Future Sustainable Living

Super Giant Oil Fields Discovered since 1969

noreply@blogger.com (Nanook) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 09:44:00 +0000

The current high price of oil has given new life to "peak oil" and it's tempting to just ignore it and let people believe it because we do need to get off of oil and I'm not sure anything else will get people to even look at alternatives. But it's a lie and people are getting hurt so I'm going to say as much.

We keep hearing about there being no new super-giant oil fields discovered since 1969. Why the media keeps repeating this lie when the information which contradicts it is publicly available to anyone willing to do a little digging, well I guess because there are so few people willing to do a little digging and it seems that if you tell a lie often enough people will take it for the truth.

So here is a list of super-giant oil field discoveries since 1969 (a super-giant field being defined as any field with recoverable oil of 5 billion barrels or more).

So media, please quit telling this lie. There are eleven super giant fields discovered after 1969 and there are probably more that I am unaware of.

In addition there are other reservoirs that have been known about but previously were either uneconomical to tap or technology was not up to the task but economics and improvements in technology now make them practical to place into production.

A good example of this is the Bakken Play, the largest contiguous geological oil pool known under North Dakota and Saskatchewan, estimated to have around 100 billion barrels of recoverable oil. Successful recovery of oil from this structure requires deep and sometimes slant or sideways drilling to tap. Much of the necessary technology did not exist until recently so even though geologists knew about this formation, getting to it was problematic.

A problem that we face right now is that it takes 5-10 years for production of new fields to ramp up to significant levels while the economies of India and China have been growing very rapidly. Add to that the fact that we've taken about a million barrels a day of production off the world market by invading Iraq, while consuming a huge amount of oil doing so, and at the same time many existing fields are aging and we've got a situation where demand hasn't been able to keep up with supply. This is not the same thing as peak oil, it is oil production lag.

In addition to that, we've got between 2.3 and 3.5 trillion (yes with a 'T') barrels of oil in US oil shale structures but we have a federal moratorium on federal oil shale leases so that it can not be extracted.

We've got as estimated 15-90 billion barrels of oil along the continental shelves yet to be discovered but that's presently off-limits. Given the recent discoveries elsewhere, I am of the belief that there is probably more than even the high estimate. Just one field 150 miles off of New Orleans has 35 billion barrels.

If we want to be able to continue to breath and eat we need to get off of this stuff, but I'd much rather see us make a good decision fully informed and move to new energy sources in an efficient smooth way than to see people lose their homes or starve to death based upon a lie.

Declaration of Energy Independence

noreply@blogger.com (Nanook) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 06:19:00 +0000

We're coming up on the 232nd anniversary of our nation's independence from England. We now find ourselves owned, controlled, and at the mercy of other countries for our nations lifeblood, energy. King Abdullah tells us to get used to high oil prices.

It's time folks to send a hardy FU to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and take our energy needs into our own hands, and it's not for lack of resources that we haven't done this already.

America has the means to be entirely self-reliant from an energy perspective, moreover, we have the means of being entirely self-reliant in a clean sustainable manner and becoming a significant world energy supplier. For too long the American dream has been just that, a dream. It's time folks that we collectively and cooperatively make it a reality.

Let's talk about what conservation can and can not do for us. Conservation can't make energy, our best conservation efforts won't eliminate the need for primary sources of energy. Conservation beyond a point entails lifestyle trade-offs that for many are unacceptable. Some people might be happy in an 8x10 foot room with a couple of LED lights and eating only raw vegetables, but many of us can not be happy that way, we are biologically omnivorous, we like to have a little space, we need intellectual stimulation and physical exercise. Providing for these things requires substantially more energy than the most simplistic survival lifestyle.

Conservation can significantly reduce the size of the problem. There are many conservation measures that we can take that not only don't reduce the quality of our lifestyle but can actually enhance it. We should be pursuing these with a great deal of zest.

In the short term, to some degree we are going to have to rely on dirty energy sources, to the degree which conservation can reduce demand, it reduces the environmental damage caused by those sources.

More than 26% of our nations total energy consumption is radiated away as 60 Hz electromagnetic radiation or dissipated as heat in our nations power grid. That is, more than 1/4 or our energy is wasted in our antiquated inefficient electrical distribution system. A good portion of that energy comes from the dirtiest possible source, coal.

Eliminating the waste in our electrical distribution system or at least reducing it to it's practical limits, would make huge impact on our nations carbon foot print. The single largest waste on the grid is in the long distance AC transmission system. The problem is long wires act like antennas and radiate a good portion of that power away. Not only is this wasted energy but power line frequency electromagnetic radiation has been shown to increase the rates of leukemia, lymphoma, and some other cancers. Harmonics of 60 Hz also cause the familiar buzzing radio interference while listening to AM stations.

The solution to this problem is to convert all transmission lines which are 300km or longer to DC transmission. DC lines do not radiate. There is a small conversion loss at either end of the line, converting from AC to DC, and then at the other end from DC back to AC, but it is less than 1%, and for any lines longer than about 300km, the reduction in radiative losses more than compensates for conversion equipment losses.

This change would reduce losses in our electrical distribution system to about a quarter of what they presently are, eliminate cascading failures, and provide immunity to space weather induced failures. In addition it would greatly increase the capacity of our grid system enabling a larger share of renewable sources to power the grid. This single change would save almost as much energy as we currently import and it would only improve our lifestyle by reducing power brownouts and blackouts.

Energy wasted in the distribution system is only one source of waste in our electrical system, the other source is the mismatch between demand and supply. Our generating system has to be designed to meet peak requirements, which tend to happen during mid-day. But neither coal fired plants nor nuclear plants can be effectively throttled. It takes too long to bring up the reaction rate in a nuclear plant from a shut-down condition, about three days, and coal fired plants also can not change their combustion rates rapidly. The result is about 75% of our generation capacity runs at full tilt all the time, only natural gas and hydro-electric generation lends itself well to being throttled. Our nighttime demand falls to much less than 75% of peak and as a consequence all of this excess energy is wasted. Coal is burnt, heat goes up the stack and is lost; nuclear fuel is fissioned, waste is created, but heating up the cooling towers and downstream water is all that we get from it during the night.

What if there were a way we could capture and use all of this excess energy when we needed it? Well, it turns out there is. If the nations commuters replaced their cars with plug-in electric hybrids with an all-electric range of 40 miles or more, almost the entirely daily commute could happen without the use of gasoline, and there is enough wasted generating capacity at night to charge all of those vehicles without fissioning a single additional gram of uranium or burning a single additional ton of coal.

Switching all of our commute vehicles to plug-in hybrids would enable us to eliminate our oil imports. This would remove all the carbon dioxide generation associated with those oil imports without putting a single additional carbon atom into the atmosphere from power generation.

If we did this AND converted all of our 300km or longer transmission lines to DC transmission, and added some East-West interties so that we could take advantage of time zone differentials, we could eliminate all oil imports and 15-20% of our coal and natural gas usage for electrical generation. So that's what conservation in just two areas CAN do for us and it's quite a lot! That's what conservation can do without getting into all the little things we can do at home, switching from incandescent to compact fluorescent and as technology allows, to LED lighting.

Incandescent bulbs convert between 3-5% of their electrical energy into visible light, compact fluorescents between 15-20%, and currently available LED's from about 15% to 30%, but LEDs in the laboratory have achieved close to 100% conversion efficiencies producing more than 300 lumans/watt which is approaching 100% efficiency.

