Clever Ideas to Recover from EMP and Geomagnetic Storm Power Grid Damage

Either an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) or a geomagnetic storm could produce devastating effects on an electric power grid. Replacing crucial power transformers could take up to 2 years, during which time society would be falling apart at the seams for lack of power, and consequent lack of fuel and agricultural production and distribution.

The Electric Power Research Institute has been concerned about the effects of an EMP or geomagnetic storm on the US power grid (PDF) for a number of decades. A more recent FAS report (PDF) reiterates many of the same concerns which EPRI has expressed, although the FAS predictably focuses more upon the politically correct threat of geomagnetic storm, rather than on the perhaps more likely threat of EMP.

Regardless, between EPRI, the electric power industry, and other groups, the US Department of Homeland Security has taken a belated look at how large power transformers might be replaced in the event of a power grid catastrophe. Some clever engineers have come up with a few good ideas -- which could conceivably save millions of lives one day.

“If you have to order a transformer from someplace, it’s two years to do it,” said Richard J. Lordan, a senior technical expert at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit consortium based in Palo Alto, Calif.

Transformers were seen as a potential problem to the grid as far back as 1990, said Sarah Mahmood, a program manager at the Department of Homeland Security, which paid for about half of the cost of the $17 million drill, with the rest picked up by the electrical industry. Transformers are about the size of a one-car garage and usually painted some drab industrial color, but without them, intersecting power lines would be like elevated highways with no interchanges.

For the test, the Electric Power Research Institute ordered three “recovery transformers” from a supplier, ABB in St. Louis. This week they were trucked to a substation owned by CenterPoint Energy near Houston. For security reasons, the company will not say precisely where.

Shipping the replacements was a problem. Ordinary transformers are often too big and heavy to travel by road, and they require special rail cars. But because the transformers typically last 50 years, only a few dozen are shipped each year, so even the appropriate rail cars are in short supply. Ratcheting up the degree of difficulty, many of the places where a replacement transformer might have to go are no longer served by rail.

...the research institute tried a different approach, substituting three smaller, more mobile transformers for one conventional one, and specifying a size that would fit on a modified truck trailer. (A standard transformer costs roughly $5 to $7 million; buying and combining the three singles is slightly more expensive.)

Using a different transformer for each phase allowed shrinking the weight of the transformer from about 400,000 pounds for a single one to roughly 125,000 pounds for each of the three-phase units. In operation, the transformers are oil-filled, but in this case, the oil was shipped in tanker trucks in the convoy, to decrease weight.

With three transformers, three crews can work simultaneously to set them up, and setting up a small transformer is faster than setting up a big one.

In addition, installing a transformer usually requires pouring a concrete foundation, but one of these transformers was mounted on skids, eliminating that need..

...The next step will be a transformer unlike almost any in the field, that can be configured to work between more than two different voltages — say, operating not just between 138 kilovolts and 345 kilovolts, but also between 115 kilovolts and 345 kilovolts. That would cover a few hundred more.

In recent years, electric companies have been required to build entire duplicate control centers, at least 10 miles from the primary center, to reduce the possibility of a catastrophe that would knock down sections of the grid for months. After a flurry of fines and public embarrassments, the utilities have become better at maintaining their power lines. But this is the industry’s first major effort to solve the transformer problem.

A study for the Energy Department last year reinforced the need for speed, suggesting that hundreds of transformers could be lost to a “geomagnetic storm,” an eventuality that experts say could leave large parts of the North American continent blacked out for months. _NYT

Many government officials and politically correct "engineers" continue to doubt the need for this type of preparedness. Unfortunately, if they are wrong, as many as hundreds of millions of people in North America could lose their lives, due to their short-sightedness.

You would not expect the energy-starvationist Obama administration to be particularly concerned about the possible catastrophic fallout from its inept energy and foreign policies, and in general you would be right. But at lower levels of government, there still remain some conscientious and capable public servants who are still looking out for the public welfare.

If the energy starvationists can be ejected soon, society may be able to retain and expand upon these small numbers of competent civil servants in time to prepare for what appears to be more and more likely threats to the power grid -- from cyber-war to EMP to geomagnetic storm to threat from forcing excessive levels of intermittency onto the grid.

Cross-posted to Al Fin blog

Obama's EPA Moves to Shut Down Economic Boom in US

The amazing US shale oil & gas bonanza has delivered an economic boom to several regions across the US. This boom has been one of the few bright spots in an otherwise depressing Obama economy -- marked by official energy starvation and political cronyism in green energy spending.

Now -- astoundingly! -- the Obama EPA is pushing forward rules which threaten to turn off this rare economic bright light in the Obama darkness. According to the American Petroleum Institute:

...proposed federal regulations for hydraulic fracturing would significantly deter oil and natural gas production in the United States.

...the EPA rules would dramatically cut overall natural gas production using hydraulic fracturing by 11 percent, and oil production by 37 percent. Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, injects high-pressure blends of water, chemicals and sand into shale rock to free up hydrocarbon deposits.

...the EPA needs to give oil and natural gas companies several more years to comply, the energy lobbying group [API] said. _BizJournals

Final report from the API outlining the damaging effects on US energy production and the US economy from proposed EPA rules

All aspects of the Obama administration and bureaucracy have opposed reliable and affordable large scale energy production in the US -- in other words, they have promoted energy starvation. Such policies of energy starvation lead to economic hardship in all sectors of an advanced economy -- yet these are the kinds of policies the Obama EPA, DOE, and Department of the Interior have promoted.

The deeper the Obama administration descends into energy starvation, the more difficult it becomes for policy-makers to deny their apparent ideological connections with big-green dieoff.orgy lefty-Luddites.

Toward a Healthy Nuclear Mix

If the societies of both advanced and emerging nations are to generate a more abundant future, there is no getting around the need for safer, cleaner, more affordable nuclear power and heat. Both the UK and China are waking up to this fact, and will be turning away from unreliable and exorbitantly expensive green intermittent energy sources, toward more reliable nuclear plants.

There will be many approaches to fission reactors in the future. When taken together, the future mix of nuclear reactors are likely to generate far more power, with far less waste, far more safely. This will be true because the discarded "waste" from one type of reactor will actually be the valuable fuel for other types of reactors -- after which very little waste will remain.

Integral fast reactors (a new type of breeder reactor, so called because they can “breed” fuel) use almost 100% of the energy in uranium. Most of the world’s 440 commercial nuclear power plants are light water reactors using less than 1%.

According to University of Adelaide professor Barry Brook, this is because fast reactors use uranium 150 times more efficiently. For example, a 1GW light water reactor with a life span of 60- 80 years would need an initial loading of 60t-80t of uranium, 3%-5% of which would be enriched. Thereafter, for every year of its life, it would need 150t of fresh (mined) uranium and 20t of long- lived waste would be produced each year.

A fast reactor would also need 80t of uranium initially but would only need 1t of uranium a year from then on. And only 1t of waste would come out of it, which would be short-lived waste (it decays to normal levels of radioactivity in a few hundred years).

The even better news is that the reactors could take nuclear waste (the highly radioactive, long-lived type) and use it as a feedstock .

“If SA used fast reactors, the first step would be to consume all its current nuclear waste — that would last hundreds of years,” says Brook _fm

Whether using uranium or thorium, breeding fissile fuel from fertile fuel within a working reactor, is likely to be the most workable long-term approach to fission power and heat.

Another type of future breeder reactor is likely to be a hybrid fusion-fission reactor, where fusion is used as a neutron source, to breed fertile fuels such as thorium or U238 into fissile fuels such as U233 or Pu239.

...nuclear is often portrayed as a single, undifferentiated energy source. This is wrong and risks losing the opportunity to explore the role that new nuclear technologies can play.

Indeed, those who seek to write nuclear off completely are missing what could be remarkable developments on the horizon, with hybrid technologies potentially reshaping the way we think about nuclear energy.

...The long-term future of nuclear may therefore lie with combining nuclear fission (atoms splitting) and fusion (atoms merging) in a hybrid reactor. Governments, agencies and research institutes are already moving tentatively in this direction.

Hybrid fusion was first proposed by the American Nobel laureate, Hans Bethe, to enable more widely available reserves of nuclear fuels than uranium, such as thorium, to be used.

