Giant Microwave Oven Says: Fuck You, Peak Oil!

What if you could take your used plastic containers, and turn them into oil and natural gas? What would that mean for peak oil? Especially if the plastic containers had been made from potatoes? Peak oil, meet Mr. Microwave Oven

A US company is taking plastics recycling to another level – turning them back into the oil they were made from, and gas.

All that is needed, claims Global Resource Corporation (GRC), is a finely tuned microwave and – hey presto! – a mix of materials that were made from oil can be reduced back to oil and combustible gas (and a few leftovers).

Key to GRC’s process is a machine that uses 1200 different frequencies within the microwave range, which act on specific hydrocarbon materials. As the material is zapped at the appropriate wavelength, part of the hydrocarbons that make up the plastic and rubber in the material are broken down into diesel oil and combustible gas.

GRC's machine is called the Hawk-10. Its smaller incarnations look just like an industrial microwave with bits of machinery attached to it. Larger versions resemble a concrete mixer.

"Anything that has a hydrocarbon base will be affected by our process," says Jerry Meddick, director of business development at GRC, based in New Jersey. "We release those hydrocarbon molecules from the material and it then becomes gas and oil."

Source

Microwaves can do a lot of things. And they take their abilities very seriously. Seriously. Don't piss them off!

Uranium Prices Stimulate Mining Rush for Nuclear Fuel

With uranium prices shooting upward with the news of a surge in worldwide construction of nuclear reactors, uranium prospectors have gone a little crazy.

Utah mining prospector Kyle Kimmerle has more than a hunch that uranium will make him rich. It is a conviction so strong he has bet his house on it.

"We literally spent every dollar we had in savings, hawked and sold our houses and put everything we owned into this. We went all in," said Kimmerle, who runs a funeral home in this Canyonlands city. "My wife is scared, but I'm not."

He is among a rush of prospectors in the Colorado Plateau mineral belt who are thumping stakes into public land and registering claims, hoping to get rich on the back of record uranium prices.

The boom is reviving the fortunes of a storied mining area in the U.S. Southwest where large uranium ore deposits were first tapped for the voracious Cold War nuclear weapons program in the early 1950s, before suffering a slump.

The Bureau of Land Management said this month a new wave of prospectors have registered some 3,700 claims in the Moab and Monticello areas since October 1 last year, more than twice the total for whole of the previous year.

Prospectors are banking on strong demand for uranium from a resurgent nuclear power industry, as high oil prices and a global effort to clamp down on greenhouse gases blamed for climate change have pushed prices for the metal to $135 per pound, from just $7 in 2000.

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This is a modern gold rush, for uranium. Modern societies are addicted to high doses of concentrated energy, and the addiction will only get worse with time. With oil production currently on a plateau, nuclear and coal are the natural fallback options.

There are many safer reactor designs, than the ones most commonly in use around the world. In China, with a heavy death and sickness toll from mining accidents and pollution/contamination of air and water, nuclear power makes sense. Even in the US, where pollution decreases every year, and mining deaths are less common, trading fossil fuel for safer nuclear plants is reasonable.

Certainly there are better means of long term waste disposal than are currently utilised, and the idea of recycling nuclear wastes back into fuel is beginning to catch on with planners and policy makers.

If you own stock in uranium mines, and have no need to sell immediately, you might want to watch and see how things develop.

Finally! A Rational Carbon Tax

Carbon trading schemes are hopelessly mired in corruption and fraud. A fair carbon tax may work better, if a rational scheme for such a tax could be devised.

The IPCC predicts a warming rate in the tropical troposphere of about double that at the surface, implying about 0.2C to 1.2C per decade in the tropical troposphere under greenhouse-forcing scenarios. That implies the tax will climb by $4 to $24 per tonne per decade, a much more aggressive schedule of emission fee increases than most current proposals. At the upper end of warming forecasts, the tax could reach $200 per tonne of CO2 by 2100, forcing major carbon-emission reductions and a global shift to non-carbon energy sources.

