce high value fuels is very far from reaching its peak.

Steam Turbine vs. Gas Turbine Efficiency

A new nuclear reactor being built in China will be the first commercial nuclear plant in the world to operate at high enough temperatures to use the Brayton gas turbine cycle--a more efficient cycle as noted in the graphic above. It is more efficient because it runs at a higher temperature (basic thermodynamics). High Temperature Reactors (HTRs) can utilise gas turbines that are driven by inert helium gas that has been heated in a nuclear reactor to extreme temperatures. The Chinese reactor will initially use steam turbines, then later switch over to gas turbines.

A steam cycle could then be "tacked on" to the end of the gas turbine cycle to improve overall efficiencies even more.

The HTR being built in China is a type of modular helium reactor (MHR), and as different aspects of the design are proven and standardised, it should be much faster to build in the future.

More information at NextBigFuture

Methane Clathrates (Hydrates) and More on BTL

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Up to 2500 gigatonnes of methane clathrates exist frozen in deep sea sedimentary rock. That is roughly ten times more than known global reserves of natural gas. It may take some time to develop the safest and most efficient ways of mining this methane ice.

One problem with extracting this methane is that you have to melt the ice to bring the gas to the surface. In 2002, a team of geologists from Canada and Japan tried injecting hot water into the ice beneath the delta of the McKenzie river in northern Canada. While this released some hydrates, it used a lot of energy.

Now the same group has extracted methane much more efficiently, and without hot water, by pumping air out of drill holes in the frozen structures. This reduced the pressure, and so raised the melting temperature of the ice so the methane could be removed.

The state-owned Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation, which announced the test results, wants to extract the 7 trillion tonnes of methane thought to be trapped in hydrates in Japanese coastal waters. It hopes this will be the answer to Japan's century-long search for an indigenous source of fuel. Last month, the government approved a plan to commercialise the extraction of the fuel within a decade. __NS

And here is more about the University of Massachussetts' George Huber, and his campaign to make biomass to liquid fuels (BTL) a major player in the energy industry.

Using a catalyst commonly employed in the petroleum industry, Huber and his colleagues heated small amounts of cellulose very quickly for a matter of seconds before cooling it, producing a high-octane liquid similar to gasoline. “The temperature window is very critical,” Huber says. If you heat too slowly, you produce mainly coke—elemental carbon residue. If you heat too fast, you make mainly vapors. The sweet spot, about 1000 degrees per second, transfers roughly half the cellulose’s energy into hydrocarbons. “If we can get 100 percent yield, we estimate the cost to be about a dollar per gallon,” Huber says. “Right now we’re at 50 percent. Can we get 100 percent? I don’t know. Hopefully we’ll bump those numbers up.”
___PopMech

Finding better ways to exploit the plentiful energy sources around us, is a potentially lucrative challenge for industry--and a test for western governments. If the US Congress cannot break its fixation on the idea of returning the superpower to the stone age through idiotic energy policy, the US government will certainly fail the test.