Hybrid could become a reality within the next two decades — the International Atomic Energy Authority has started a project on conceptual development of steady state compact fusion neutron sources, and the Institute of Plasma Physics in China is planning to build a hybrid fusion proof-of-principle prototype experiment by 2025. International experiments are under way into the critical fusion parts of such a system.

The basic principle is that neutrons generated by fusion in the plasma core stimulate fission in the outer blanket that contains uranium or other fissile materials (which could include nuclear waste).

Because there is relatively less energy extracted from the plasma than in pure fusion, continuous operation can be engineered more readily.

The fission is well below critical mass and operates only when there is a current flowing in the plasma, which can be switched off at a moment’s notice. This is why the system is safer, especially in regions where earthquakes and tsunamis can occur._BusinessDay

The hybrid fusion - fission reactor functions a lot like an accelerator-driven sub-critical reactor. But the hybrid reactor should prove to be more economical overall.

Other forms of "breeder reactors" will probably be adopted far sooner than hybrid designs can be perfected. Many of them will be of the small modular reactor (SMR) type, to provide increased scalability, affordability, reliability, and better siting options.

Besides a variety of breeder reactors, advanced light water reactors and gas-cooled high temperature reactors will round out the future mix, for greater versatility.

More on Oxford U. report recommending the UK turn away from expensive and unreliable green energy, to adopt more reliable nuclear power.

More on the Gen III and Gen IV nuclear reactor synergy

More on the Fukushima Follies

...no one has died from radiation exposure at Fukushima and...the health effects from radiation exposure are too small to measure.

"Fukushima was no Chernobyl." _Dan Yurman

One year after Fukushima, independent scientists working for the UN say bluntly that irrational fears of radiation poisoning will cause far more harm than the radiation itself. Not a single individual from the Japanese public received a dangerous dose, according to the early and informal analyses by the scientists. (Conspiracy theories cannot survive against the constant independent radiation measurements uploaded on Twitter.) Even the 70 altruistic plant workers who stayed behind gained an additional cancer risk of just 0.002% -- effectively zero in a country where four out of ten people get cancer. _Breakthrough Institute

As skankstream media outlets from Japan to Europe to North America continue to spew their anti-nuclear hysteria, the sober reality of the situtation is that no one died or was harmed by radiation exposure at the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown.

Skankstream thug-monkeys of a green-dominated media want you to forget that both the earthquake and the subsequent tsunami were exceptionally catastrophic events, killing tens of thousands of people. Instead they want you to adopt their own anti-nuclear hysteria, and to insist that all other nations adopt the irrational and reflexive flight from nuclear which was adopted by Japan and Germany, following the natural disasters in Japan.

How does one explain such a headlong rush away from reality?

Bending to a panicked public, Japan shut down its nuclear plants, and has had to spend the eye-popping sum of $100 million more every day to import and burn fossil fuels. Cancer-causing pollution fumes are up, as are greenhouse gases (four percent despite reduced overall energy use, according to a Breakthrough analysis). The turn back to fossil energy has turned Japan's decades-long trade surplus into a trade deficit. Higher energy costs exacerbate the nation's ability to deal with its $12 trillion debt, which at 212% of its GDP is far higher than even that of Greece (165%) or Italy (128%).

Despite the over-reaction in Japan and Europe, Fukushima has not slowed the pace of new nuclear plant construction globally (something we predicted last year). Against claims made in this week's Economist, the number of reactors planned and under construction is virtually unchanged. In the US, the main obstacle to the expansion of nuclear has not been fear of radiation but rather the abundance of cheap natural gas from shale -- a reality which similarly challenges the expansion of renewables.

There was nothing inevitable or natural about Japan's panicked reaction to Fukushima. Growing mistrust of the government long pre-dates the tsunami. "The hysteria about radiation reflects a breakdown in trust, as witnessed by endless media accounts quoting people who doubt the government's monitoring of food and soil," wrote former Tokyo correspondent for the Washington Post, Paul Blustein.

...Perhaps the most important lesson to be drawn from Japan's radiation scare is the need for new, credible sources -- independent of both electric utilities and governments -- able to soberly put the risks and benefits of energy technologies in context. Alas, if the Natural Resource Defense Council's slickly demagogic "nuclear fallout crisis" map is any indication, such credible sources won't likely come from the traditional environmental movement. _BreakthroughInstitute

No, the "traditional environmental movement" is too closely tied to the big money green supported dieoff.orgy movement, which wants to abolish all reliable and affordable forms of large scale energy, in favour of exorbitantly expensive and dangerously unreliable green forms of energy such as big wind and big solar.

We know that the sun doesn't shine at night or in cloudy weather, making big solar a huge joke in terms of supplying reliable baseload power. We also know that the wind does not usually blow its best during peak load hours, but tends to blow either too hard or not hard enough. And now we learn that wind turbines may need to be turned off at night, to satisfy environmental regulations and laws.

If the dieoff.orgy greens do away with nuclear power, coal power, and gas power, what are we left with? Unreliable and expensive solar -- which does not generate power at night -- and capricious wind, which will have to be shut down at night, whether the wind is blowing or not?

The most likely conclusion one is left with, is that the big money greens of the lefty-Luddite persuasion, truly do want to starve modern societies of energy, with necessarily catastrophic economic impacts. And it looks as if governments in the US, the EU, Australia, and elsewhere, are closely tied to this movement -- politically and ideologically.

Sooner or later, thinking people of the western world will have some difficult decisions to make, if they are to avert an existential crisis foisted on them from above.

Real World Says: F*ck You, Fukushima!

The real world -- aside from Obama's US NRC and the EU's greener governments -- has just about had it up to the chin with Fukushima doomsday coverage. Intelligent people who solve real world problems understand that nuclear power is the only reliable, safe, and affordable form of power and process heat generation that can go the distance over a time frame of many centuries.

MIT Technology Review

Several countries [living in a fantasy dream world __ ed.] have completely changed course. Japan has turned off 52 of its 54 reactors, and the future of nuclear power there is extremely uncertain. Germany shut down seven reactors, elected not to restart another that had been down for maintenance, and plans to decommission its remaining nine reactors by 2022. Italy, Switzerland, and Mexico have each retreated from plans to build new nuclear plants, and Belgium's government, which took over in late 2011, wants to make the country nuclear-free by 2025.

Several other economically developed countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and France (whose 58 reactors provide around three-fourths of its electricity) are still generating roughly the same amount as they were before the Fukushima disaster, and maintain modest plans for future construction of additional reactors.

But the future of nuclear power in the developing world is a different story. China, which currently has 15 reactors connected to its grid, is building 26 more and has approval, funding, or major commitments in place to build 51 more, according to the World Nuclear Association. Russia, with 33 reactors, and India, with 20, are building a combined 16 more, with 34 more planned.


Dozens of countries have expressed interest in building their first nuclear reactor, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. _MIT Technology Review -- World Plans for Nuclear Future

Unfortunately for the US and much of Europe, their green delusional governments are putting them in a very tough spot, in terms of future reliable power generation capacity. Once the people comprehend what is being done to them in the name of a dieoff.orgy green ideology, they will not be happy.

Here is more about how ideological factions within the US government have retarded the development of safe, reliable, and affordable new nuclear power:

The Obama Administration and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D–NV) scored a victory in their war against Nevada’s Yucca Mountain as a nuclear-waste repository when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) voted in September to dispose of all pending matters in the Yucca licensing case without approving or disapproving the Department of Energy’s application to construct and operate the repository.

By pushing the nation further from a solution for nuclear-waste disposal, the vote also damages the prospects for nuclear energy expansion. Under current practice, the NRC can license new reactors only if it expresses confidence that the spent nuclear fuel (SNF) from the reactors will be disposed at an off-site facility. This requirement is referred to as the “waste confidence” rule.

Recognizing the link between new construction and waste disposal, the NRC’s chairman, Gregory Jaczko, persuaded the NRC to revise the waste confidence rule to reflect an assumption that no waste repository will be built in the foreseeable future. The problem is that this revision undermines the original purpose of the rule, which was to assure the public that nuclear waste would not remain at nuclear reactor sites indefinitely. Specifically, the revised rule:

1. Undermines the credibility of the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, as amended, and its mandate to complete the Yucca Mountain project;
2. Undermines confidence that any effective nuclear-waste-disposal plan will be implemented;
3. Provides the anti-nuclear movement with an opportunity to slow the expansion of nuclear energy through litigation;
4. Weakens investor and public confidence in nuclear power;
and
5. Undermines incentives for government and industry to develop long-term waste-disposal solutions.