Global-warming activists would like this. But so would skeptics, because they believe the models are exaggerating the warming forecasts. After all, the averaged UAH/ RSS tropical troposphere series went up only about 0.08C over the past decade, and has been going down since 2002. Some solar scientists even expect pronounced cooling to begin in a decade. If they are right, the T3 tax will fall below zero within two decades, turning into a subsidy for carbon emissions.

....Under the T3 tax, the regulator gets to call everyone's bluff at once, without gambling in advance on who is right. If the tax goes up, it ought to have. If it doesn't go up, it shouldn't have. Either way we get a sensible outcome.

But the benefits don't stop there. The T3 tax will induce forward-looking behaviour. Alarmists worry that conventional policy operates with too long a lag to prevent damaging climate change. Under the T3 tax, investors planning major industrial projects will need to forecast the tax rate many years ahead, thereby taking into account the most likely path of global warming a decade or more in advance.

And best of all, the T3 tax will encourage private-sector climate forecasting. Firms will need good estimates of future tax rates, which will force them to look deeply, and objectively, into the question of whether existing climate forecasts have an alarmist bias. The financial incentives will lead to independent reassessments of global climate modelling, without regard to what politicians, the IPCC or climatology professors want to hear.

Policymaking in the real world is messy, and ideas that sound good in theory can come out hopelessly gummed up with extraneous provisions that dilute or contradict the original purpose. But as a thought experiment, I find the T3 tax clarifies a lot of issues.

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Read the whole thing. It is clear that apocalyptic prophecies that aspire to public policy need to be called to account. Alarmist bureaucrats and "scientists" must be forced to "put their money where their mouths are."

Alarmist predictions that can not possibly come true before everyone now alive is long since dead, are not worth taking seriously. Benchmarks must be set and adhered to. Otherwise it is all a cynical game on the part of the IPCC and its pet computer modelers.

Methane Hydrate Reserves--Up to One Half the Amount of Other Fossil Fuel Reserves Worldwide

Methane hydrates may contain up to half the energy of other fossil fuel reserves. China does not want to be left out of the act, and is actively working to develop the methane hydrates lying in the northern part of the South China Sea.

China announced yesterday it had made a breakthrough in excavating natural gas hydrate, the so-called “flammable ice”, which is believed to be a potential natural energy source. Zhang Hongtao, deputy director-general of China Geological Survey (CGS), said gas hydrate samples were successfully collected from the northern part of the South China Sea last month. China is the fourth country after the United States, Japan and India to make such a technological achievement. Zhang said the development was expected to ease the country’s dependence on oil and coal.

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Methane hydrates, or "fire in ice", will require special technologies in order to be exploited, because they lie underwater off continental shelfs. As you can see on the map, the China Sea deposits are not considered among the larger deposits. It is quite likely that current estimates of undersea fossil fuel resources are woefully understated.

New Lighting Technology

We need better lighting. Incandescent bulbs are inefficient, but fluorescent bulbs contain toxic materials such as mercury. Fortunately scientists at the University of Illinois are working on a new lighting technology that is brighter than incandescents, and may eventually be more efficient than fluorescents.

“Built of aluminum foil, sapphire and small amounts of gas, the panels are less than 1 millimeter thick, and can hang on a wall like picture frames,” said Gary Eden, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the U. of I., and corresponding author of a paper describing the microcavity plasma lamps in the June issue of the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics.

Like conventional fluorescent lights, microcavity plasma lamps are glow-discharges in which atoms of a gas are excited by electrons and radiate light. Unlike fluorescent lights, however, microcavity plasma lamps produce the plasma in microscopic pockets and require no ballast, reflector or heavy metal housing. The panels are lighter, brighter and more efficient than incandescent lights and are expected, with further engineering, to approach or surpass the efficiency of fluorescent lighting.

The plasma panels are also six times thinner than panels composed of light-emitting diodes, said Eden, who also is a researcher at the university’s Coordinated Science Laboratory and the Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory.

