Peak Oil: You Don't Know Jack!

"Jack" is a recently discovered undersea oil field in the Gulf of Mexico that may exceed 15 billion barrels of oil. Given that water covers 2/3 of Earth's surface, it is not unlikely that more oil reserves exist underwater than under dry land.

The mother lode of oil in the deepwater Gulf is so significant that Tahiti and other successful fields in this region are expected to soon produce enough crude to reverse the long-standing decline in US oil production of about 10 percent per year.

Even better, a recent discovery by Chevron has signaled that soon there may be vastly more oil gushing out of the ultradeep seabeds — more than even the optimists were predicting four years ago. In 2004, the company penetrated a 60 million-year-old geological stratum known as the "lower tertiary trend" containing a monster oil patch that holds between 3 billion and 15 billion barrels of crude. Dubbed Jack, the field lies beneath waters nearly twice as deep as those covering Tahiti, and many in the industry dismissed the discovery as too remote to exploit. But last September, Chevron used the Cajun Express to probe the Jack field, proving that petroleum could flow from the lower tertiary at hearty commercial rates — fast enough to bring billions of dollars of crude to market.

...Technological breakthroughs have, decade after decade, revived the perpetually doomed oil industry. "Predicting peak oil," Siegele tells me as we tour the drilling floor of the Cajun Express, "is almost like predicting peak technology" — an exercise, in other words, that to him seems inherently small-minded. Even absurd.

SourceBesides the "Jack" oilfield and other yet to be discovered Gulf fields, there are also many Arctic and Antarctic oil fields currently unexplored. And then, there is all of that oil shale and oil sands that Canada, the US, and other large countries are sitting on.
And don't get me started on all the coal reserves and uranium/thorium reserves spread out across the globe. And please--never! and I mean never!! get me started on all the resources in the solar system, should humans ever grow out of their prolonged, restless, and generally incompetent adolescence.

Peak Oil doesn't know Jack. Peak Oil will soon meet Jack and a lot of other energy resources that will be developed, sooner or later.

Peak Oil: Meet Microbial Petroleum Producers

Creating micro-organisms that can synthesise renewable hydrocarbons for fuels and feedstocks, is one aim of synthetic biology.

The process is the same as making cellulosic ethanol insofar as cellulosic feedstocks are converted into fermentable sugars, and those sugars are placed in a fermentation vat. The difference comes in the microbes doing the fermenting. With ethanol, it's generally some form of yeast. The researchers at LS9 have engineered their own microbes, lifting genes from other microbes and recombining them into an organism that does just what they want. In this way they can precisely tweak the characteristics of the resulting fuel.

Yeast fermentation produces ethanol, which mixes with water and subsequently has to be extracted via distillation. LS9's microbes produce -- via fatty acid metabolism, in a process I won't claim to understand -- hydrocarbons (the building blocks of petroleum). These hydrocarbons are immiscible, i.e., they don't mix with water. Instead, they float to the top of the vat, where they can essentially be skimmed off. That allows LS9 to skip the distillation process, which saves a whole boatload of energy. (That's where most of the claimed 65% energy savings comes from.)

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David Berry, one of the brains behind LS9, has won the Young Innovator of the Year award from MIT's Tech Review.

Berry's goal was nothing less than "to develop a novel and far-reaching solution to the energy problem." In col­laboration with genomics researcher George Church of Harvard Medi­cal School and plant biologist Chris Somerville of Stanford University, Berry and his Flagship colleagues set out to do something that had never been attempted commercially: using the tools of synthetic biology to make microörganisms that produce something like petroleum. Berry assumed responsibility for proving that the infant company, dubbed LS9, could produce a biofuel that was renewable, better than corn-derived ethanol, and cost-­competitive with ­fossil-based fuels.

I understand that Chris Somerville -- a leading figure in the plant biology field -- is also at work on plants that are genetically engineered to produce biodegradable plastics. Now if they could just integrate that idea with these petroleum-producing microbes, we'd really have something to celebrate.