_Nuclear Power: Obama Administration No Confidence

Read the rest of the article for historical perspective, and possible solutions and workarounds to the Obama energy starvation plan.

Green ideologues inside and outside of governments and inter-governments, would like to be able to repeal the industrial revolution from the outset. Their energy starvation ideology applies to nuclear, hydrocarbons, and any other reliable forms of abundant energy which might be discovered or devised.

The real world outside of green-dominated jurisdictions is having none of that nuclear and carbon hysteria. For those who must labour under capricious and irrational green dieoff rules, regulations, and taxes foisted on them by corrupt, delusional, and degenerate ideologues, hold on. Help is coming.

Unfortunately, some very bad things may have to happen to your economies before the green hysterics can be flushed. But be prepared for better times, once that has been done.

MIT Report: Managing Large Scale Penetration of Intermittent Renewables

In April of 2011, the MIT Energy Initiative held a symposium on the challenges of integrating green intermittent power sources into power grids. Today, the PDF report from that symposium was released for public download.

The images below were taken from the MIT report. The full report is downloadable at the link above.

Large electrical power grids are complex systems which help make modern affluent societies possible. Common tells us that we should not put undue stress on systems which are that important.

Intermittent power sources such as big wind and big solar cannot be controlled, because the wind and the sunshine cannot be controlled. This means that if power grids attempt to integrate these unreliable power sources, they will be forced to pay a number of costs on several levels. The cost of maintaining grid stability and reliability will rise. The cost of maintaining existing power plants will rise appreciably. The cost of supporting structures -- such as backup power sources, large-scale energy storage facilities, new grid infrastructures, new power management technologies, etc. is likely to prove enormous.

Environmentalists would like to shut down hydrocarbon and nuclear based power plants and replace them with wind and solar. Making an attempt to do so would prove an unmitigated catastrophe. But even the partial replacement of coal, gas, and nuclear by wind and solar could easily prove disastrous, if the integration of wind and solar were pushed too far, and too fast.

Frequent shut downs and startups of power plants is costly -- both short-term and long-term. Keeping personnel and machine systems on a hair-trigger, just in case wind and solar should pick up or slow down unexpectedly, is ludicrous.

As intermittency takes its toll on machinery and economies, wise and prudent observers should begin to question the rationale for pushing intermittency onto the power grid in the first place.

The "cure" for intermittency is thought to be new energy storage technologies at utility scales. But how long before such technologies become economically feasible?

Again, wise persons are forced to question the underlying rationale behind forcing destructive intermittencies onto the power grid.

You may think that only politicians could be so stupid as to quickly push ahead with intermittent sources long before the problems associated with intermittency have been solved. But that is not quite right. Academics and journalists are every bit as stupid as politicians, on that score, as are government bureaucrats -- and especially environmentalists. There has never been a shortage of stupidity.

There has always been a relative shortage of workable human ingenuity paired with wisdom.

Cross-posted from Al Fin Potpourri

Political Peak Energy: Obama's America is Full of It

From nuclear to coal to oil to natural gas to oil sands to oil shale -- the Obama administration has pursued an agenda of energy starvation.

Democrats want higher energy prices mostly to make alternative sources of energy seem economical. That's a tall order....

The Obama administration's massive subsidies to "green" firms have produced more embarrassment than energy. Solar panel manufacturer Solyndra, which went bankrupt last September after receiving $535 million, has left behind an environmental mess. Eleven other subsidized firms are having financial problems and five have filed for bankruptcy, CBS News reported in January.

In his state of the union address this year, President Barack Obama cited battery manufacturer Ener1 as a government investment success. Ener1 filed for bankruptcy two days later...Mr. Obama's "investments" haven't been bad for all of us. Eighty percent of the firms that got DOE loans are run or owned by the president's financial backers, according to the Hoover Institution's Peter Schweizer. "Green Firms Get Fed Cash, Give Execs Bonuses, Fail," headlined an ABC News investigative report broadcast Tuesday.

In what was billed as a "major speech" on energy policy Feb. 23, the president pledged to make more such "investments."

The speech was remarkable for its mendacity. During the Obama administration, the time it takes to get a permit to drill in the Gulf of Mexico has nearly doubled. Leases to drill on federal lands in the West are down 40 percent. But Mr. Obama claimed credit for the recent rise in domestic production of oil and natural gas. This "couldn't be farther from the truth," said the president of the American Petroleum Institute. _Obama Energy Abyss

President Obama's policies have been hard on energy producers and suppliers. No one should be surprised at that. The US president is merely following through on his promises to bankrupt energy companies and cause energy prices to skyrocket, which he made before he was elected.

Mr. Obama's Core Self

Obama will soon be personally responsible for preventing some 2 million barrels per day of possible North American crude oil production from reaching the American economy. The U.S. currently produces only about 6 million barrels of domestic crude oil, so that would be more than a 30 percent increase in domestic production.

...Two millions barrels per day of oil production would affect not just the price of gasoline in North America, but also the economics of world oil production: The president is preventing the U.S. from increasing oil production by an amount nearly equivalent to Iran’s total oil exports.

...We are once again entering a period of scarcity, where slight fluctuations in demand or supply will have a disproportionate impact on gas prices — but this time the scarcity is largely the product of Obama’s policies. _Obama Choking Off Oil Production

The reality is that the Obama administration slowed the permitting process long before the spill happened. Rather than playing catch up, we're falling further behind. The American people and the oil and gas industry need certainty that energy independence, not politics, will drive our nation's security. _WSJ

Mr. Obama owes a lot to big money faux environmental lobbies and special interests. He promised to shut down coal companies, and he has delivered. He promised that energy prices would skyrocket and he has delivered. He promised truckloads of green nonsense, and he delivered.

“North Dakota oil producers were scheduled to feed the Keystone pipeline with 100,000 barrels of crude oil per day,” Dalrymple said. “Now we will not be able to supply the choice American markets because President Obama says he needs more time to study Keystone. The fact is he has had over three years to study this issue.”

The pipeline has been under federal review for years and a key State Department analysis said the project would have minimal environmental impacts. _TheHill

The oil and gas industry could be creating even more jobs if the United States had more of a pro-development policy for traditional energy sources instead of a government-driven, heavily subsidized, green energy approach. For example, energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie evaluated the impact on production, jobs, and government revenues of implementing regulatory policies that support the development of oil and natural gas resources, including: a) opening federal land that is currently “off limits” to exploration and development; b) lifting the drilling moratorium in New York; c) increasing the rate of permitting in the offshore Gulf of Mexico; d) approving the Keystone XL and other future Canada-to-U.S. oil pipelines; and e) leaving regulation of shale resources predominantly at the state level.

Under a scenario that encourages the development of new and existing domestic energy resources, Wood Mackenzie estimates that by 2015 an additional 1.27 million barrels of oil equivalent (BOE) could be produced, rising to 10.4 million BOE by 2030. That would be a 47 percent increase over the estimated 2030 production levels under a current development path case.

Furthermore, under the new development path, there would be a potential increase of 1 million new oil and natural gas jobs by 2018, and 1.4 million new jobs by 2030, while adding cumulative potential government revenue of $36 billion by 2015, and nearly $803 billion by 2030. _American

A Remarkable Lack of Concern for America's Energy Future
A new report from the World Economic Forum (PDF) reveals that about 9% of new US jobs in 2011 were created by the shale energy revolution.

The report said the oil and gas industry contributed 37,000 direct jobs in 2011, which led to the creation of an additional 111,000 indirect jobs during the same period. It said the multiplier effect for solar and wind energy were lower during operation, but higher at up to 3.3 times during construction.

“We always suspected that energy had a vital role to play in the economic recovery but we were still surprised when the data uncovered the magnitude of the sector’s multiplier effects,” Roberto Bocca, head of energy Iidustries at the World Economic Forum, said in a release.