People have various objections to compact fluorescents, but most of those are based upon bad experience with older technologies, though the garden variety CFL bought at your local retailer still has much to be desired in my opinion. The cheaper CFL bulbs tend to have two phosphors, one producing a greenish light and one producing an orangish light balanced to give the appearance similar in color to an incandescent bulb, and while on a white wall the color may appear similar, the CFL's short comings become apparent when you have colored items, reds appear extremely dark because CFL's give off very little red light, the same is true of violet, and blues and yellows appear muted.

You can buy full spectrum bulbs that, while not providing the completely continuous spectrum of a black-body source, does have lines in all of the colors from violet to red and thus render color much more vividly. Phosphors that provide these colors are more expensive and this cost is more than reflected in the cost of the CFL bulb. The other thing is that the eye is less sensitive to colors at either end of the spectrum than those near the center and as a result these full spectrum lamps appear dimmer than their orange/green counterparts. I have found that even amoungst the cheaper bulbs, there is considerable difference in the quality of the phosphors used. So if you don't like the color of one brand, try another. I personally have found the Phillips CFLs provide a more pleasing light than many. Lights of America bulbs tend to provide a cooler white with more blue and I think better overall color rendition but the quality of their ballasts seems to leave something to be desired. I have experienced a high failure rate with Lights of America bulbs.

Domestic heating and cooling is another area where we use a lot of energy but addressing that involves better insulation and more effecient heating and cooling apparatus which, like replacing vehicles, tends to be expensive.

It is clear though that conservation can buy us a lot even before we step into the realm of degrading our livestyle, in fact it is apparent that many of the things we can do will enhance it.

Look at plug-in hybrids for example, if we eliminate all that gasoline burning, the air quality in major metropolitan areas surely will be much more pleasant than it presently is.

But now we get realities to deal with. Our economy is already wrecked, most of us can't afford to go out and buy a new plug-in hybrid, even if such were already on the market, which they aren't in the United States.

So we've got to do other things in the short term, things we can afford to do, things like car pooling, bicycling, relocating closer to our work, or telecommuting and working out of our homes, and most of us can afford to replace our incandescent lamps.

We need to increase our nations domestic energy production so that less capital gets sent out of the nation and is available for things like improving the electrical grid, buying plug-in electric hybrids, and developing new energy sources.

To the degree that we rely on oil or hydrocarbons, our dependency should be completely upon domestic resources. We have more coal than any nation in the world, gasoline, diesel, heating oils, and jet fuel can all be made from coal. We have around 3.5 trillion barrels of oil in the form of oil shales, about half a billion of which is recoverable with existing technologies. Presently we have a federal moratorium on leasing of oil shale extraction rights. There is significant oil deposits along the continental shelf but we have a drilling moratorium prevent these from being tapped.

I'm not in favor of environmental damage that these sorts of projects would entail, however balanced against the damage we are doing in Iraq and the potential for a war with Iran, I think we should be developing our own resources. Beyond that, in my view it's not ethical for us to inflict environmental damage on other parts of the world to sustain our own needs.

In California we've got heavy crude reserves approximately equal to those of Venezuala but we aren't tapping them. I don't know to what degree California's environmental laws play into that, but even if we were to tap these resources, we lack the refinery capacity to deal with heavy sour crude. Given that heavy sour crude is mostly what is readily available, even though it's more expensive to refine, the raw supply costs less and we should have refinery capacity to use it. We also have tar sands in other parts of the country that yield similar heavy sour crude.

I can envision a time when we no longer require oil at all, not just for fuel but where we can get hydrocarbons we need for plastics and what not by recycling existing materials, or agricultural and forestry waste, or even by the growth of oil-rich algae, but in the immediate future we are still going to need it.

One place we could grab some free energy from an clean up the environment in the process would be to retrieve the mid-pacific plastic whirlpool garbage and process it either into new plastics or through thermal depolymerization, into other hydrocarbon products. It would be nice to eliminate that floating garbage dump and given that it's a potential energy source, why not tap it?

In terms of renewable sources, we've got plenty; for example we have enough geothermal sites in the non-sensitive areas of the Rocky mountains to supply the electrical energy needs of the entire nation. Likewise, we have enough wind resources in just three states to supply the entire nations electrical needs. A relatively small portion of our land devoted to solar power production could supply our energy needs. There are many other options, ocean currents, tidal, ocean thermal, wave power, etc.

We've got to commit the resources to do whatever we need to do to eliminate our dependence upon foreign energy now, keep our dollars at home and provide jobs here.

Society

noreply@blogger.com (Nanook) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 11:08:00 +0000

One of the major problems our society has is that social rules do not acknowledge the reality of what human beings are, a mammal, a primate, that sexually reproduces and has all the drives that served to make us a successful species which evolved over millions of years to the point where we've now changed our environment so radically that we're maladapted to the environment we've created.

We have jailed 2% of our population and in my view this is wrong. Instead, what we should be doing is trying to find a way to adapt to the environment we've created, or alter our environment to be more suited to that which we've adapted to over the last several million years. We have people in jail for drugs, sex crimes, theft, and various violent crimes among other things.

Over millions of years we developed the most complex brain of any land mammal on the planet. Our brain developed over a period of time when generally food was scarce, consequently where food is plentiful, we tend to be fat.

Our brains evolved reward feedback loops where if a given action lead to a reward, doing this got us food, sex, comfort, whatever, then that behavior was reinforced. It's not something we are consciously aware of yet it had survival value because it reinforced the behaviors that got us food, shelter, and propagated our genes. Of course this adaptation happened before we had the ability to chemically create rewards.

Enter the modern era where we can make all sorts of chemicals or cultivate plants that make them, that affect this reward circuit and now what used to be an adaptive behavior becomes a destructive behavior. Snort this, shoot that, smoke this, swallow that and the reward center is chemically stimulated, and the behavior that lead to that is reinforced, addiction. And now that is what the majority of our jail population is there for, addictions. Many secondary crimes, theft, violent crimes, are related to addiction.

Is it their fault that an adaptive mechanism is now being presented with a situation for which it is now maladaptive? No, and yet rather than treated, most are punished for it. As a society, we really need to find better ways to deal with this whole addiction thing, whatever the addiction might be it involves that same reward-feedback mechanism that prior to artificial stimulation used to enhance survival in an environment that proceeded the artificial one we've created only recently.

Sex crimes are another area that largely represents a maladaptive response to our present environment, but several thousand years ago when we were living in small tribal groups without religious convictions that tried to tell us we're not animals, behaviors which are now criminal were at the time adaptive.

In the last hundred years we've gone from a situation where it was routine to marry someone off as soon as they reached puberty, to a situation where they're not allowed to consent to sex until they've actually passed their physical reproductive prime. Life expectancy has also dramatically changed in that time but better nutrition and artificial chemicals in our food and water supply that mimic hormones, particularly that mimic estrogen, have advanced rather than delayed puberty. This really creates a situation that is much different than we were adapted to even a hundred years ago.

Laws which regulate such things as sodomy and prostitution even among consenting adults, are influenced by a couple of forces. Religious ideas that suggest that we are different from other animals, that we have a soul and animals don't and that we are imbued with original sin and animals are not, have been reflected in laws that frankly do not reflect the physical reality of our nature.

These religious beliefs are codified into laws because if we are allowed to act upon our nature it threatens the believes of those that hold those religious views and by extension their immortality. No matter what your religious convictions, biologically we are still animals, primates, that reproduce sexually, and religious views do not change the brain wiring, hormone system, and the drives that result, which developed prior to religion. If someone's religious faith isn't strong enough to be maintained in the face of physical evidence to the contrary they should deal with it rather than trying to impose laws to hide the physical aspects of our nature.

As a society, it is OK to decide some behaviors which were adaptive in the past no longer are adaptive in the present, but I think we also have to acknowledge that we can't discard millions of years of evolution overnight and jail everyone who fails to do so.