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If synthetic biologists can create microbes that efficiently create "petroleum" in an industrial environment--out of renewable materials and skipping any energy-wasting distillation process--the economics of the future of energy might change a bit.

Oil Seeds: Jatropha

Jatropha is disease resistant, and grows on marginal soil. Cultivation of jatropha for biodiesel may have less impact on food costs than other oil seeds.

Almost overnight, the unloved Jatropha curcushas become an agricultural and economic celebrity, with the discovery that it may be the ideal biofuel crop, an alternative to fossil fuels for a world dangerously dependent on oil supplies and deeply alarmed by the effects of global warming.

The hardy jatropha, resilient to pests and resistant to drought, produces seeds with up to 40 per cent oil content. When the seeds are crushed, the resulting jatropha oil can be burnt in a standard diesel car, while the residue can also be processed into biomass to power electricity plants.

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There is a substantial need for a renewable liquid fuel substitute for petro-diesel and gasoline. Using food oils for biodiesel would cause the cost of some foods to rise--much as the price of maize has risen due to corn ethanol for fuel.

Jatropha seems as good a crop for oil seed/biodiesel as any, for now. Eventually, genetic modification of plants may produce a much better oil seed crop.

Peak Oil: Meet Oil Seeds

Oil seeds are a renewable source of oils for industrial use, for chemical feedstocks, and for petroleum replacement in transportation fuels.

... an even greater potential for oilseed crops, according to John Dyer—who works at the agency's Southern Regional Research Center (SRRC) in New Orleans, La.—resides in their capacity to pump out unusual fatty acids that have valuable chemical, industrial and nutritional properties. Fish-oil-type fatty acids derived from plants, for instance, could benefit the heart, brain and eyes.

Dyer, a chemist, and Jay Shockey, a plant geneticist who also works at the SRRC, are getting inspiration from tung trees for how plants could be coaxed into churning out such impressive oils.

Tung trees, which used to be cultivated in great plantations along the U.S. Gulf Coast, produce eleostearic acid, an unusual fatty acid with applications ranging from furniture finish to computer chip production. The trees' major shortcomings? They're slow to grow and vulnerable to hurricanes.

Similar limitations apply to other currently grown oilseed crops. With traditional breeding alone, it's almost impossible to raise crops that will manufacture abundant amounts of unusual fatty acids.

That's why Dyer and Shockey are looking to engineer plants that will practically gush forth unique fatty acids, such as eleostearic acid. They recently discovered that a gene involved in the production of the important enzyme DGAT2—short for diacylglycerol acyltransferase type-2—may well be the "magic bullet" for boosting plants' oil-oozing abilities.

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Genetic engineering research has focused mainly on medical applications. But modifying the genetic makeup of plants to create inexpensive substitutes for petroleum, and to create novel and unique products for human use, is inevitable.

The research described in the above article is rather tame and mundane, compared to what is possible for engineered plant life. But it's a start.

Nanotechnology and Power Engineering

Nanotechnology is poised to strongly influence virtually every area of technology and engineering. Electric power engineering is no exception.

discoveries in nanotechnology have led to what many consider the next generation of solar technology: ultra-thin amorphous silicon, organic and inorganic solar cells derived from nanocrystals that convert sunlight into electricity at a fraction of the cost of silicon-based solar cells. They are also more flexible, less brittle and can even be painted onto structures, allowing more possibilities for building integrated architectural design. Greater research investment in these technologies is yielding continually higher sunlight-to-electricity conversion efficiencies, bringing them closer to full-scale commercialization.