A plasma panel consists of a sandwich of two sheets of aluminum foil separated by a thin dielectric layer of clear aluminum oxide (sapphire). At the heart of each lamp is a small cavity, which penetrates the upper sheet of aluminum foil and the sapphire.

Source

Such lightweight, thin profile lighting would be in demand by upscale designers, even if the efficiencies were not much better than that of incandescents. But with efficiencies challenging fluorescents, this lighting technology should find ready acceptance if efficient production methods are devised.

Big Money Abhors a Vacuum--Wildcatters Enter the New Oil Rush

Big oil companies have reduced their oil exploration efforts since the 1980s. That means there is big money to be made in finding new oil fields--and the small wildcatters are the ones who are going to be cashing in. Venture capital is beginning to find the wildcatters with the best chances of hitting crude.

The American oil patch, once left to languish during an extended period of low oil prices, is on the rebound. Wildcatters like Mr. Bryant are ready to pounce. With oil prices now hovering around $60 a barrel — three times higher than they were throughout the 1990s — the industry is expanding at a pace last seen decades ago.

“The oil industry has changed dramatically in the last 20 years,” Mr. Bryant says. “Barriers to entry have dropped significantly. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been in the business 100 years or 100 days.”

Easily available capital and technology, once the preserve of traditional oil companies, are reordering the business. Investors are lining up to finance energy projects while leaps in computing power, imaging technology and collaborative online networks now allow the smallest entities to compete on an equal footing with the biggest players.

“There’s a lot of money out there looking for opportunities,” said John Schaeffer, the head of the oil and gas unit at GE Energy Financial Services. “It seems like everyone wants to own an oil well now.”

...Instead of looking for new petroleum sources, the big oil companies now spend more money on strategic and financial maneuvers like acquisitions and share buybacks, according to analysts. Many have also bolstered dividend payments in order to please their shareholders. A decade ago, oil companies spent $2 on exploration for every $1 spent on acquisitions; today, it’s the other way around. Exploration, which once took a place of pride among major oil companies, now takes a back seat.

But analysts warn that the industry should be expanding exploration, because much more energy will be needed in coming years. According to the International Energy Agency, the world will be consuming 115 million barrels of oil a day by 2030, up from 85 million today.

“It’s hard to explain why exploration isn’t getting more attention,” Mr. Smith said. Oil companies, he said, “have become more risk-averse.”

For whatever reasons Big Oil is forgoing exploration, that reluctance has opened a door to entrepreneurs like Mr. Bryant. Cobalt, taking advantage of the lush financing available to energy start-ups, has secured $600 million from investors like Goldman Sachs and Carlyle/Riverstone, a private equity firm. It is about to secure an additional $600 million to $900 million from its investors.

....Finding, developing and operating costs in the Gulf of Mexico run below $20 a barrel. With oil prices at $65 a barrel, if the company finds a field that flows at 50,000 barrels a day, it can potentially earn more than $2 million a day — or $800 million a year — from a single field. “The whole game is to put a string of those together,” Mr. Bryant says.

....Cobalt is looking for oil reserves ranging from 100 million to 300 million barrels. While a big discovery can instantly earn the company billions, there is no guarantee that the company will find oil at all. “How are you successful in oil and gas exploration? It doesn’t need a whole committee,” said Mike Lentini, a 49-year-old geologist who spent 25 years looking for oil at Shell and recently moved to Cobalt. “If you go the consensus path, you get the average result rather than what is truly path-breaking.”

On a recent afternoon here, Mr. Byrant, who had just returned from a visit to the Middle East, said Cobalt would never be able to compete with Big Oil everywhere. But he said independent companies now had more than a fighting chance.

“Exploration has become a game of super technology,” he says. “That’s a lot different from the early days of the industry when wildcatters would just drill a well, cross their fingers and hope for the best.”

Source

For more on the promise of new oil exploration technologies, see here, here, here, and here.