Rather I think we need to change the environment we've created to more closely match that to which we've evolved and we need to provide help for individuals who are having difficulty adapting to our changed environment.

To do otherwise is really no different than Hitlers proposal of Eugenics, just kill everyone who does not possess the genetic makeup that society deems proper. By jailing 2% of the population and preventing them from participating in society, this is effectively what we are doing.

But then the one thing you can say about the Nazi's, what they lacked in compassion they made up for in efficiency and given what we're doing in Iraq perhaps we are simply in an era where efficiency counts, greed, money, power count, and compassion, love, freedom, life, do not. Our big developed brain has allowed us to invent an incredible set of tools for repressing and killing each other.

I've really had these feelings about society for a long time but when I was younger, as I saw the new millennium approach, I thought, an irrational thought I know, but I thought, 2000 would be a new era. When we enter the new millennium, people will look back at what we've done, all the people we've slaughtered, all the people we've repressed, and see that it was bad, and decide collectively to make the new millennium better.

It has not happened yet, instead, we've used our technological prowess to maim, kill, and repress far more effectively than we could before. It is time to put the dark ages behind us.

Talk-Polywell Forums

noreply@blogger.com (Nanook) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 03:22:00 +0000

I just discovered Talk-Polywell forum. Good to see that there is enough interest in the subject to actually sustain a forum. Now if we could just find someone with a spare 200 million to build the power reactor.

Bussard Polywell Fusion Update

noreply@blogger.com (Nanook) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 02:41:00 +0000

For those of you following the development of the Bussard Polywell Fusion reactor, I've got some information that I've managed to glean from various sources. I don't really know with any certainty which source is the original authoritative source since they all seem to be quoting each other, but the word is that WB7 after tweaking is "running like a top" according to Dr. Nebel.

The Navy had committed late last year to building a demonstration power reactor if WB7 met expectations. Dr. Nebel suggests this is the case, that nature is acting as we expected, the reactor is running like a top, etc, but no specific information is given.

However, on MSNBC's Cosmic Log, an article by Alan Boyle says that a group of experts from the funder (and he doesn't elaborate with respect to who the funder is, so I don't know if someone other than US Navy has gotten involved) will be coming to review the data this summer (which technically we are in now) to review the data and decide whether or not to fund a power reactor.

EMC2 Fusion is also soliciting private contributions to continue research. I am concerned their unwillingness to share data is going to make that difficult, but I can also understand that the US Navy might prefer that data not be shared.

I wish Google or Paul Allen or some other independently rich person who would rather not see us go down in flames as a civilization would fund this and make the information public. There has to be someone out there with the ability to fund this and the knowledge to understand the potential importance of this machine to civilization.

Evil Television

noreply@blogger.com (Nanook) — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 20:34:00 +0000

Television has conditioned the American Public to be unable to grasp anything that is more complex than what can be represented in a 15-second sound bite. This in and of itself is tragic because simple solutions do not usually work for complex problems and many of the issues we face today are complex.

Global warming for example; is not as simple as "put more CO2 into the air and the Earth gets warmer". It is far more complex than that. For example, there is an 11-year solar cycle, actually it is a 22-year cycle but peaks twice in that cycle, during which the Suns energy increases and decreases with sunspot activity. When it increases, the Earth gets warmer, when it decreases the Earth gets cooler; and that effect is more rapid and more pronounced than warming due to CO2 and thus over short time periods of a decade or two, masks the effect of CO2. But CO2 does contribute to a gradual warming. There are many other aspects of this that need to be understood in order to see the full picture and come up with viable solutions but that's not the point of this post, the point many of the issues that affect us can't fit in a 15 second sound byte.

So called "Peak Oil" is another example, it's a complex issue; we haven't come anywhere close to using up half of what is in the Earth. We have used up a large portion of that which is near the surface, on land, which isn't in politically or geographically difficult areas to extract, which has the quality of having a low viscosity, a high proportion of lighter hydrocarbons, and a low percentage of sulfur. But we've got plenty of heavy sour crude that is easy to get at but difficult to refine, and we have plenty of light sweet crude that is deep requiring drilling more than 20,000 feet through bedrock which is difficult and expensive, or off-shore a mile or more underwater, or in politically difficult to work in areas like Africa, Russia, or the Middle East, or in geographically difficult areas, like Anwar. There is more, but point again, it doesn't fit in a fifteen second sound bite.

The same is true of so many pressing issues and that's one of the reasons I've created these blogs, but unfortunately they're only read by a small segment of our population, the majority of Americans still get their news in 15 second network television sound bites.

Another disturbing trend in television lately, and particularly I am seeing this on Fox News, is the deliberate taking sound bites out of context. For example, the sound byte of Reverend Wright saying, "Not God Bless America, God Damn America", and in that speech he is actually quoting someone else and really you have to watch the whole sermon and put it in context to understand the meaning. Reverend Wright was in the marines for eight years, he does not hate this country. But this was repeatedly used out of context by Fox News in association with Obama to try to smear Obama and harm his chances at the presidency.

Another out of context quote that Fox News keeps using as do members of the Bush administration is a speech by Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in which he is purported to say that Israel will be wiped from the map; and therefore Iran having nuclear technology is unacceptable. Again this is a sound bite taken out of context, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is actually quoting one of his predecessors in a speech in which he is contrasting his policies against those of his predecessors, so in effect what he is saying is completely the opposite of what this sound bite that Fox News and the Bush administration keep using implies when taken out of context which is the only way in which they present it.

The way television is being used to manipulate people is beyond evil. Folks, do a little investigation, you can find the entire speeches on the Internet, Google is your friend, Television is your enemy. Find the whole speeches, learn the context that these sound bites came from, and understand that the people using them out of context are trying to manipulate you in the most horrible of ways, ways that if successful, will result in the needless deaths and suffering of millions of people.

I am hopeful that when this federal mandate of the end of analog television broadcasting happens next year that a lot of people will just say screw it, not buy new televisions and perhaps over time they'll even learn to think beyond the fifteen second sound bite.

Oil Drilling

noreply@blogger.com (Nanook) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 10:14:00 +0000

I'm going to ask very nicely that you please read this through and consider it carefully because I know what I've got to say here is not going to be popular on the surface and the knee-jerk reaction, if you don't really take the time to understand it, is going to be to reject it. Please understand that my desire is that we get off of burning hydrocarbon mineral resources for fuel entirely.

We are in an extremely precarious situation in which oil supply is not able to keep up with world oil demand, and the growing economies of China and India are going to exacerbate that problem. We are in danger of starving to death with even a minor interruption in supply. We are also on the brink of world war III directly because of oil. Iran holds the worlds second largest reserves of conventional, poke a straw in the ground and light sweet crude that you can almost put in your gas tank without refining spurts out, oil.

There is concern over Iran's nuclear development. Sanctions won't be effective and the reason they won't is because the world needs Iran's oil and Iran isn't going to just give it away without getting something in return. Iran needs nuclear power now because it makes business sense, they can sell the natural gas and oil for much more than the power they can generate via nuclear will cost. They need it in the future because when the oil runs out they still need to be able to desalinate water to grow enough food to feed their population.

Arguably Iran needs nuclear weapons because they've got a crazy neighbor that has a predisposition to bombing neighboring countries on a regular basis which happens to possess nuclear weapons already and Iran also has a resource that various nations wants and without a deterrent they've got no hope of avoiding invasion. Iran isn't going to voluntarily give up their future, allow their country to be overrun so their resources can be stolen and then allow their people to starve to death. We and Israel can threaten them with military action but they know that lacking a deterrent, that military action will happen anyway because they have oil.