Fuel cells also benefit from nanotechnology. While the ability to store adequate quantities of hydrogen molecules has remained a serious dilemma in developing the technology for large-scale use, nanotechnology has the potential to put hydrogen storage in the fuel cell directly using nanostructures of carbon, zeolites or stacked clays. Nanoengineered electrodes in the form of cathodes and anodes are currently being manufactured and incorporated in solid oxide and polymer electrode-based fuel cells that provide higher efficiency and performance. Nanotechnology applied to fuel cells enables more efficient and reduced use of precious metals - such as using platinum nanoparticles for high surface area and low volume - along with improved membrane function and durability.

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Also see this article, that discusses the exciting quantum level effect called multiple exciton generation (MET), which is being studied in silicon nanocrystals/quantum dots. These crystals can be capable of generating more than one electron per absorbed photon.

Improved storage batteries and supercapacitors will also come from the application of nanotechnology research to electric power.

Generation IV Nuclear--Toward an Environmentally Friendlier Nuclear Fission Reactor

Nuclear energy is a likely alternative to the increased use of coal, as oil supplies begin to plateau over the next few decades. Next generation nuclear fission reactors will not have the massive need for coolant water, and will thus be environmentally friendlier. Their safer designs--when compared to contemporary reactors--should reduce some public concerns about moving toward more nuclear power plants.

The US government energy labs are actively soliciting new reactor designs, in the knowledge that there are few alternatives to nuclear energy over the next half century, if humans are to significantly move away from fossil fuels.

The Energy Department's Idaho National Laboratory is conducting the program that seeks to use cutting-edge technology in building a high temperature reactor capable of producing hydrogen, electricity and/or process heat. Officials said such a nuclear power plant would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by enabling nuclear energy to replace fossil fuels in the petrochemical and transportation industries.

"Proceeding with conceptual design for the Next Generation Nuclear Plant brings the Department of Energy another step closer to developing this advanced new technology," Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy Dennis Spurgeon said. "Through this effort, (the department) will foster a public-private partnership to complete this development and spur the commercial scale deployment of advanced clean and safe nuclear energy as quickly as possible."

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Read more about next generation fission here, here, and here.

The last link, Energy from Thorium, is particularly thought provoking, because it introduces a reactor concept that will not add to the concern over the propagation and breeding of weapons grade fissionable materials. Thorium does not breed Plutonium.

High temperature reactors that do not use water as the primary coolant should allow the use of nuclear energy in more arid climates, where cooling water is scarce. These designs should also be more useful in mining both oil sands and shale oils in situ.

China has already begun the planning and development process for a rapid expansion of
Chinese nuclear energy capacity. And although recent Japanese earthquakes are causing the Japanese to re-think their commitment to nuclear, for less earthquake-prone areas in the developed world, nuclear is a natural.

Greece Opts for Fuel Cell Submarine

While fuel cell powered submarines cannot stay submerged as long as nuclear submarines, they are able to remain underwater for a respectable 3 weeks before needing to resurface.

The HDW Class 214 submarine has a fuel cell-generated power supply, allowing it to operate entirely on hydrogen. The fuel cell, which produces electrical energy from oxygen and hydrogen, allows the new submarine to cruise under water for up to three weeks without resurfacing. Conventional diesel-electric submarines typically deplete their battery power after a few days cruising under water. In addition, the fuel cell makes no noise and produces no detectable exhaust heat, in turn making the submarine virtually undetectable.

This is the most advanced conventional submarine in the world and the Greek State was the first in the world to order it.

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The power system is based upon technology developed by Air Products.

The fueling technology is based on Air Products’ unique cryogenic hydrogen compressors (CHCs), which are used in conventional hydrogen supplies, as well as in bus fueling applications.

“We are paving the way to the future hydrogen economy, by already supplying liquid hydrogen from Central Europe, as far as Ireland, Italy, Spain and Israel. By supplying liquid hydrogen as well as fueling equipment, we are able to offer a complete and safe package to our customers. We are proud to have already supplied hydrogen fueling equipment, as well as liquid hydrogen, to fuel submarines from the German Navy and now the Hellenic Navy, and we hope more will adopt this revolutionary technology soon,” said Ian Williamson, general manager-Future Energy Solutions, Air Products Europe.