Such independent operators could not operate in most "oil countries", where corrupt government leaders hover--waiting to pounce on new finds and nationalise them to enrich their Swiss bank accounts.

Hat tip instapundit.

Peak Oil: Meet Biofuels

The entire transportation infrastructure is based on combustion engines. Combustion engines feature very high energy density combined with very high power density. Such a combination is difficult to achieve with electric storage and fuel cell technologies. So it is natural that a lot of venture capital is being invested in the development of liquid biofuels, to substitute for fossil fuels currently used in the transportation industry.

Biodiesel, cellulosic butanol, and now pyrolytic liquid biofuels offer a renewable way to ease the transition from a fossil fuel based infrastructure to an eventual combustion-free transportation and energy infrastructure.

A team of University of Georgia researchers has developed a new biofuel derived from wood chips. Unlike previous fuels derived from wood, the new and still unnamed fuel can be blended with biodiesel and petroleum diesel to power conventional engines.

“The exciting thing about our method is that it is very easy to do,” said Tom Adams, director of the UGA Faculty of Engineering outreach service. “We expect to reduce the price of producing fuels from biomass dramatically with this technique.”

Adams, whose findings are detailed in the early online edition of the American Chemical Society journal Energy and Fuels, explained that scientists have long been able to derive oils from wood, but they had been unable to process it effectively or inexpensively so that it can be used in conventional engines. The researchers have developed a new chemical process, which they are working to patent, that inexpensively treats the oil so that it can be used in unmodified diesel engines or blended with biodiesel and petroleum diesel.

Here’s how the process works: Wood chips and pellets – roughly a quarter inch in diameter and six-tenths of an inch long – are heated in the absence of oxygen at a high temperature, a process known as pyrolysis. Up to a third of the dry weight of the wood becomes charcoal, while the rest becomes a gas. Most of this gas is condensed into a liquid bio-oil and chemically treated. When the process is complete, about 34 percent of the bio-oil (or 15 to 17 percent of the dry weight of the wood) can be used to power engines. The researchers are currently working to improve the process to derive even more oil from the wood.

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Many scientists have opposed biofuels as being inefficient and potentially harmful to the public health. The facts of transportation and energy/heating suggest that petroleum based fuels will trend progressively higher over time, as long as there is no significant recession or depression in the world economy. Given these rising costs, one would expect the smart money to invest in ways to produce useful fuels less expensive than future fossil fuels will be.


Many science bloggers have suggested that biofuels are a dead-end for the future. They say that the costs of producing the fuel are as great as the value of the fuel itself. They suggest that there is not enough land to grow both biofuels and food crops.

These are interesting claims, but they are unlikely to hold up in the face of the economic importance of viable alternatives to fossil fuels that can be used with existing combustion equipment, and such equipment as is likely to be introduced in the near term.

Food crops can be grown economically using aeroponic techniques, in the driest deserts, in outer space, or on sea-floating arcologies. Human ingenuity in the growing of both food crops and biofuel crops has just barely been tapped. The importance of liquid fuels in the trillion dollar infrastructures suggest that liquid biofuels will be very important quite soon, and for at least several decades.

Peak Oil: Meet Saskatchewan Oil Sands

Alberta does not have all the oil sands in Canada. Saskatchewan comes in for her fair share.

Industry and Resources Minister Eric Cline is hoping new regulations that came into effect Monday will encourage more exploration of Saskatchewan's oilsands and oil shale resources.

"If we had more companies operating up there ... then that would dramatically alter the situation,'' Cline said Monday.

The new regulations have been developed after consultation with the industry and other jurisdictions, and are an update of regulations approved over 40 years ago.

....Oilsands were identified in the province in the 1970s in an area north of the Primrose Lake Air Weapons Range, but there has been limited interest until the last few years.

Exploration for oil shales in the Hudson Bay area of the province was conducted 40 years ago, and the area has seen renewed exploration by industry recently.