The domestic U.S. oil and gas industry is in the midst of the its biggest boom in a generation, with hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling technology unlocking billions of barrels of oil and decades’ worth of natural gas from previously untappable tight coal seam fissures. _Reuters via GWPF

The Obama administration has, of course, been trying to find a way to shut down as many forms of energy production as possible -- and to hell with jobs.

The oil and natural gas industry, one of the strongest job-creating sectors of the U.S. economy, has been unfavorably targeted by President Obama’s proposed 2013 fiscal year (FY) federal budget. To start with, Obama is proposing, for the fourth consecutive year, to repeal Section 199 of the “American Jobs Creation Act.” If enacted, this selectively punitive treatment would increase taxes on oil and natural gas companies by almost $12 billion over the next decade. It could possibly jeopardize some of the millions of American jobs supported by oil and natural gas producers and prolong the sub-par “jobless recovery.”

Overall employment in the U.S. economy still remains short by almost 5 million jobs, and more than 3 percent below the pre-recession employment peak in November 2007. But the oil and natural gas industry has added 34,200 jobs over that period and expanded industry employment by more than 22 percent. Oil and natural gas companies have been on a hiring spree, adding almost 100 new payroll jobs every day for the last year.

In contrast, job creation in green energy projects has so far been very disappointing. According to a recent Wall Street Journal analysis of $4.3 billion in public funding for wind energy under Section 1603 of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, there were 36 wind farms that employed 7,200 American workers during the peak of their construction, or an average of 200 workers per project. Today, according to these companies and state and local government economic development officials, those projects employ only about 300 workers, at a cost to taxpayers of more than $14 million per permanent job. _TheAmerican

Obama's antagonism toward reliable sources of energy appears to be based upon at least two foundations: 1. A desire to please big money faux environmentalist supporters, who are pursuing an agenda of carbon hysteria, and 2. A desire to punish and discipline successful private sector enterprises, and to bring them more under the control of a bloated central governmental bureaucracy.

Anyone who has read Mr. Obama's first two autobiographies and observed his early career in community organising and political activism, will understand the man's antagonism toward capitalism, free markets, and any source of wealth and power creation which competes with a central, redistributive government.

Political peak oil. Political peak energy. Political energy starvation and economic hardship for everyone except political supporters...Perhaps American voters need to re-think the government they have chosen to represent them.

Of course, political peak energy is not limited to the US. It is rampant in Germany, the UK, and the EU as a whole. It has taken over Australia and occupies provincial government seats in Canada.

Parts of this article were excerpted from an earlier piece published on Al Fin blog

Why Big Utilities that Reject Full Sized Nuclear Reactors Might Just Go For Small Modular Reactors: Achieving a Nuclear Renaissance via Scalability

Pete Sena, president of FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Co., the utility's nuclear subsidiary, said the company no longer can afford full-scale nuclear reactors, but small, modular reactors are manageable investments.

"What really excites me about nuclear energy is the new technology," Mr. Sena said.

Todd Schneider, a FirstEnergy spokesman, confirmed that the company is greatly interested in modular reactors.

In fact, FirstEnergy is among 15 utilities who last year joined Babcock & Wilcox Co., a nuclear engineering and design firm, to form the mPower Industry Consortium. The group is providing oversight and pre-licensing funding for development of the 125-megawatt "mPower" reactor -- a small, modular light water reactor that is 83 feet high, weighs about 700 tons, and can power about 125,000 homes. _ToledoBlade

A scalable approach to nuclear power such as small modular reactors (SMRs) puts safe, reliable power in the same price category as new coal or gas plants -- making them affordable and competitive for utilities. Full-sized nuclear plants, on the other hand, can bankrupt companies that are not prepared to jump through all the hoops, weather the delays, finance $10 + billion dollar loans over indefinite time frames, and deal with all the bureaucratic seismic shifts and frivolous lawsuits which are likely to occur over the decade or more it will take to get the thing built and operating.

Currently, the price tag for a new baseload nuclear plant that can produce 1,100 to 1,200 megawatts is about $7 billion to $8 billion, Mr. Mowry said.

Atlanta-based utility the Southern Co. recently announced it would spend $14 billion to build two reactors at its Vogtle plant site south of Augusta, Ga., that will begin operating in 2016.

"By the end you're going to be at $15 billion-plus, so for a company whose whole market capitalization is that amount or less, you're basically betting the entire company on that one plant," Mr. Mowry said. "And Southern Co. is a regulated utility. FirstEnergy is not. Who's going to give [FirstEnergy] a loan for that one asset?"

So if a new nuclear plant "is a nonstarter even if the company is interested in betting the company on that one plant," Mr. Mowry said, "the question is: How do you cut this thing down to size? How do you cut the cost and manage the risk for a utility like FirstEnergy?"

The answer, the Babcock & Wilcox executive said, is to get the total cost under $2 billion, or about the price tag of a new coal-fired or combined-cycle natural-gas fired plant.

With small, modular reactors, that $2 billion or less price is achievable because about 70 percent of the reactor and its systems are contained within the unit and built in the factory. They do not require separate external cooling and other systems.

In fact, for $2 billion, a utility should be able to buy two modular reactors with a total output near 360 megawatts, Mr. Mowry said.

SMRs "truly are innovative but in a retro kind of way," said Paul Genoa, director of policy development at the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry lobbying group.

The concept of small, modular reactors was explored in the early 1950s and 1960s, but the concept gave way to large reactors, he said.

But the costly economics of big plants has revived the idea of smaller reactors that could serve niche markets. _ToledoBlade

The article linked above provides an insightful look into many of the problems faced by any utilities which want to add safe, reliable nuclear power to their portfolio of electric power sources.

The fact that SMRs appear to solve many of the budgetary and financing problems of adding scalable nuclear power to the energy mix, is likely to attract the attention of the energy starvationists within the Obama government. So don't be surprised if the thug-monkeys of the skankstream media are sent out to attack SMRs in some of the larger mass media outlets.

Just so long as it is not too easy for voters to trace the trail of energy starvation back to the White House. At least, not until after November.

An Abundant Future Awaits

Onstage at TED2012, Peter Diamandis makes a case for optimism -- that we'll invent, innovate and create ways to solve the challenges that loom over us. "I’m not saying we don’t have our set of problems; we surely do. But ultimately, we knock them down.”

Peter Diamandis runs the X Prize Foundation, which gives rich cash awards to the inventors and engineers who'll get us back to the moon, build a better car and explore the genome. And watch for more prizes to come. _TED

It is difficult to get an audience for abundance these days, given how popular doom has come to be in the movies, the news media, in academia, and global politics. But there is reason to believe that some of the more popular dooms -- such as peak oil doom, climate catastrophe doom, overpopulation doom, resource scarcity doom, etc -- are not due to take place anytime soon.

Long-term forecasts are rarely sunny or even middling. In fact, they’re often fairly dystopian: Peak oil, peak gas, peak water, peak food, mass hysteria, zombie apocalypse.

Yet, to believe such specific long-term forecasts, you must believe that, now, folks have the never-before-seen ability and technology to accurately make long-term forecasts based on far distant supply pressures, unknowable future innovations and myriad other factors in the complex beast that is the global economy. Consider just one example: The (always moving) Peak Oil date certain has come and gone many, many times. Why? Extracting from easy-to-find conventional sources may slow. But there was just no way for folks in the 1950s to know that, 60 years later, we’d still be finding caches of oil (and natural gas) and innovating new ways to get at said energy sources more cheaply. Every decade, the world consumes more energy, yet every decade, the known energy reserves increase.

...The belief the future will be unmitigated disaster isn’t new to this generation. Humanity is prone to be hypersensitive to unknown future risk. Our brains evolved through tens of millennia to be keenly focused on survival—hence our tendency to focus on the negative. This was handy when one was trying to stay three steps ahead of giant hungry predators and gather enough sustenance to survive a snowy winter in the wilderness, but is probably less useful in helping us think more clearly about the future.

Over the past 100 years average human lifespan has doubled, average per-capita income (inflation adjusted) has tripled and childhood mortality is down by a factor of ten. The cost of basic necessities has fallen—sometimes radically. (If you haven’t watched that video yet, stop and do it now.)