The only way to diffuse this situation is for the United States to become self-sufficient for our energy needs very rapidly and that can not happen fast enough to avoid catastrophe if we only pursue renewable options. Furthermore, if we do not address our needs internally and continue sending our money to the Middle East, we will not have the economic means to convert to renewable resources. If we starve to death or if we're all glowing in the dark after world war III happens, nothing else will matter.

To the extent that our oil habit is destructive to the environment, it is morally objectionable to export our environmental destruction to the Middle East, Canada, and Mexico, and other nations. We should bear the environmental costs of our energy appetite so that we have the motivation to change our ways. Changing our ways doesn't mean we have to suffer a poor standard of living. Quite the opposite, continuing with the status quo will insure a poor standard of living for Americans.

It is really important that we make the transition to a sustainable economy while maintaining and improving the world wide standard of living. The reason for this is that the more people on this planet, the greater the demand for resources, the more waste produced, the more environmental destruction results. Countries with a good standard of living, excepting immigration, have a negative population growth. People who feel they will be secure in their old age don't tend to have a lot of children. This is the most humane way to contain the world population, bring the standard of living up to acceptable levels for the entire world population. This will take energy, however, how much energy is a huge variable depending upon how we go about it.

We need to take immediate steps to end US imports of hydrocarbon fuels, oil, natural gas, etc. We have ample supplies of all of these raw resources right here in this country. I've already stated in previous messages what I think we need to do in terms of developing renewables, but nothing can scale these things up fast enough and we need to avert starvation, world war III, and poverty.

To this end, we need to allow drilling offshore, the development of oil shale which presently is under a moratorium, develop tar sands, build refineries capable of dealing with heavy sour crude, and build coal-to-liquid capacity. We do need to do this as cleanly as possible, develop and deploy the necessary technology to clean up any spills that do occur, put in place legal infrastructure that will provide oil companies meaningful incentive to do things as cleanly as possible.

We have as much heavy crude in Southern California as does the entire country of Venezuela. The only reason Venezuela is able to provide substantial oil to the world, (including all the Citgo gasoline stations you see around the United States) because they developed their heavy crude resources and built refinery capacity that is able to refine it into diesel, gasoline, and other useful distillates.

We have 35 billion barrels of oil sitting in a recently discovered field about 150 miles off of New Orleans in the Gulf of Mexico. This isn't heavy crude, it's light sweet crude we could feed to our existing antiquated refineries and make gasoline and diesel. In all probability there are many more oil fields like this off of the continental shelves of this country as similar fields have been found along the continental shelf of virtually every other country that has allowed exploration. In this country, most of the offshore areas are off-limits to exploration and production. We have an estimated 3.5 TRILLION barrels of oil in oil shale and tar sands. Right now there is a moratorium on the production of this oil.

We need to allow exploration of the continental shelves, build refineries capable of dealing with heavy sour crude and develop the heavy crude resources in California. The crude that can be extracted from shale and tar sands will be heavy crude so we need the capability to do cracking and reforming as well as sulfur removal.

Now, if we do all of this several things are going to happen; the cost of crude world-wide will plummet and Iran's oil will lose it's value and thus the incentive for world war III will go away. Likewise, the value of Iraq's oil will also plummet and we won't have the incentive to remain there. The value of the US dollar will improve when we eliminate the export of billions of dollars in exchange for foreign oil. Our national productivity will improve as we bring our troops home from foreign soil. All of this new activity will create jobs in the United States. Lower energy costs will lower our manufacturing costs allowing us to recover some of our lost manufacturing base, providing more export products and jobs.

When we stop occupying foreign countries, stop killing and maiming their citizens, and stop creating environmental problems for them while we steal their resources, the world will view us with less hostility and more respect.

Getting at all of this oil still won't be cheap; oil that is left is plentiful but it involves drilling deep to get at abiotic oil, drilling under water to get at light sweet crude along the continental shelves, building new refinery capacity to utilize easy to get at but difficult to refine heavy crude, or extracting oil from oil shale or tar sands, economic incentive will still exist for the further development of renewables. Wind power has become less expensive than coal, and solar is approaching the cost of coal. Solving oil shortages will not change these basic economics. When our citizenry start to see the environmental costs because they are here at home and not half-way around the world, that will further motivate people to move towards renewables. But in the interests of avoiding a near-term end to civilization as we know it, we must end our dependence upon foreign oil and gas now.

In addition to opening up these things for development here in the states, I believe we need to slap a $20/barrel tax on imported oil.

Now you say but this is going to contribute to global warming; in the short term this is true, but we've been given a bit of a short-term reprieve in global warming and in the long term this will enable us to have a chance at making the shift. Otherwise our economy is going to grind to a halt and we're going to fight world war III and final. It will go nuclear if it happens, that is pretty much inevitable, and Iran is allies with China and Russia so it won't be small scale nuclear. If this happens we won't have to be concerned with global warming.

But if we avoid this fate by doing something intelligent for a change, nature has given us a short-term reprieve and this is how; our climate is tied to our suns activity. The last three solar cycles have been increasingly active; this has added strongly to global warming. Now we are in a solar minimum and the start of the next cycle is so far two years late. This winter was the coldest winter on record in the northern hemisphere. In Washington state we had snow in June in the passes. We had snow at sea level in mid-April, the latest we have ever had it.

This pattern is the same pattern the sun has displayed in the past before entering periods of inactivity like the Maunder minimum. Even if this does not happen, a delayed start has always been the sign of a weak cycle, so we are going to have in all probability a decade or longer of cooler than normal climate.

However, there are greater issues caused by carbon dioxide than global warming, the biggest issue are the effects on ocean chemistry. The oceans cover more than 70% of the Earth's surface, and by no coincidence, we get 70% of our protein from the oceans. Carbon dioxide increases ocean acidity, and this dissolves the shells of various ocean life forms from microscopic on up. If allowed to continue this will destroy the entire oceanic food chain.

Carbon dioxide depresses the freezing point of the oceans, even in the absence of heat, it threatens to release huge amounts of methane presently trapped in methane hydrates. Methane is 100x more effective in terms of it's greenhouse gas effects. If this happens, we're in a big world of hurt. So no, we can't keep allowing carbon dioxide to enter the atmosphere, we need to stop burning fossil fuels.

We have to address the immediate threats immediately and if we don't we won't have the infrastructure necessary to address the longer term threats, and starvation and war is inevitable. First stop the hemorrhaging that is the life blood of our nation flowing to the Middle East, then treat the cancer which has taken many forms ranging form our dependence upon hydrocarbon combustion, to the military-industrial complex, to the oligarchy that has replaced what was supposed to be a democracy, and then start the healing, correcting environmental damage, repairing foreign relations, fighting world-wide poverty, and a general transition towards sane sustainable living.

McCain and our future

noreply@blogger.com (Nanook) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 03:03:00 +0000

If we're going to stand a chance at having a future; we need a serious change in direction. I don't believe McCain is going to do anything good for this country. The war that is breaking us will continue, he clearly doesn't know anything about economics and our economy is in desperate need of help, and I don't see him doing anything to bring us to a state of self-sufficiency let alone sustainability.

Nobody can speak for McCain quite like McCain himself:

Solar Cell / Panel Efficiency

noreply@blogger.com (Nanook) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 10:18:00 +0000

A couple of things I failed to mention recently with respect to solar panels and their efficiencies. Polycrystalline solar cells basically "leak" at the crystal boundaries. That is to say, electrons and holes recombine at the edges of the crystal without going through an external circuit, and it is this that causes these panels to be less efficient than monocrystalline cells.