Meanwhile, the first company to explore and develop oilsands resources in northwestern Saskatchewan in 40 years is stepping up development of its Axe Lake discovery, near La Loche.

Source

Meanwhile, several giant oil sands development projects are getting started in Alberta.

This summer, as many as 7,000 construction workers will be on the site of Canadian Natural Resources Ltd.'s Horizon project, which features an oil sands mine and upgrader north of Fort McMurray. The expansion of Royal Dutch Shell PLC's Athabasca mine and its Scotford upgrader near Edmonton employ about 2,000 workers right now, with a peak of more than 6,000 next year.

An upgrader is a sprawling industrial facility where bitumen, a mixture of sand and oil, is put through searing processes where the sand is stripped away from the oil and the low-grade crude is upgraded into synthetic oil. Total plans to use a method that's called delayed coking, a widely employed and proven process.

Skilled construction workers such as welders, ironworkers, electricians, pipefitters, millwrights, and other skilled workers will be getting paid a lot of money in various oil sands, shale oil, and coal projects over the next two or three decades. After 20 to 30 years, I suspect the transportation industry will be using more biofuels and electrical energy than fossil fuels.

If you know a poverty stricken English or History major working for minimum wage and struggling to make payments, you might tip them off--tell them to learn a useful trade!

Ultracapacitors Compared with Storage Batteries

Ultracapacitors, storage batteries, and fuel cells each have strengths and weaknesses, in terms of supplying energy to an electric vehicle. Fuel cells can store a large amount of energy, in the form of fuel, but cannot provide the huge surges of power needed for rapid acceleration. Storage batteries can store an intermediate amount of energy, and can provide a moderate surge of power. Ultracapacitors store small amounts of energy but provide very large surges of power.

Combining the strengths of all three storage media will almost achieve the strengths of the internal combustion engine, but with a cleaner, more efficient use of energy. In the future, the distinctions between fuel cells, storage batteries, and ultracapacitors are likely to fade.

This Google Tech Talk presents some details of the approach to ultracapacitors by a Ukrainian/US startup, APCT. It provides a useful overview of the need for ultracapacitors, and the potential market.

Pluggable Hybrid Video

Pluggable hybrids can be plugged in to the electrical grid, or other source of electricity. Electrical energy is currently less expensive per unit of energy, than petroleum based fuels. As time goes by, electricity should become more available and de-centralised, while petroleum will probably trend more expensive, over time.

Battery technology is lagging far behind the needs of modern travelers. Electric vehicles are severely limited in their travel range, due to the miniscule amount of energy storage that even very large and heavy battery banks can contain.

Current battery storage is a joke. Fuel cell technology, on the other hand, promises to advance more quickly in the near to intermediate term than battery technology. Fuel cells that run on biofuels would run fairly clean.

Pluggable automobiles that combine fuel cells running on biofuel, with state of the art electrical storage batteries, may be the best near to middle term approach to personal transportation. Ultracapacitors may by some miracle become good enough in energy density to replace storage batteries, but that would require significant advances in nanotechnology. By that time, integrated molecular manufacturing will probably probably blur the distinctions between the ultracapacitor and the storage batter. Fuel cells will also become far better, and closer to the high performance in both energy and power densities that typify the internal combustion engine--while maintaining a cleaner and more efficient operation.

Cornwall Wave Energy Hub

A £21m wave energy farm in Cornwall has been agreed to.

More than £21m of funding has just been agreed for Wave Hub, a giant electrical terminal on the seabed 10 miles off the coast of Hayle, near St Ives, through which wave energy devices can transmit the energy they generate along a high-voltage undersea cable back to the National Grid on shore.

When it is operating next year it is likely to support the largest array of wave energy machines in the world, and mark an enormous step forward in the development of wave power, which has long been the Cinderella in the family of renewable energy technologies - far less advanced than wind and solar power.