And the future likely only features still more health- and wealth-creating innovations—in the US and elsewhere. _Forbes Doom is not coming

The author of this optimistic Forbes article is probably right, as long as the governments of the world are not allowed to shut down free markets based upon their misguided senses of doom -- or for any other reason.

When Russia became the USSR, many authors and journalists were highly optimistic about the future of the new country. And for a while, things seemed to be going well for the USSR.... until the reality of a failed centrally planned economy set in. The same disaster happened in China with Mao's totalitarian government, and the malaise continued until a new set of rulers opened up China's markets.

It is fine and good to be optimistic about the future of a free people in an opportunity society. But never forget how eager some government officials always seem to be, to shut it all down for reasons of power and ideology. It has happened before and it could easily happen again in your home country, if you let it.

More optimism:

Peak oil is dead

How Canada is adjusting to the North American energy boom

China's big new shale energy wealth

New Era of Discoveries

Untapped Unconventional Fields to Meet Demands

And so on, from South Africa to Argentina to Israel to Vietnam. New resources are being found and better ways to utilise old resources are being developed. The potential for a huge new global energy and industrial revolution is there, and would undoubtedly proceed unmolested -- if it were not for dysfunctional governments.

The most acute shortage is human ingenuity, followed by skilled manpower. But bad government trumps almost everything else, at least on the national and international scale. On a local and regional scale, human capital can often hold out long enough for the dysfunctional governments to be overthrown or voted out or otherwise disposed of.

Cross-posted from Al Fin blog

Cobalt Technologies' n-Butanol Project Advances on Two Fronts

Butanol is a 4 carbon alcohol that is widely used in industry as a solvent and food additive, and is increasingly being seen as a potentially useful fuel additive and gasoline substitute.

Cobalt Technologies is one of several small companies working hard to develop profitable new ways of producing butanol from biomass and other cheap, non-petroleum feedstocks. Cobalt recently announced two separate advances toward its goal of profitable renewable butanol production:

Cobalt Technologies, a developer of next-generation technology for the production of n-butanol, announced the successful demonstration of one of its advanced biocatalysts. Partnering with the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Cobalt completed multiple fermentation campaigns in a 9,000 liter fermenter, exceeding the target yield and other performance metrics for a commercial-scale facility.

That announcement came one day after Cobalt successfully demonstrated its biomass pretreatment process in cooperation with ANDRITZ, a leading supplier of technologies, equipment and plants for the pulp and paper industry.

Our strain demonstration comes on the heels of the successful demonstration of our pretreatment technology, proving our ability to map performance at the smallest scales all the way through demo scale. Ultimately, we’re showing performance is achievable at commercial scale across our technology platform. This essentially eliminates the majority of scale-up risk associated with commercialization, which is vital for our customers and partners.

—Bob Mayer, CEO of Cobalt Technologies _GreenCarCongress

So by both demonstrating more efficient and economical production of sugars-from-biomass, and demonstrating commercial-scale multiple fermentations of n-butanol, Cobalt should be taken more seriously. Here is more from the company's website:

Cobalt has taken a re-engineering approach to the tradition fermentation process for making butanol. The primary driver for Cobalt’s technology is reducing the cost of feedstock and minimizing the capital cost for fermentation. Sugars derived from food products, such as corn and sugar cane, are prohibitively expensive for the production of chemicals and fuels. Therefore, Cobalt has focused on the use of low cost cellulosic biomass such as forestry wastes and biomass process extracts as raw materials for butanol production as a starting point. There are abundant sources of these materials available today to supply the n-butanol market globally, and to make significant headway supplying related chemical derivatives markets.

Several technological innovations combined with low cost feedstock have advanced the process to be economically advantaged to petroleum-derived butanol and derivatives, including:

Biomass Sugar Extraction
To convert the carbohydrates (cellulose and hemicellulose) in lignocellulosic biomass, Cobalt has developed a process that simultaneously extracts and converts the lignocellulosic materials into simple sugars. Cobalt’s approach integrates the extraction process with hydrolysis chemistry in a way that shortens residence time while maintaining mild conditions. Our approach enables the use of smaller vessels and less expensive metallurgy, thereby minimizing capital and operating costs....

Microbial Strain Development
Cobalt’s technology is based on a bacterial fermentation of lignocellulosic sugars into butanol. Cobalt has developed proprietary bacterial strain development technology for improving the fermentation performance of a variety of microbial strains. These strains are specifically selected for their ability to utilize all five of the sugars found in plant materials. This innovative technology makes it possible to process a range of lignocellulosic biomass in the production of butanol....

Fermentation Process
Cobalt’s fermentation process differs radically from the traditional batch processes used today to convert starch to alcohol fuel. Our technology poises our continuous fermentation process at peak production rates for extended periods of time using our innovative bioreactor technology. Continuous production increases the overall production time of the fermentation unit, reducing capital and operating costs....

Product Recovery
Historically, distillation has been used to purify butanol from petroleum and biological processes, an approach which is energy and capital intensive. Cobalt utilizes process and thermal integration to reduce costs. Cobalt’s distillation process for butanol recovery uses approximately half the energy and half the equipment services compared to conventional butanol distillation. _Cobalt

Cobalt claims that its biomass to butanol process should be able to eventually undercut the price of butanol from petroleum, for industrial use. If true, butanol sales to industry should provide Cobalt with the income to allow it to continue to perfect its system with the long term goal of competing on the huge transportation fuels market.

Solazyme Aims to Get the Most Out of Algae

Solazyme's proprietary biotechnology platform creates renewable oils by harnessing microalgae's prolific oil production capabilities. Through world-class molecular biology and chemical engineering capabilities, we're able to cost-effectively produce high-value tailored oils. _SolazymeTechnology

Solazyme Technology
Al Fin analysts and consultants have been telling biofuels startups for years to focus on products with early profitability, while perfecting their processes for high volume, competitively priced biofuels -- which may not be ready for market until 2020 or later, in the case of algal oil-based biofuels.

It seems that algal oils company Solazyme may be listening. Instead of solely focusing on algal oil biofuels, solazyme is looking at a wide range of algal based products. Besides cosmetics, nutritional supplements, and industrial chemicals, solazyme is also developing algal food oil products, algal flours for bread and other baked goods, and even algae ice cream.

Solazyme has already found success in the cosmetics industry with its Algenist line of beauty products (tagline: "biotechnology from San Francisco), which rely on "alguronic acid," a compound produced by microalgae that can protect algae--and incidentally, human skin--from the environment. Since launching less than a year ago, Algenist products have become best-sellers at Sephora stores across the country.

...Solazyme’s algae-derived flour, which has a similar lipid profile to olive oil, can be used to create strikingly tasty foods.

The Almagin flour, a yellowish powder containing algae oil, can go anywhere butter, eggs, and oil are used. "It’s like having an oil on steroids," explains Morgan. "It acts like more oil than it is. You can take out three pounds of oil and put in one pound of our product."

... ice cream containing the algae flour, for example, has less fat and fewer calories than a traditional ice cream. It also contains more protein and dietary fiber. So while half a cup of regular ice cream contains 17% butter fat and 260 calories, that same ice cream made with algae flour has 6% total fat and 160 calories. Take it from someone (me) who has compared the algae ice cream with an ice cream from a big-name manufacturer: The algae stuff tastes almost exactly the same.

...Solazyme is currently testing whether the algae flour helps to extend the shelf life of certain foods. Proof of this ability was sitting in the kitchen: a half loaf of algae flour bread that had been on the counter for 12 days was still in decent shape. Not good enough to eat without toasting it first, but not moldy, either.

Morgan expects to have products containing the algae flour on store shelves by the end of this year (they will be sold by food manufacturers, not Solazyme). Products containing algae protein are already available.

Ultimately, Solazyme’s bet outside the biofuel business may be the thing that allows it to survive--and maybe even outlast other algae fuel-producing companies. _FC

This is the type of creative thinking that allows some companies to survive under general economic conditions that would destroy most other startups in the same general classification. First, look to the bottom line, while always keeping in mind your long-term goals.

The idea of eating algae as a staple food may seem odd to those of us accustomed to thinking of it as a fuel feedstock, but if it can be done profitably, why not? Algae certainly does not compete for prime farmland with regular food crops, at least not the way Solazyme grows it.