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It is important for Greece to have a submarine capability for patrolling its many kilometers of coastline. Along with many other countries on the Mediterranean, Greece is under assault from hundreds of thousands of would-be immigrants, many terrorists among them, who seek to flee a life of oppression in muslim countries to the south.

Brazil Going Nuclear

Brazil is best known in the energy world for using sugar cane to produce ethanol for fuel. But Brazil also has the world's largest known uranium reserves. With the passage of time, uranium is becoming more important than petroleum, for many uses.

Latin America is a place of current unrest, largely due to the influence of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Chavez supports the bloody revolutionary movement FARC in Colombia, and is trying to influence the political future of every other country in Latin America--with some success in Ecuador and Bolivia.

Brazil, with its vast mineral resources and large economy, is the main obstacle to Chavez' desire to dominate Latin America. If Chavez cannot bully Brazil through its recent huge purchases in arms from Spain, Russia, China, etc. Hugo will feel compelled to take more forceful measures.

Brazil is feeling the heat from its neighbor to the north. That is why Brazil is converting its attack submarines from closed-cycle fossil fuel to nuclear fuel.

July 15, 2007: Brazil is going to invest half a billion dollars over the next eight years to develop a nuclear power plant for submarines (SSNs, nuclear attack subs). Brazil has two nuclear power plants, and the largest deposits of Uranium on the planet. The submarine power plant would be designed to fit in an French or German submarine. Both of these countries are now building subs with closed cycle power plants, which take up nearly as much space as a nuclear power plant would. But the closed cycle plants still use fossil fuel, and Brazil wants to reduce use of fossil fuels. Thus Brazil would replace its current five conventional subs with four or five nuclear ones. These boats would be used to patrol the sea lanes off Brazil's long Atlantic coast.

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For large scale electric power generation, for powering naval vessels at sea for long cruises, for powering large underground or undersea shelters, growing centers, and shelters--nothing is as good as nuclear power. And despite the best efforts of "environmentalist activists," nuclear energy is becoming safer and more reliable at every stage of its cycle.

Brazil understands the threat that Venezuela poses to the future of Latin America. Brazil does not intend to become a "client" of Chavez, nor to allow Hugo to become the regional hegemon.

Better Large Scale Battery Storage

Al Fin is always spouting off about the need for "utility scale energy storage" for load-leveling, and for bringing more renewable energy sources online--such as solar and wind. Al Fin's favourite technology is the redox flow cell, but other storage technologies are making a bid to play this very important role.

Using so-called NaS batteries, utilities could defer for years, and possibly even avoid, construction of new transmission lines, substations and power plants, says analyst Stow Walker of Cambridge Energy Research Associates. They make wind power — wildly popular but frustratingly intermittent — a more reliable resource. And they provide backup power in case of outages, such as the one that hit New York City last week.

Such benefits are critical, because power demand is projected to soar 50% by 2030 and other methods of expanding the power supply are facing growing obstacles. Congress is likely to cap carbon dioxide emissions by traditional power plants to curtail global warming. Meanwhile, communities are fighting plans for thousands of miles of high-voltage transmission lines needed to zap electricity across regions.

....American Electric Power (AEP), one of the largest U.S. utilities, has been using a 1.2 megawatt NaS battery in Charleston, W.Va., the past year and plans to install one twice the size elsewhere in the state next year. Dozens of utilities are considering the battery, says Dan Mears, a consultant for NGK Insulators, the Japanese company that makes the devices.

"If you've got these batteries distributed in the neighborhood, you have, in a sense, lots of little power plants," Walker says. "The difference between these and diesel generators is these batteries don't need fuel" and don't pollute.