....Wave Hub will allow developers of wave energy devices to test new wave energy technology. Groups of devices will be connected to the terminal and float on or just below the surface of the sea to assess how well they work and how much power they generate before going into full commercial production.

The terminal will be connected to the National Grid by a 15.5 mile cable linked to a new electricity substation at Hayle. It could generate 20 megawatts of electricity, enough power for 7,500 homes or three per cent of Cornwall's domestic electricity needs.

Source

Although surfers fear the Wave Hub will detract from their surfing excitement, only time will tell whether the surfers' waves lose energy and height as a result of this experimental project.

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.

Improved Use of Tidal Energy

The tide rises and falls twice a day, every day, as regular as clockwork. Why not tap into the tidal river to produce renewable energy?

Thanks to lessons learned by wind turbine designers, tidal power is already economically competitive, producing electricity at prices similar to wind power, according to feasibility studies by the Electric Power Research Institute, an industry R&D consortium. And it offers a big advantage over wind and other renewables: a precisely predictable source of energy. As a result, developers in the United States have laid claim to the best sites up and down the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. In the past four years the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in Washington, DC, has issued preliminary permits for tidal installations at 25 sites, and it is considering another 31 applications.

.... "The whole point of doing kinetic hydro is to have a very small environmental footprint," says Dean Corren, Verdant's director of technology development, who designed the tidal turbines in the early 1980s while conducting energy research at New York University.

Corren's team installed its first two turbines in the East River in December. One has been delivering a maximum of 35 kilowatts of power to New York City, swiveling to generate power as the river swells with the high tides and empties with the low. The other turbine delivers performance data that Corren says will be crucial to refining the blades and gearbox, generator, and control system to optimize power generation.

This month Verdant added four more 35-kilowatt turbines. Corren says Verdant is now working on a next-generation design that will be cheaper to mass-produce, in anticipation of installing a farm of at least 100 turbines at the East River site.

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Although the absolute quantity of electric power available from the East River may not compare with a large coal or nuclear power plant, the potential is not insignificant. New nuclear power plants will be needed, but adding incremental sources such as wind, tidal, and wave power will help round out the symphony of power sources.

Energy from the Sea

The sea stores massive amounts of energy from both the sun and the wind. The Energy Blog points to a recent news story on marine energy.

After sputtering along for nearly a decade, marine power appears poised to join the alternative energy juggernaut, though the technologies are still in the early stages and have no guarantee of success. Developers are using an array of contraptions — from spinning turbines to bobbing buoys and undulating, snakelike cylinders — to convert ocean or river movements into electricity.

The world's first commercial wave farm is scheduled to launch this summer off Portugal's coast. The first pilot tidal generator in the USA revved up in New York City's East River last December. And the USA's first utility-scale wave project, off Oregon beaches, won preliminary federal approval this year. All told, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has cleared 21 preliminary permits, and about 35 are pending for wave and tidal projects, largely off the West Coast and shores of Florida and New England.

Widespread use of marine energy is about a decade away, says Roger Bedard, ocean energy leader for the Electric Power Research Institute. In 50 years or so, he says, 20% of offshore wave energy could be tapped practically. That, combined with tidal energy, could constitute 10% of all U.S. power sources.

I am particularly interested in any energy technologies that would facilitate the success of seascapes or undersea habitats.

More on Nuclear Power Resurgence

Brian Wang at Advanced Nanotechnology Blog, has a recent post up on the wildly accelerated pace of new nuclear plants to be built in Russia and China.

The United States has not had to rely significantly on nuclear power because energy from the abundant U.S. domestic coal supply (reserves are estimated at 520,494 million tons) is much cheaper than nuclear energy, which requires significant initial capital investment. However, from an economic perspective, energy suppliers are taking a second look at nuclear energy, since expected GHG regulations and requirements for coal plants to use cleaner technology will make coal-powered energy more expensive.