But there is more to this difference in efficiency. The rate of electrons and holes recombining at these crystal boundaries tends to be relatively constant as long as there are electrons and holes available to recombine, while the rate that electrons are ejected by photons varies with light intensity.

While a monocrystalline panel might be 17% efficient at full lighting and a polycrystalline panel 15%, which isn't a huge difference, in 50% lighting that monocrystalline panel will still be close to 17% efficient but the polycrystalline panel will be much less than 15%, perhaps 13%, and as the lighting falls the efficiency of the polycrystalline panel falls off rapidly, and a point is reached where no power at all is produced because electrons combine with holes at the crystal boundaries as fast as they are ejected by photons. However, the monocrystalline panel will produce electricity corresponding to illumination relatively linearly down to very low light levels.

Consequently, a monocrystalline panel will produce less than full power but still what might be usable power under overcast skies, a polycrystalline panel will produce much less under these circumstances, if any power at all.

So if you live in a place like the Pacific Northwet, you may want to consider shelling out a little extra for monocrystalline panels. You'll get more usable power out of them relative to polycrystalline than the difference in efficiency would suggest.

This consideration really applies only to unconcentrated solar arrays. If you're concentrating the light with mirrors, lenses, or reflectors, the concentration won't be effective in overcast skies anyway and in that case the array is only going to operate in direct sunlight effectively regardless of which type of cell you use. Also, concentration will reduce the differences in efficiency making polycrystalline cells more attractive.

One of the problems with silicon cells is that of gathering the energy they produce. A physicist by the name of Bram Hoex discovered that he could increase the efficiency by more than 1% by adding a thin layer of aluminum oxide to the surface. I'm curious how this works since aluminum oxide is normally an insulator. Still if it works, that is what's important, if it works and it's cheap enough that it doesn't rise the cost of the panel more than the efficiency.

I've included a link on the title to a page in Science Daily that provides more information on this.

LED Lighting

noreply@blogger.com (Nanook) — Thu, 29 May 2008 12:34:00 +0000

I've added a new section to the sidebar for LED lighting. While LED lighting is presently very expensive, there are some applications in which it is preferable to compact fluorescent and ultimately LED lighting promises to be much more efficient, provide better color rendering, have a much longer life span, and be less expensive than compact fluorescent without any toxic mercury (but there are other toxic substances such as arsenic, although generally in significantly lower quantities).

We use a tremendous amount of energy for lighting. Compact fluorescent greatly improved lighting relative to incandescent lamps and even somewhat over the larger fluorescent tube lamps. Incandescent lighting tends to turn between 3-5% of the electricity it uses into visible light while compact fluorescent tends to turn between 15% and 20% of the energy consumed into visible light.

LED stands for light emitting diode. It is a solid state device that acts like a solar cell in reverse. LEDs in their pure form produce a very narrow band of light frequencies so they have a distinct color such as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, etc. White LEDs are being manufactured for illumination purposes but these actually are usually blue LEDs with a broadband yellow phosphor that converts a portion of that yellow light into a broadband yellow spectrum light. Single color LEDs can be made with efficiencies that very closely approach 100%, but white LEDs currently in production are usually on par with compact fluorescent efficiencies with 15-20% efficiencies though some of the very best approach 30%.

This method of making white light actually is spectrally very sparse and renders colors very poorly. A better and potentially much more efficient method is to combine a red, green, and blue led into one unit. This can produce a LED which has spectral output in all the same energy bands that our eyes have receptors and thus can render colors much better. Until recently, ultra-bright and efficient red and blue LEDs existed but ultra-bright green LEDs were not as efficient and limited the overall efficiency of a LED light using this technology. However, recent advances now make it possible to make an ultra-bright and efficient green LED but this type of RGB LED isn't yet in wide production.

So while present LED lighting tends to be insanely expensive, only about as efficient as compact fluorescent, and with a similarly icky color rendering index, the potential exists and has been realized in the lab, for LED based lighting that is nearly 100% efficient or about five times more efficient than compact fluorescent, and that has an excellent color rendering index. This is about as large of an improvement in efficiency over compact fluorescent as compact fluorescent is over incandescent lighting. Hopefully we will see these get from the lab into full scale production and costs drop out of the stratosphere soon.

LED light lifetime also tends to be much better than compact fluorescents, with typical ratings from 30,000 to 70,000 hours, however, this is actually much better than the numbers indicate because of the difference in the way lifetimes are rated. Compact fluorescent lamps are considered "dead" even in the absence of complete failure when their output drops to 50% of their new output. LED lighting is considered "dead" when it's output drops to 70% of it's new output. If LED lifetimes were rated at 50% instead of 70% output, they'd be much longer. Also, compact fluorescents frequently do fail outright rather than just dimming, but in the absence of some external abuse, LED lamps rarely do, they just get progressively dimmer with age. Lastly, the rate that LED lamps dim is dramatically lower when operated at less than 100% rated output power and their efficiencies are generally higher at below 100% rated output power.

One additional difference, compact fluorescent lamps perform poorly in cold temperatures owing to incomplete vaporization of mercury used in the arc tube but LED lights are generally more efficient at lower temperatures. LED lifetimes are longer at lower operating temperatures.

Inexpensive Solar Panels

noreply@blogger.com (Nanook) — Thu, 29 May 2008 12:00:00 +0000

Recently, I added a section to the sidebar of Solar Panel sources at prices of $4 or less per watt. A recent search turned up a few more sources under the $4/watt figure, one at $3/watt though the $3/watt panels were CIGS technology which, although less expensive, is both less efficient and shorter lived than silicon panels, particularly mono-crystalline solar panels.

When you look for Solar Panels, the most common types you will find are mono-crystalline, poly-crystalline silicon, amorphous silicon, and CIGS (Copper Indium Gallium Selenide) (Cu(In,Ga)Se2) [Thanks to the anonymous commenter who pointed out my error.]

Of these mono-crystalline panels are the most expensive; there are even more expensive multi-junction solar cells and solar panels manufactured but they are so expensive that they are generally reserved for space applications where the power-to-weight ratio far outweighs the additional expense given the huge cost of getting something in orbit.

Mono-crystalline solar panels are generally the most expensive solar panel designed for terrestrial applications, however, they are the most efficient single junction panel and they have the longest lifespan. Mono-crystalline solar silicon panels will generally provide efficiencies of 15-19% and lose less than 10% of their power production capability in thirty years. You should look for panels with a glass, not plastic face because plastic will discolor over this time frame and reduce efficiency.

Poly-crystalline silicon solar panels are less expensive than mono-crystalline panels but also have lower efficiencies, generally in the range of 12-15%, and poly-crystalline silicon solar panels will usually lose about 10% of their capacity in the first couple of years. Thereafter they will generally remain stable for decades.

Amorphous silicon solar panels use a thin film of silicon deposited on a substrate such as steel or glass. Those that use steel as a substrate are flexible. They typically have low efficiencies ranging from about 6% to 10%. Although they cost less to produce, market demand is presently much greater than supply because their flexible nature allows them to be used in products where other types of solar cells can not be used, such as roll-up portable battery chargers, and at present their retail cost does not reflect the lower cost of production and in fact tends to be higher than other silicon panels. Because many different substrates and disposition methods are used to produce these cells, little is known about their long term stability and it is likely to vary widely with the substrate and manufacturing process used.

CIGS technology solar panels are very inexpensive to produce, but they have lower efficiencies and deteriorate faster than other solar panel technologies. Although they are often advertised as having a lifetime of twenty years, they really haven't been around long enough to know what their long term performance will be like. Although much less expensive to produce than silicon panels, the present market saturation conditions tends to keep their retail prices at around 75% of those of polycrystalline solar panels. However, as production is ramped up they have the potential for producing power at well under $1/watt and at that rate, a shorter lifetime and lower efficiency may well be an acceptable trade-off for much lower costs in many applications.