What human societies currently suffer from is a shortage of human ingenuity, as well as a growing shortage of skilled craftsmen and creative engineers with practical skills. Human ingenuity is the ultimate resource which needs to be developed.

Shale Gas Booms Globally -- Big Green Crashes & Burns

A Shale Gas Summit is being held on the 23rd and 24th of April, in Beijing, to assess the global impacts of the shale gas explosion.

Shale gas revolution created nearly 10% of all new US jobs in 2011

The World Economic Forum report, which highlighted the role that the energy industry can play in reviving the global economy, comes during a presidential election year as candiates argue about high U.S. unemployment and energy policy.

The report said the oil and gas industry contributed 37,000 direct jobs in 2011, which led to the creation of an additional 111,000 indirect jobs during the same period. It said the multiplier effect for solar and wind energy were lower during operation, but higher at up to 3.3 times during construction.

“We always suspected that energy had a vital role to play in the economic recovery but we were still surprised when the data uncovered the magnitude of the sector’s multiplier effects,” Roberto Bocca, head of energy Iidustries at the World Economic Forum, said in a release.

Early success for China's shale gas exploration well drilling: China has perhaps the world's largest deposits of shale gas. Once production of Chinese shale ramps up, world energy markets will never be the same.

Meanwhile South Africa may have a shale gas resource in excess of 485 trillion cubic feet. This is said to be enough to create hundreds of thousands of jobs and provide hundreds of years of energy for the troubled nation in southern Africa.

In fact, many analysts are beginning to see the oil shale revolution as the energy equivalent of the Berlin Wall crashing down, in terms of global impact.

On the green energy front, the UK is just beginning to assess its £120 billion wind energy blunder, and what it will have to do to recover from the disaster.

And in the US, the magnitude of damage from Obama's misguided pro-green energy policies is still mounting. The jobs destruction from the president's naive approach to national energy policy will continue long after he leaves office.

It’s unclear how much taxpayers spend on the 94 green building initiatives in the form of grants, loans, technical assistance, and tax incentives. That’s because many are combined with larger programs, and are not priced out individually by federal agencies. Equally unclear is the cost benefit of these programs, because two-thirds are not measured for their performance, GAO reported.

...“If you suggest a program that’s part of a hot issue for the President, like energy-efficiency, you’re likely as an agency to get more favor and funding in the budget,” Ellis said. But that practice results in enormous overhead costs for separate program staffs, and paves the way for the type of overlap that undermines the whole effort, Ellis said. “How can you deliver services and achieve the overall goal of saving energy when every cook in the federal government is trying to get their hands in the energy-efficiency pot?” Ellis said. _FiscalTimes

Despite Obama: A Slow Revival of US Nuclear Power?

The article excerpted below is a summary and description of a recent report from the Federation of American Scientists: The Future of Nuclear Power in the US (PDF). The FAS report is something of a "good news, bad news" joke: The good news is that a lot of safe new nuclear reactors are being designed and developed; The bad news is that the US government may not allow them to be built. Read on:

Generation III reactors were designed as improvements to those currently operating in the US, emphasizing simplification, standardization, and passive safety features. However, after the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents, no Generation III plants were ever constructed. More recently, updated versions of these designs (known as Generation III+) were developed, and are in the process of being licensed. The recently approved Westinghouse AP-1000 is one such example.

The next generation of commercial reactors, Generation IV, are all still in the research and design phase, but promise significantly higher performance, safety features, and sustainability. The development of Generation IV reactors began in the US in 2000, but since then 12 additional countries joined in the research program.


There are six specific reactor concepts that fall in this category: Very High-Temperature Reactor (VHTR), Super-Critical Water-cooled Reactor (SCWR), Molten Salt Reactor (MSR), Sodium-cooled Fast Reactor (SFR), Lead-cooled Fast Reactor (LFR), and Gas-cooled Fast Reactor (GFR). The first three are thermal reactors that operate at high temperatures, providing heat for non-electricity purposes. The second three are fast reactors that could function as breeders or nuclear waste burners.

...The VHTR is designed to operate at temperatures as high as 1000°C in order to provide the heat needed for industrial processes such as steam reforming of natural gas, coal gasification, and hydrogen production via the sulfur-iodine cycle. This would allow the reactor to serve as a source of both electricity and alternative liquid fuels. However, conventional light water reactors are limited by the boiling point of water, so instead coolants such as gases, supercritical water, or molten salt must be used to reach such high temperatures. In addition, new construction materials would be needed to withstand high-temperature operation.

The US actually built two prototype VHTRs using helium as the coolant: Peach Bottom 1, which operated from 1966 to 1974, and Fort St. Vrain, which operated from 1977 to 1992. Helium is used in most VHTR designs since it is inert, remains in the gas phase, and doesn’t become radioactive (unlike most other coolants). Research on helium-cooled VHTRs is ongoing, funded by the DOE Office of Nuclear Energy. The main challenges are sustained operation at such high temperatures.

...The NRC hasn’t yet approved any SMR designs, but multiple companies and research groups have been developing them since the 1970s. Designs using water, helium, sodium, lead, and fluoride salt coolants are all being considered, although the first commercial reactors will likely use the familiar light water reactor technology.

To give you an idea of the size, Westinghouse designed an SMR based on their larger AP1000 reactor. Compared with the AP1000’s 1100 MW electrical power output, the SMR would generate around 225 MW. All of the reactor components fit inside a containment vessel a little under 30 meters high and 10 meters in diameter. Like the AP1000, in includes passive safety systems. This design could remain cooled for seven days without any human intervention.

Many other companies are also designing SMRs. Babcock & Wilcox is working on a 160 MW, pressurized light water reactor design called mPower that might cost $600 million.

NuScale Power is developing an even smaller pressurized light-water SMR (creatively named NuScale) that would sit in in an underground water-filled pool. Each NuScale reactor module, at 45 by 9 meters, would generate 45 MW; a combined reactor building with 12 SMRs would generate a total of 540 MW. Unlike other designs that use pumps to circulate water, the NuScale reactor relies on natural convection.

...Another company, Hyperion Power Generation, is developing a 25 MW fast SMR that uses a lead-bismuth eutectic liquid-metal coolant (this falls in the Generation IV LFR class). Unlike most other reactors that use uranium dioxide as fuel, the Hyperion Power Module would use uranium nitride. This has a higher melting point and thermal conductivity than the typical fuel, which is beneficial at the higher operating temperatures of liquid-metal cooled fast reactors. With this SMR, instead of refueling every couple years, the entire 20-ton module is designed to be replaced every 7-10 years.

Low-cost SMRs may offer a solution to the cost problem, and help revitalize the industry. However, none have yet been approved by the NRC.

According to David Biello at Scientific American, only the two plants in Georgia plus another three elsewhere are likely to be constructed in at least the next decade. If there is a nuclear revival, it’s likely to be a slow one. _Arstechnica

The article above also links to a recent MIT report on the nuclear fuel cycle (PDF).

Clearly the two issues of new reactor technology and new fuel cycle technologies, are intertwined. The ideal reactor : fuel cycle duo would allow maximum extraction of energy from mineral ores (uranium and thorium) with minimal processing, minimal waste, minimal costs overall, and minimal risk of proliferation.

For the US to contribute to reaching that goal, it will be necessary to eject anti-nuclear bureaucrats and functionaries from the NRC with all due haste. Any politicians who are unwilling to take the necessary steps toward streamlining the path to a safer and more abundant future of nuclear power, should likewise be ejected with all due haste.

The US Must Have Both Nuclear and Coal: Obama Forbids Both

NewAmerican
An industrial society requires massive amounts of affordable fuels and electrical power. For electrical power, both nuclear and coal are suitable to provide the huge levels of baseload output required. But US President Obama is fighting a war to close down coal plants, while at the same time dragging his feet on allowing safe and revolutionary new nuclear designs to be licensed and approved.