The NaS battery is the most advanced of several energy-storage technologies that utilities are testing. The oldest and most widespread form of energy storage in the USA, pumped hydroelectricity, collects water after it spins a turbine and uses a small amount of electricity to send it back and repeat the process.

Lead-acid batteries — the same kind used in cars — were installed by Southern California Edison in 1988. But the batteries, though inexpensive, typically fill warehouse-size buildings and last about five years. That's because the acid that connects positive and negative electrodes corrodes components.

An NaS battery, by contrast, uses a far more durable porcelain-like material to bridge the electrodes, giving it a life span of about 15 years, Mears says. It also takes up about a fifth of the space. Ford Motor pioneered the battery in the 1960s to power early-model electric cars; NGK and Tokyo Electric refined it for the power grid.

Since the 1990s, Japanese businesses have installed enough NaS batteries to light the equivalent of about 155,000 homes, says Brad Roberts, head of the Electricity Storage Association. In the USA, AEP is using the 30-foot-wide by 15-foot-igh battery to supply 10% of the electricity needs of 2,600 customers in north Charleston, says Ali Nourai, AEP manager of distributed energy. The battery, which cost about $2.5 million, is charged by generators from the grid at night, when demand and prices are low, and discharged during the day when power usage peaks.

....A more intriguing goal is to wring more energy out of the wind farms that are cropping up across the country. Wind typically blows hard at night when power demand is low, producing energy that cannot be used. When demand peaks midday, especially in the summer, wind is often sporadic or absent. NaS batteries could let AEP store wind-generated power at night for daytime use.

Next year, AEP plans to install another NaS battery in West Virginia to provide backup power in case of an outage — the first such application of the technology, Nourai says. The battery would kick in automatically, so customers would see no disruption.

Other utilities are planning or considering the technology. In Long Island, N.Y., a group of utilities plans this summer to install an NaS battery at a bus depot. The battery is charged at night, when power prices are low, and discharged during the day to pump natural gas into tanks to provide fuel for the buses, says Mike Saltzman of the New York Power Authority. That cuts electric costs for the bus company and eases stresses on the grid. Pacific Gas & Electric is leaning toward installing a much larger, 5-megawatt battery by 2009, enough to power about 4,000 homes, says PG&E's Jon Tremayne.

....Meanwhile, other storage devices are gaining traction, too. A group of Iowa municipal utilities plans to use wind turbines to compress air during off-peak hours that will be stored in an underground cavern. The air would be released at peak periods to run turbines and generate power for about 200,000 homes. Another technology, the flywheel, has a massive cylinder that can spin for days after being started by a generator. The cylinder can then activate a turbine to supply electricity for a few seconds or minutes when it's needed, for instance, to head off an interruption to a computer center from a lightning strike.

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Homes, businesses, neighborhoods, and larger areas all need energy storage scaled to their needs. This is one of the more important energy issues at present, yet it gets relatively little attention.

Hat tip Fatknowledge blog

Small Scale Solutions

The image above depicts a Zotloterer Gravitational Vortex that can be used to generate electricity from a small head of water, and at the same time aerate the stream.

The aspect of the power plant reminds a bit of an upside-down snail. The water passes through through a large, straight inlet, then passes tangentially into a round basin, forming a powerful vortex (whirlpool), which finds its outlet at the center bottom of the shallow basin.

The turbine does not work on pressure differential but on the dynamic force of the vortex. Not only does this power plant produce a useful output of electricity, it also aerates the water in a gentle way.

Of course the use of water vortices has been pioneered by another Austrian - Viktor Schauberger, who was also known as the "water wizard". He floated hard-to transport heavy logs from remote regions of the Austrian forests, not accessible at the time by streets, to where they would be milled and processed. The feat was accomplished by carefully regulating the water's temperature and by inducing a rolling, longitudinal vortex motion in the water.

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Look at this interesting approach to converting sunlight directly to fuel through artificial photosynthesis.