Why A Nuclear Iran?

noreply@blogger.com (Nanook) — Wed, 28 May 2008 12:30:00 +0000

While the United States continues to threaten Iran, Iran really has no choice but to pursue a nuclear program. In doing so, it risks possible destruction from a US or Israeli attack, although I am convinced what's left of our own country would be left in shambles as well, but if it fails to do so it's citizens ultimately will face starvation and Iran will still face possible US or Israeli attack.

Iran is highly dependent upon desalinated seawater to provide water to grow crops to feed it's 66 million people. Easy to get at oil is a valuable commodity and Iran's oil fields are already in decline. Nuclear energy is one option, and probably the most economic option, for providing the energy necessary for desalinization of seawater on a large scale.

When you've got a whack neighbor like Israel that feels obligated to regularly bomb all of it's surrounding neighbors, and that neighbor has a nuclear arsenal; then unless you enjoy glowing in the dark, some kind of deterrent is really necessary.

When you've got another whack foreign power that eyes your oil reserves and has demonstrated no qualms about killing and maiming millions to obtain them, again some kind of deterrent is necessary.

President Mahmud Ahmadi-Nejad is regularly misquoted as calling for the destruction of Israel; this quote is taken out of context, and actually he is quoting former leader and setting himself apart. If you dig around the net a bit, you can find the speech in question.

I really wish we could drop the war mongering and get on with life. It is really in everyone's interests for these countries to modernize; fundamentalism does less well in a modern society.

War and Greed

noreply@blogger.com (Nanook) — Wed, 28 May 2008 12:21:00 +0000

If Iraq were producing oil at pre-war levels; an additional million barrels per day would be on the market, more than 1% of the worlds total production. Even given existing demand, we would not have an oil shortage, oil would likely be under $40/barrel.

However, if we wouldn't have invaded Iraq; demand would be considerably less because the US military is one of the largest oil consumers in this country. All of those Hummers running around Iraq don't run on solar power.

Our dollar would be worth a lot more, our military would be prepared to deal with real threats, and our economy would be in much better shape.

Middle-East oil is attractive to oil companies because it's relatively inexpensive to produce, when they don't bear the cost of a military operation to invade a country. The war only increases their profits.

It is in our interests not to depend upon foreign sources of oil. There is no reason that we should because we have ample resources in our own country. If the cost of war is factored in, developing them would be much more cost effective both in terms of dollars and environmentally. War is hell on the environment.

I believed that when the millennium rolled over; it would be the start of a new age and we would abandon war as an energy policy. Now that we've had an eight year demonstration of just how much of a failed policy that is I hope that we can get on with a better policy and take a different path.

Connecting The Dots...

noreply@blogger.com (Nanook) — Wed, 28 May 2008 11:40:00 +0000

Often partial solutions to our problems are presented on the Internet but nobody puts the pieces together. Recently, I have focused quite a bit on the energy issue, and I have found that solutions abound, but the political will to implement them is lacking, or they appear uneconomical because they are, by themselves in fact uneconomical.

A good example of this is wind power penetrating the grid at more than about 20%. By itself taken in isolation, with all other variables ignored; more than about 20% seems impractical because of the variability of wind. But taken with other solutions the picture is quite different.

Our existing electrical grid is mostly an AC grid, the east and the western grids aren't substantially connected, and overall it's inefficient, unreliable, and at capacity straining to meet ever growing demands.

If this weren't the case; if we modernized our electrical grid adding east-west ties and converting all spans longer than 300km to DC transmission, first, doing this alone would be like adding 15% additional generating capacity to the grid without any additional pollution because we could cut the losses from around 17% to around 2%. Moreover, efficient east-west transmission would allow us to distribute the peak load across the time zones requiring less peak capacity and making more efficient use of the capacity we already have, above and beyond grid losses.

If we can utilize geographical diversity with wind generation, something only possible with the modernization of our power grid; then the total capacity available from wind power never falls below about 1/3rd of peak capacity, and then we could, if we choose, simply overbuild capacity and supply our entire electrical needs from wind alone. I'm not advocating wind alone, ideally we'd use a mixture of renewable sources, solar, geo-thermal, ocean-current, ocean-wave, tidal, ocean-thermal, various forms of hydro (there are forms that can capture energy from the movement of river water without dams), etc.

We could generate all of our electricity by wind if we so choose simply by building 3x as much capacity as we need and modernizing the electrical grid. But there is a snag, wind, presently the least expensive method of generating electricity, less so even than coal now, would lose it's attractive economics if we had to overbuild by 3x AND if there were no market for that peak power.

Add in some other technologies, for example, we can take electricity, carbon dioxide, and water, and using one of three processes, we can make an alcohol called butynol which can directly be used as a replacement for gasoline in ordinary gasoline cars. Butynol actually has tremendous advantages over gasoline. Butynol produces only 3% of the hydrocarbon emissions, almost unmeasurable carbon monoxide emissions, and greatly reduced nitrous oxides relative to gasoline. It also produces slightly better fuel mileage and power, greatly reduced acidic blow-by products (thereby enhancing engine life) and less waste heat (also enhancing engine life).

We can make butynol from electricity, carbon dioxide, and water by one of three methods. There exists a kind of reverse fuel cell that was recently invented that uses a catalyst in the presence of electricity to convert carbon dioxide and water to butynol. That is one method; it's a method that from what I've read Richard Branson paid to have developed to produce butynol as a renewable jet fuel. However, there are two other methods also that can be used, carbon dioxide can be electrolyzed into oxygen and carbon monoxide, the carbon monoxide can be mixed with steam to form "process gas", and then in the presence of catalysts, this can be used to create a variety of useful hydrocarbons including butynol. Lastly, electricity can be used to create sufficient heat to disassociate carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide and oxygen and then the same process that follows electrolysis can be used. The last process has been demonstrated on an industrial scale, I'm not sure if the first processes have made it out of the lab, but they have at least been demonstrated in the lab. Using the latter two processes it is also possible to make synthetic diesel.

If use the electricity generated during times when there is excess capacity to create butynol, we can replace imported oil used for gasoline and diesel, while at the same time providing a market for the peak electrical production, thereby allowing wind power to be economical even when capacity is overbuilt, and we create a market for the carbon dioxide generated by existing coal and gas fired plants instead of just releasing the carbon dioxide into the air. When the butynol is burned it will release carbon dioxide, but this is displacing oil that would have been burnt, so the net result will be a reduction in carbon dioxide and if we can bring enough renewable electricity capacity online to eliminate the need for fossil fueled power generation, then we can continue to make butynol by sequestering carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere, thus making the process a closed loop resulting in no net carbon dioxide increase.

Any one of these elements by themselves may not be economic; but they are all mutually synergistic and implemented together they could eliminate our dependency upon foreign oil first, and later eliminate our dependency upon fossil fuels (or for that matter abiotic oil) entirely.

We should be doing this, and we should not be doing it ten or fifty years from now, we should be doing it now.

Bush Asks Saudi's to Produce More Oil

noreply@blogger.com (Nanook) — Mon, 19 May 2008 09:22:00 +0000

If the Saudis could produce more oil, why would they? $129/barrel is a good thing from their perspective. So they offered to increase by 300,000 barrels/day, a drop in the bucket, which essentially amounts to "no". I don't think the Saudis can produce significantly more oil. Ghawar is Saudi Arabia's largest oil field, accounting for approximately 70% if it's daily output. In 2001, the Saudis started injecting seawater to maintain oil pressure. Now the water cut from many of the wells is on the order of 55%. A point will be reached when the energy required to extract the oil is so great that it will become impractical to continue producing oil from this field and the rate that the water cut has increased suggests that that point is not far away.