Senator Obama declared a war against coal back in 2008, when he was still running in the Democratic presidential primaries against Hillary Clinton:

Consider candidate Obama’s January 2008 comment to the San Francisco Chronicle: “So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them because they are going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”

Obama originally planned to keep this promise through cap-and-trade legislation, a scheme to tax companies for their so-called greenhouse-gas emissions. Lacking congressional approval, the President has turned to his Environmental Protection Agency to kill coal by way of crippling new regulations just put into effect this year. _NewAmerican

Mr. Obama's EPA has taken extraordinary steps to shut down coal plants -- thus progressively destabilising the North American power grid and raising the cost of power to industrial, commercial, municipal, and residential customers. In the midst of an ongoing economic downturn, these policies would never be permitted in a rational society with a rational governmental system. More:

...the EPA passed new emission regulations that had to be complied with by utility companies within six months — in the past, utilities were given years to comment on the workability of the rules, plan the implementation of new rules, and adjust their budgets for the adoption of the regulations, because adding air scrubbers or other major implements to a coal-fired power plant is not as easy as adding a new deck to one’s house. Obviously, the new regulations were designed to lead to the closure of certain utilities, mainly coal-fired power plants.

How will this affect our citizenry? When utilities cannot afford to do the bidding of bureaucrats with respect to their generation facilities, they shut them down. According to the February 12 Wheeling (WV) News-Register, “It was revealed at least 32 coal-fired power plants in 12 states, including West Virginia and Ohio, would be closed so utility companies could comply with the Obama administration’s air pollution regulations.” Up to 55 million households will be in danger of outages, brownouts, or, at the least, higher rates due to this unnecessary EPA rule. Already financially strapped Americans will be thrust into what is known in Europe as “energy poverty.”

...The effect of depriving a population of reliable sources of electricity is catastrophic. This can be quantified by examining the average national use of electricity in watts per person, compared to life expectancy in those nations.

...The United States is considered by many geologists as the “Saudi Arabia” of coal. This resource provides life-saving and life-enhancing energy for America, but it is under attack for this very reason by those who would take us back to an earlier era that was infinitely dirtier, deadlier, and with fewer opportunities to move civilization to new levels of freedom and prosperity. Government should not pick winners and losers to subsidize or regulate out of existence but should get out of the way and allow the free market come up with solutions to provide our energy needs.

In the future coal should probably be a feedstock for liquid fuels and for production of iron and steel, with nuclear energy providing our electrical base load. Coal is a resource that is proven and available. _NewAmerican

Eventually, either American voters will eject this dysfunctional president and his administration, or time will run out on his lame duck presidency. By then, the damage will have been done.

A huge power generating infrastructure can be shut down by the act of putting pen to paper. It cannot be re-built nearly so easily.

It is taking Obama only a few years to dismantle a coal power producing infrastructure which will require decades to replace with nuclear -- if it can ever be replaced. The alternative to abundant energy is a depleted economy, a depleted agriculture, and depleted lives of citizens.

US voters require the facts, so that they can make a rational choice.

More: The Manhattan Institute recently held two panel discussions on the topic of "Keeping the Lights On: What Role for Coal and Nuclear?" Videos for Part 1 and Part 2 (Each session is just over 1 hour)



Power 2012 - Keeping the Lights on: What Role for Coal and Nuclear - Part I

Panelists: Laszlo Varro, Jacob Williams, Porter Bennett

March 1, 2012



Power 2012 - Keeping the Lights on: What Role for Coal and Nuclear - Part II

Panelists: David Mohler, David Diamond, David Dismukes

March 1, 2012

Australian-USA Laser Enrichment vs. Russian Centrifuges

SILEX v Existing Technologies
	SILEX	CENTRIFUGE	GAS DIFFUSION
DEVELOPED	2000’s	1940’s	1940’s
PROCESS	Laser Excitation	Mechanical (‘centrifugal force’)	Mechanical (‘brute force’)
ENRICHMENT EFFICIENCY	2 to 20(1)	1.3	1.004
COST COMPARISON	Potentially Attractive	Capital Intensive	Very expensive
% OF EXISTING MARKET(2)	0%	54%	33%
STATUS	Under Development 3rd Generation	Proven 2nd Generation	Obsolescent 1st Generation

Source: Silex Systems

Above, you can see a tabular summary of three different ways to enrich uranium isotopically. The new Silex-GE laser enrichment venture to be located in Wilmington, North Carolina, has recently passed a milestone toward receiving regulatory approval from the US government.

According to Silex, the new laser enrichment process might prove to be up to 15 times more efficient than the old centrifuge approach, which Russia favours.

Here is more on the Russian viewpoint:

The gas uranium centrifuge - despite its seeming simplicity - is extremely complex and high-tech equipment. Not everyone, even the well-known engineering companies such as Samsung, can build those. Uranium enrichment has many unapparent obstacles and non-trivial problems in the operation. Russia is a recognized leader in uranium centrifuges.

"The characteristic feature of the Russian technology is the production of high modulus and high strength carbon fiber, a critical structural material for gas centrifuges. Carbon fiber is produced at "Argon", "Plant of carbon structural materials," and "SNV." The details are developed in three design bureaus: "Centrotech - St. Petersburg," OKB "Nizhny Novgorod" and Novouralsk Science and Engineering Center.

Production of gas centrifuges in Russia is managed by Engineering Center "Russian Gas Centrifuge." Firms engaged in the uranium enrichment are part of fuel company "TVEL," that brings together all organizations in one way or another associated with the production of nuclear fuel.

...Not all countries that have nuclear power plants have their own enrichment plants. Even the U.S. does not have such plant, and all enriched uranium is imported to the U.S., including from its "sworn friend" - Russia.

Currently there are only a few players on the world market of enriched uranium. There are only two main players - Russia and the EU. But this is not a classic oligopoly. There are a number of important points. First, as such, the global market of gas centrifuges or separating plants does not exist, primarily because of the sensitivity of this sector in terms of the nuclear nonproliferation regime. Accordingly, manufacturers of gas centrifuges do not enter in direct competition in the international markets.

Second, in addition to Russia, only West European consortium Urenco has advanced and cost effective gas centrifuge technology. To be exact - it is ETC company joint with the French nuclear engineering holding Areva. U.S. Enrichment Corporation - USEC - is only unfolding its project "The American Centrifuge," and it is too early to tell what the economic indicators of the Americans will be.

Third, neither Russia nor its main competitor - Urenco / ETC - aspire to replicate innovative separation plants and conduct "unaddressed" sales of gas centrifuges. Third countries are sold only outdated technology and equipment. _Pravda

It will require years of work and testing before it is known if the new Silex-GE laser enrichment approach will prove competitive. In the meantime, the various centrifuge technologies will continue to do the bulk of the enrichment work globally.

Is Google Suffering from Alzheimer's in its Old Age?

Google's Wind Scam: Is Google the Scammer or the Scammed?

Google claims to be buying up to 30% of the energy used to power its servers from wind, in an effort to be seen as an environmentally conscious power consumer.

Google (GOOG) is stepping up wind-power purchases to reduce emissions, even as it devotes most of its renewable energy investments to sun-related projects, a trade-off aimed at reining in costs as the company seeks higher returns.

Google drew 30 percent of the energy it consumed last year from renewable sources, virtually all of it from wind, up from 19 percent a year earlier. Yet of the $917 million that the company has invested in renewable-energy projects, about two-thirds—or $622 million —is channeled toward solar.

Wind power is at least 50 percent cheaper than solar energy, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That explains why Google, which consumes 2.26 million megawatt-hours of electricity a year, mainly for data centers that run its billions of Web searches, increasingly prefers wind. _BusinessWeek

But regular readers of this blog understand that electrical power delivered to consumers cannot be sorted by utilities according its source. The power that Google buys could be generated by coal power plants, nuclear plants, natural gas plants, or even by covert power plants that burn torrefied human corpses for fuel. There is no way to know how Google's particular power is being generated.

Q: If a customer signs up for the CTCleanEnergyOptions, does that mean that clean energy is being delivered directly to that customer’s home or business?
A: No. The clean energy that is being generated is being delivered to the electric system and this will displace an equal amount of electricity that would have been generated from traditional sources, such as nuclear, coal, oil and natural gas-fired generating plants. Once in the system, the electricity from clean sources (like the electricity produced from any generator) follows the path of least resistance and, thus, cannot be delivered to a specific location (home or business). _CTCleanEnergyOptions Q&A

So is all of this posturing by Google a big public relations stunt, or does Google actually believe it is buying wind energy? Probably a little of both, depending upon who at Google you are asking the question of.