Natural photosynthesis is a good interim measure, but Brudvig and colleagues decided to design an artificial system to harness sunlight with greater efficiency, he said.

"Our goal is artificial photosynthesis, to move electrons not using chlorophyll," he said.

Brudvig is experimenting with manganese complexes hooked onto nano particles of titanium oxide and suspended in water.

Nano particles are the material of choice because they maximize surface area, essential to a process that depends on light.

Both manganese and titanium are common in Earth’s crust and relatively inexpensive, he said. Earth also has a large supply of water.

The manganese molecule can absorb energy from sunlight and use it to split water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen. The plan is for the manganese to split a water molecule into one oxygen atoms, two positively charged hydrogen nuclei and two negatively charged electrons, he said.

These electrons are transported to the titanium oxide, where light boosts them into a higher energy state andconducts them to another reaction surface that create hydrogen, methane, methanol, and other fuels.

"Any fuel has excess electrons. We could transfer the moving electrons to make hydrogen, and then use hydrogen to turn carbon dioxide into methanol," Brudvig said. That is, in chemical symbols, CO2 + 6 e- + 6 H+ ---> (CH3 OH) + H2O.

Excess oxygen from the water would be released to the atmosphere.

Check out these Turkish phase transition tiles for keeping cool in the summer heat.

Or this architectural innovation using solar powered pumps and fans that could save up to 40% of the fossil fuels used to heat and cool the average home.

This Indian plan for generating electricity from plastic waste may help clean up landfills and trash piles.

Finally, this improved approach to radiant floor heating may help bring this energy saving technology to more new homes.

Hat tip keelynet.

News from the Nuclear Front

As more countries begin ramping up plans for new nuclear power plants, IBM has committed itself to playing a leading advisory role.

Big Blue's Global Center of Excellence for Nuclear Power sits in southern France, near Cadarache, the site of the International Thermonuclear Experimental reactor fusion project.

The center will provide consultation for the design, construction, safety and operations of power plants based on IBM software, hardware and services. The company is eager to vend its expertise to utility companies looking to build new reactors or put older ones back in shape after the EU opened the energy market to all Europeans at the beginning of July. Theoretically, all Europeans are free to get their energy from any company, making a market ripe for competition — and perhaps consulting.

"France possesses world-class expertise in the area of nuclear power," IBM Lead Architect Frederic Bauchot said. "Establishment of the Center enables IBM to utilize not only local IBM talent and experience in nuclear systems design and implementation, but also advanced skills of a leading nuclear power market".

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Meanwhile, South Korea will be assisting the Ukraine in construction and management of new nuclear plants. In India, nuclear scientists are designing an advanced Thorium reactor.

The novel Fast Thorium Breeder Reactor (FTBR) being developed by V. Jagannathan and his team at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) in Mumbai has received global attention after a paper was submitted to the International Conference on Emerging Nuclear Energy Systems (ICENES) held June 9-14 in Istanbul.

Power reactors of today mostly use a fissile fuel called uranium-235 (U-235), whose "fission" releases energy and some "spare" neutrons that maintain the chain reaction. But only seven out of 1,000 atoms of naturally occurring uranium are of this type. The rest are "fertile", meaning they cannot fission but can be converted into fissionable plutonium by neutrons released by U-235.

Thorium, which occurs naturally, is another "fertile" element that can be turned by neutrons into U-233, another uranium isotope. U-233 is the only other known fissionable material. It is also called the "third fuel".

Thorium is three times more abundant in the earth's crust than uranium but was never inducted into reactors because - unlike uranium - it has no fissionable atoms to start the chain reaction.

But once the world's uranium runs out, thorium - and the depleted uranium discharged by today's power reactors - could form the "fertile base" for nuclear power generation, the BARC scientists claim in their paper.

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Development of alternative fuels for nuclear reactors can not come soon enough, since the market for uranium is threatening to burst through the roof.

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."

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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.

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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.

Source

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.