There are newly discovered fields offshore in the Santos basin that may eventually replace some of the lost production capacity in Ghawar but this reservoir, like the other newly discovered reservoirs along the South American coast and in the Gulf of Mexico, requires drilling an average of 22,000 feet and the cap consists of 5500 feet of salt which is highly corrosive at the pressures that exist at that depth. This presents significant technological challenges that neither Brazil or Mexico appears ready to tackle.

At the current market rate you had better believe that the Saudis are producing every drop they can. The current high market prices have produced a wealth of new oil discoveries and there is no doubt in my mind that supply will catch up with demand eventually but these types of deep ocean reservoirs typically take 5-10 years or more to develop so this is not going to provide any immediate relief from high oil prices.

The only thing that is going to lower the price of gasoline and other oil derivatives is if we reduce our demand and increase our supply. We have the means to do both but apparently not the political will.

The real solutions are going to come from a variety of sources but all of them take time to bring online, so in my view, we should be pursuing all of them as fast as we can.

There is enough surplus energy on the electrical grid at night to power our daily commute, all that we need to make this possible is a practical plug-in hybrid vehicle. While GM has a concept car called "The Volt", like most GM concepts it will probably never see production. Their present claim is that the batteries aren't available in sufficient quantity yet. Meanwhile, a Chinese company is making plug-in hybrid vehicles with a 60 mile all electric range using their own proprietary lithium-iron-sulfide battery technology. I would bet that if GM was given sufficient financial incentives, we could see that plug-in hybrid introduced in the near term.

Even if GM produced an affordable plug-in hybrid tomorrow, people don't replace their cars overnight, especially in a depressed economy, but it would be a start; lowering the prices, and it also would be an exportable technology which would help reduce our trade imbalance and strengthen the dollar. To the degree which it does reduce oil consumption, it will place downward pressure on the price of oil and upward pressure on the value of the dollar.

If we're going to make the transition to clean renewable energy we need to find a way to do so that won't totally destroy our economy and we have to find ways to minimize economic opposition to this transition. To this end, I think we should invest in coal to liquid technologies, and in places where we have natural gas production without an economical method of transporting it, natural gas to liquid. Then, as we displace coal and natural gas from electricity production, we can use this coal and natural gas to make liquid fuels and displace imported oil.

We have to stop the economic hemorrhaging, the money leaving our country and the value of our money from going down the toilet, in order to have the capital resources necessary for new energy infrastructures.

Doing this would reduce net carbon dioxide emission because we wouldn't be burning that imported oil anymore; and we'd be using coal much more cleanly rather than burning it in a power plant, because the process of converting it to a liquid fuel would remove contaminants like mercury, arsenic, sulfur, radium, etc, and that material would no longer go up a smoke stack and be disbursed across the countryside. Instead, those materials can be recycled and used by industries that need them.

As coal production is replaced by renewable sources such as wind, solar, geothermal, and other renewables, we can start using surplus electricity to produce liquid fuels, especially butynol which can be used as a direct replacement for gasoline, and removing carbon dioxide from the environment in the process.

We really need to ramp up our domestic energy production now; it's the only thing that we can do that will leave us with enough of an economy to make a transition to renewables and to prevent starvation as food shortages and the inability to move foods to the market, will otherwise price food out of the reach of many people.

Magic financial manipulation won't save us from $10/gallon gasoline, the only thing that will do that is to produce enough energy to meet our demands, and the only thing that is going to stop the rapid decline of the dollar is a correction of the huge trade imbalance and national debt that we have. Becoming self-sufficient for our energy needs is a necessary prerequisite for peace in the middle east. As long as we are dependent upon the middle east for energy, the financial effects are going to provide the incentives for war. Nothing is a larger environmental or economic disaster than war.

National security also demands energy self-sufficiency. If we are dependent upon the middle east for fuel, pretty soon we're going to find it difficult to even fly our planes. There is no doubt in my mind that this fact will not be lost on China and Russia, not to mention many other nations that we've given good reason to hate us. When they realize that all that is necessary to cripple our military is to disrupt an 8,000 mile long supply line of oil tankers, they are going to feel emboldened. The only defensive option that would leave us is the nuclear option, and a nuclear exchange with Russia would be pretty much the end of civilization.

Energy Costs - Gasoline Prices

noreply@blogger.com (Nanook) — Thu, 08 May 2008 09:17:00 +0000

Our energy woes aren't going to resolve themselves unless we continue to let them escalate until enough of us die off that demand is brought within the constraints of supply. That would be an extremely painful solution to the problem but it seems to be the default solution and the one that politicians are heading towards. Without major input from us, it's not going to get better.

The demand for energy from China and India is going to continue to grow, and it must, because only by eliminating poverty can we hope to have a humane solution to overpopulation. In developed countries, people naturally have fewer children, in fact, excluding immigration developed countries have negative population growth. The same thing needs to happen in Africa as well, Malaria and AIDS need to be brought under control, the food and water issues need to be resolved, and when these things happen we'll see a similar growth in demand for energy.

In the United States we could totally eliminate our need to import oil by simply addressing waste in the electrical generation and distribution system. What does electricity have to do with gasoline? Well, everything!

50% of our electricity is generated by coal, 20% by natural gas, 19% by nuclear, 7% by hydroelectric, 2% by petroleum, and approximately 2% from solar, wind, and other renewables (excluding hydro-electric).

Coal and nuclear energy, which together make up 69% of the energy supply, can not be throttled down at night. In the case of coal, the thermal mass of the system is just to great to change the energy production rate rapidly, and in the case of nuclear, it takes too long to bring the reaction back up after shutting it down. The electrical demand for energy is much lower at night, so the excess produced is dissipated as waste heat, pollution is generated, but the energy is just wasted.

There is so much wasted energy from these sources at night that they could power our entire daily commute eliminating the need to import oil. We import about the same percentage of oil as goes into powering our daily commute.

If we could take that wasted energy produced at night, use it to power our commute during the day, we would eliminate the need to import oil; we'd go from having a trade deficit to having a trade surplus, we'd see the dollar strengthen, we'd see our economy improve; and we'd eliminate the financial incentives for going to war in the middle east. We'd eliminate all of the carbon dioxide from all of that imported oil being burned, without adding anymore from power plants, because we're just using energy they're already producing that is being wasted.

How can we do this? There are a variety of ways we can do this; the one that you hear talked about the most is plug-in hybrid vehicles. These are gas-electric or diesel electric hybrids with enough battery capacity to cover the normal commute and the ability to recharge off the power grid. Problem, nobody in the United States is producing them at present. Chevrolet has a concept car called, "The Volt", which they claim will be in production in 2010 but not at present because they claim adequate batteries aren't available.

Yet, the Toyota Prius is readily converted to a plug-in hybrid using existing battery technology. The Prius has a "stealth mode" button that is enabled in other countries but not in the United States that stops the car from using the gasoline engine so that one can drive short distances on electricity alone. The Prius also has space for a second battery pack. Plug-in hybrid enthusiasts have been enabling this button on US models, adding a second battery pack, and adding an off-the-grid charger to convert these cars to a plug-in hybrid.

China has an automobile manufacturer making plug-in hybrids for domestic use in China, a company called BYD makes a plug-in hybrid vehicle that can go sixty miles on electricity alone. BYD developed a rechargeable lithium iron phosphate battery system for their vehicles. They plan to market these vehicles to Europe and the United States in 3-5 years. Meanwhile our automobile industry continues to lose money and lay off workers because they can't sell the SUV gas hogs they produce when gas is $4/gallon. Why isn't Detroit producing these? Why does GM drag it's feet saying that the battery technology is not available when amateurs are converting Prius cars using existing battery technology and China's BYD is manufacturing and marketing plug-in hybrid vehicles based upon their own battery technology?