But even if Google could be sure it was buying wind power specifically, would that be a smart buy? Only from a public relations point of view, if targeted toward a particularly stupid public such as coastal dwellers of the US Pacific coast, the US Northeastern coast, or Vermont.

In fact, if one were to choose a specific source for his electrical power, one could hardly do worse than wind -- except perhaps for solar in an Antarctic July or an Arctic January. Wind is an intermittent power source which typically does not blow when it is needed, but generally blows when demand is low. This means that since power generation must be instantaneously matched with power load, excess generation must be "dumped," or wasted.

This is what Google is signing up for -- the growing waste of unneeded power, and a growing risk of insufficient supply of power when it is truly needed. That is the cost of frivolous intermittent energy producers such as big wind and big solar, and it is an issue which the frivolous people who tend to endorse and support big wind and big solar choose not to discuss.

Fortunately, people such as Matt Ridley are willing to discuss the issue. As are people such as Robert Bradley Jr., and K Hawkins. (Much more from Master Resource)

And here is something that the people at Google -- the ones not suffering from terminal dementia -- should be sure to study.

Big wind is a delusion. The issue of big wind energy has been in the public eye long enough for intelligent and aware persons to look at it critically, without being influenced by the feel-good herd vibrations of green dominated media, politicians, academics, and big money lobbies.

Google is supposed to be a cutting-edge technology company, with clear-thinking leaders and planners. So what happened to Google? Does anyone know?

Iraqi Oil Production Rises Higher than Anytime Since 1979

Iraq's oil production has risen above 3 million barrels per day for the first time in more than three decades, it announced on Monday, and said it will sharply increase exports with a major new floating oil terminal beginning operations in three days.

"While I am talking to you today, the Iraqi oil production has exceeded 3 million barrels per day," Deputy Prime Minister Hussein al-Shahristani told a conference in Baghdad. _Reuters

Iraq's oil production "peaked" in 1979. The peak was a form of "peak oil," but it was a "political peak oil." Expect to see many more examples of "political peaks" which will be exceeded in the future, when political conditions change.

Besides Iraq, in the future we should expect the same phenomenon in several oil dependent nations such as Iran, Venezuela, Mexico, Russia, and a number of African oil-producing countries. These nations neglect their production technologies and oilfield maintenance very badly. The incompetence of their national oil production executive and engineering administration would be grounds for immediate termination en masse, if not for the endemic corruption built into all of those country's governments from top to bottom.

Saudi Arabia has the capacity to exceed prior peaks, but the leaders of the kingdom understand that an oversupply of oil on world markets is their deadliest enemy. They will do anything to prevent such an oversupply from occurring again, if they have any control over the matter.

Canada is likely to expand oil production considerably, as long as it has a government that recognises the importance of energy production to a national and provincial economy. US total oil & gas production is likely to rise above prior peaks, when the energy starvationists in the Congress and the White House are removed from power. Brazil is likely to expand its production for some time to come. And so on.

The best place to look for new oil is where you have already produced old oil. That is likely to be true for some time to come, via improved production methods.

And when that fails there are trillions and tens of trillions of barrels of oil equivalent from unconventionals, waiting for human ingenuity to catch up to human needs.

Do Oil Wells Re-Charge Themselves?

There have been numerous reports in recent times, of oil and gas fields not running out at the expected time, but instead showing a higher content of hydrocarbons after they had already produced more than the initially estimated amount. This has been seen in the Middle East, in the deep gas wells of Oklahoma, on the Gulf of Mexico coast, and in other places. It is this apparent refilling during production that has been responsible for the series of gross underestimate of reserves that have been published time and again, the most memorable being the one in the early seventies that firmly predicted the end of oil and gas globally by 1987, a prediction which produced an energy crisis and with that a huge shift in the wealth of nations. Refilling is an item of the greatest economic significance, and also a key to understanding what the sources of all this petroleum had been. It is also of practical engineering importance, since we may be able to exercise some control over the refilling process. _Recharging of Oil & Gas Fields

RigzoneOf course we all understand the concept of "repressurising oil fields" using gas injection and other means.

As the oil or natural gas in a formation is produced, the hydrocarbons remaining in the reservoir may become trapped because the pressure in the formation has lessened, making production either slow dramatically or stop altogether.

...gas injection is used on a well to enhance waning pressure within the formation. Systematically spread throughout the field, gas-injection wells are used to inject gas and effectively sweep the formation for remaining petroleum, boosting production.... gas injection can serve as an economical way to dispose of uneconomical gas production on an oil reservoir. While in the past, low levels of natural gas that were produced from oil fields were flared or burned off, that practice is discouraged in some countries and against the law in others.

...Gas Injection, Gas Lift & Gas Miscible Process
Although the terms are sometimes interchanged, gas injection and gas lift are two separate processes that are used to increase production. While gas injection is a secondary production method, gas lift is a type of artificial lift.

Artificial lift is another way to increase production from a well by increasing pressure within the reservoir. The main types of artificial lift include gas lift and pumping systems, such as beam pumps, hydraulic pumps and electric submersible pumps.

While gas injection is achieved by injecting gas through its own injection well, gas lift occurs through the production wells. In gas lift, compressed gas is injected down the casing tubing annulus of a production well, entering the well at numerous entry points called gas-lift valves. As the gas enters the tubing at these different stages, it forms bubbles, lightens the fluids and lowers the pressure, thus increasing the production rate of the well.

Furthermore, a type of EOR employed on a well in the tertiary production process, a gas miscible process can be used to increase production. The difference in this recovery method is that the gases introduced into the reservoir are not naturally occurring. In a gas miscible process, carbon dioxide, nitrogen and LPG are injected into the reservoir. _Rigzone Gas Injection

Most of the oil in existing wells remains underground, waiting for people to become smart enough to retrieve it. Better enhanced oil recovery techniques will inevitably be developed to extract more and more of the residual hydrocarbon -- until it is no longer economical to do so. Then the remaining oil will wait for further developments.

Thomas Gold argues (here and here for example) that oil wells are charged and re-charged with new oil & gas from below. He claimed that most new hydrocarbons are generated deep in the crust, rising into geological traps at several different depths for particular parts of the crust. That is the abiogenic theory of hydrocarbon production, which is supported by astronomical data and by lab data simulating conditions in the deep crust and upper mantle.

Rapid charging of oil fields -- such as is suggested here -- would require deeper secondary reservoirs under pressure, feeding into the primary reservoirs as they are depleted.

There is another way in which oil & gas fields are re-charged -- via the biogenic production of oil & gas. But biogenic production via geologic heat and pressure is generally a much slower method of re-charging than Gold's abiogenic method. But it inevitably occurs all the same. Biogenic oil is a renewable resource, but it is renewable on a different time scale than humans generally use.

And yet, there is a way in which biogenic oil can "rapidly" recharge a depleted oil field. In the case of multiple communicating oil reservoirs at different depths, heat, and pressure, a deeper biogenic reservoir could re-fill a more superficial reservoir at variable rates, depending upon a number of factors. Oil & gas migrate upwardly, when given the opportunity. In this case, instead of "turtles all the way down," it is "oil & gas reservoirs all the way down." ;-)

Biogenic Oil FormationThis image illustrates the conventional idea of biogenic formation of oil. Imagine it taking place over and over again, during the 3 billion + years that photosynthetic life has been converting CO2 into various biological carbon polymers, layer stacked upon layer etc etc . . . . .

Abiogenic Hydrocarbons Forming in the Mantle

This image illustrates the likely abiogenic formation of hydrocarbons in the upper mantle. These hydrocarbons then can migrate upward into the crust, and become trapped under impermeable minerals. Abiogenic hydrocarbons almost certainly mix with biogenic hydrocarbons.

Abiogenic hydrocarbons are also modified in various ways by deep crust microbial populations. In other words, the predominately short-chain abiogenic hydrocarbons from the mantle can be converted to longer chain hydrocarbons on the way up.

Finally, there is the ocean crustal tectonic activity which feeds a constant supply of partially processed organic material to the deep crust and mantle via constant subduction of ocean crust beneath continental crust. This is a slow but steady pipeline which supplies feedstock for production of oil & gas on a constant basis. The Earth's huge gas hydrate resource likely owes a great deal to this tectonic process.