Other factors will add to the growing support for nuclear energy development in the United States. First, Americans too young to have seen the effects of nuclear plant disasters are much more open to nuclear development than the previous generation, particularly as younger citizens grow more concerned about climate change. Second, the notion of energy independence and security is popular with politicians and the public who view nuclear development as a way to make the country less dependent on petroleum from politically unstable regions. Further, environmental groups are beginning to come around to nuclear energy because of its potential role in slowing climate change; some environmentalists have come out in support of nuclear energy as a viable option (though most still prefer alternative energy and energy efficiency measures). A convincing argument for a repository like Yucca Mountain or a successful implementation of GNEP could certainly add to the growing support for nuclear energy development in the United States.

Merely replacing the existing U.S. fleet of nuclear reactors could be worth as much money as all of the planned expansions in France, Russia and China combined. Such a development would not only revolutionize the U.S. domestic nuclear industry but would also lead to expanded nuclear technology research and development worldwide. Also, U.S. acceptance of nuclear energy likely will lead to a quick increase in nuclear operations in other industrialized countries that have been hesitant to pursue further nuclear activity because of safety concerns.

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Peak Uranium--As Overblown as Peak Oil?

Recent concerns over CAGW have led many planners--and even environmentalists--to suggest that increased use of nuclear power may reduce CO2 dumping into the atmosphere. But many anti-nuclear activists are claiming that there is a shortage of uranium which prevents any large scale nuclear energy alternatives. What is the reality?

Uranium is a common mineral--as plentiful as tin.

Uranium prices reached an all-time low in 2001, costing US$7/lb, but have since rebounded strongly. As of January 2007, uranium sells at US$72/lb and the price is rising fast. This is the highest price (adjusted for inflation et cetera) in 25 years [2]. The higher price has spurred new prospecting and reopening of old mines. Cameco and Rio Tinto Group are the top two producing companies (with 20% of the production each), followed by Areva (12%), BHP Billiton (9%) and Kazatomprom (9%).

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Deposits of uranium lie primarily in Canada, Australia, the US, South Africa, and countries of the former USSR. There is tremendous flexibility in the production of uranium, depending on pricing and political/regulatory conditions. Currently Canada and Australia are the world's major producers, but producers in the third world are gearing up for higher production with Chinese and Russian backing.


Realistically, "Peak Uranium", like "Peak Oil", is an almost meaningless term. Better terminology would refer to pricing of these commodities--which reflects supply, demand, and political/regulatory factors. Although some people have seized upon this report that suggests an impending bottleneck of uranium supplies for the US, more informed individuals with a broader perspective of commodities markets will understand that markets find a way--even when ivory tower academics can only see government action as a solution.

The important thing is to assure that government regulatory agencies do not make it impossible for the market to function.

Gas Turbines--An Important Part of the Power System

Gas turbines are important machines in the production of energy for electricity and transportation. When used as part of a cogeneration system, they contribute to high efficiencies for scalable power plant systems.


A short but interesting animation of gas turbine operation for electricity generation. It depicts the operation of the compressor phase of the gas turbine.

This is a video portraying the reliability testing procedures for a new GE gas turbine for jet aircraft.

Here is more information on some specific turbine gensets.

Solar Tower Video--Featuring the Pilot Project in Spain

This video goes inside the solar tower pilot project that has been built in Spain. Although not as large as the tower in the previous video, this one actually exists, and generates electric power. A fascinating glimpse into what is probably one of the best large scale ways of generating electricity from the sun.

Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion--OTEC

A very nice video illustrating Earth's thermohaline circulation, and the OTEC method of extracting electrical energy from the temperature differential of the tropical ocean. Definitely worth four minutes of your time.

Large Scale Renewables--Fantastic Video!

While there is no doubt that human civilisation will require more nuclear plants in order to transition away from fossil fuel dependency, large scale renewables offer more sustainable energy paths for the long run.

The solar tower--particularly one of the designs that generates power both day and night--is one of the most promising ideas for large scale renewable power. Personally, I like the idea of combining the solar tower with an arcology tower dwelling--like the Ultima Tower.