Plug-in hybrid vehicles are only one way to use this surplus energy. Another method is to convert surplus electricity into liquid fuel. How can we do this? There are two methods I am aware of for taking electricity, carbon dioxide, and water, and making a 4-carbon alcohol called butynol which unlike Ethanol and Methanol, has an energy density nearly that of gasoline, a road octane of 104, and can be burned directly in unmodified gasoline engines. Because of the characteristics of the fuel, it actually gets better mileage, produces more power, and reduced emissions by 97% relative to gas, and the lower peak cylinder temperatures and lower partial combustion products, longer engine life can be expected. One method involves a kind of reverse fuel cell in which electricity and a catalyst drive a reaction to produce butynol from carbon dioxide, water, and electricity, the other method is to electrolyze carbon dioxide (yes, you can do this) to produce carbon monoxide and oxygen. The carbon monoxide is then mixed with steam to make process gas which can then be converted into a number of useful hydrocarbon liquids, including butynol.

This process CONSUMES carbon dioxide making the butynol fuel! So if we located these adjacent to coal fired plants, we could take that carbon dioxide and instead of pumping it into the ground, which is long term a really bad thing to do for reasons I mentioned in another post; we can make it into fuel! So this is a way that we can shift the EXISTING automotive fleet to using surplus electricity at night and this wouldn't have the limited range of plug-in hybrids since butynol can be distributed the same way that gasoline is. Because butynol is not hydroscopic, unlike ethanol and methanol, it can be piped through the same pipelines used to move oil distillates.

Now, long term we want to get off of burning hydrocarbons entirely, except those that are created by taking carbon dioxide out of the air such as biomass, or butynol produced this way. We have plenty of sources that we can exploit. There is enough geothermal energy available in environmentally non-sensitive areas of the western United States that we could power our entire electrical grid this way. Presently however wind is the most economical, but wind is not constant. Now if we put these electricity to butynol plants in place, and then just overbuild wind capacity we provide a market for the times when wind produces a surplus by using that surplus to make fuel. Thus making butynol from electricity can shift the commute to using presently wasted energy, provide a market for carbon dioxide and surplus wind power allowing wind power, which is the least expensive source of electricity, to fulfill a much larger percentage of our energy needs.

There is another way butynol can be produced, and that is by using concentrated sunlight to break down carbon dioxide to produce the same process gas, which ultimately can be made into butynol and other hydrocarbons.

These things can only be ramped up so fast. We need to be doing everything we can to encourage them. We also must stop the outflow of capital from this country to the middle east. To that end, in the short term we need coal-to-liquid plants. If we did this concurrent with displacing coal generation with solar, geothermal, wind, and other renewables, it would result in less resistance from the industry to the transition, and at the same time provide more capital for the implementation of new clean and renewable technologies. We can not afford to allow our economy to go down the tubes any further because it will make conversion impossible and in the end all we'll have is a lot of people starving to death, riots, and war.

Our current energy situation is so dire that we really need to exploit all our alternatives to the max, but even so it may not be enough to keep our farm equipment moving producing food and our distribution network distributing it, and get us to work and back. We need to do what we need to do in the short term but we need to focus on the long-term.

To this end I believe we should look at adding an import duty tax on oil of around $20/barrel, and then taking that money and using it to develop all of these alternatives as fast as possible.

Another area we could obtain a huge amount of energy from, and that would also increase the degree to which we can depend upon wind and solar, would be to drastically modernize our grid system. Presently, long distance transmission lines lose an average of about 17% of the energy put into them. Nationwide this results in a loss of approximate 10% of our electrical production capacity.

The particular modernization that we should consider is converting all AC transmission lines that are longer than 300km to DC high voltage transmission lines. Doing that would cut that 17% loss figure to 2-3% by eliminating radiative losses which are the largest portion of transmission line losses.

Switching to DC transmission eliminates electromagnetic radiation from those AC transmission lines which is a leukemia hazard to anyone living near them. Low frequency magnetic fields have been determined to have carcinogenic effects. One suspected mechanism is that a low frequency AC magnetic field causes ions to spiral as they pass ion transport channels in cell walls reducing their ability to cross these channels. Drugs which reduce ion transport have also been shown to increase cancer rates. For many people, particularly those living in houses with older wiring where the source and return path are not always cabled together, the magnetic fields generated inside are often far higher because you are very close to them. Never the less, there is a statistical correlation between leukemia and living in proximity to AC high voltage transmission lines. DC high voltage lines do not radiate and thus eliminate both the majority of their power losses and this cancer threat.

Switching to DC eliminates susceptibility to space weather. Space weather, solar storms, induce very low frequency currents in long distance transmission lines. In AC lines, the transformers have very low impedance to this low frequency current and the current causes the transformer core to saturate. This results in the destruction of the transformer and failure of the transmission line. In DC transmission lines, this same current is induced, but simply slightly increases or decreases the voltage and the far end and the inverters compensate in real time and no damage results.

Switching to DC eliminates cascading failures. In an AC line, if one source of capacity is lost or load increases, there is no way to limit the load on the line except through load shedding which may or may not happen fast enough, and if it doesn't happen fast enough, failures result. When one line goes down, it increases the load on the next, phase and voltage fluctuations result which increase the load even further, and additional lines go down. In this way, a localized failure can cascade across an entire grid. But with DC lines, the inverter technologies limit the power in real time and keep the phase constant, so no cascading failures result.

Switching to DC adds significant capacity in two ways. In an AC transmission system, the peak voltage is 1.414 times the RMS or average voltage. So a line designed to carry 500KV AC has to have insulators designed to carry 1.414 times that value or 707KV. So we can take an AC line designed to operate at 500KV and operate it at 707KV DC, at the same current that is a 141% improvement in transmission capacity. But it gets even better, because on long transmission lines, the factor that limits current is heat induced sag. When wires are warmer they expand, when they expand the total length of the line changes and that changes the phase relationship of the voltage at the far end. Out of phase power just heats the wires and so current has to be limited to values that are much lower than the line is physically capable of carrying. With DC transmission, the phase is determined by the inverter and is independent of the line length, and thus sag induced phase shift is no longer a limiting factor. Of coarse the current still has to be limited to values above which sag would represent a physical danger to the line but this value is significantly higher. So switching to DC transmission increases both the current carrying capacity and the voltage capacity of the line.

For new lines, the costs are less for DC lines than AC lines for distances longer than 300km. DC lines require less right-of-way because there is no AC magnetic field radiation. They require only two conductors instead of three (or in some cases six). For a given conductor power and insulators they can carry significantly more power. These factors all combine to make them much less expensive for distances greater than 300km.

Reducing the losses substantially while increasing capacity makes it cost effective to transmit power over greater distances and allows for greater geographical diversity. This in turn allows wind, solar, and other variable sources to contribute to a greater share of the load because geographical diversity can be used to advantage. When the wind isn't blowing in one location, it is blowing somewhere else. Currently in the United States, we have an eastern grid and a western grid. We should add DC interties and make it one grid. Peak loads occur at different times because of the different timezones, so full east-west connectivity would reduce the peak-to-average load ratio allowing us to use our generating capacity more effectively.

I know that I dwell on this particular subject a lot but it is of major importance and getting next to zero attention. The deregulation of the power industry has resulted in a situation where nobody wants to contribute the maintenance and upgrading of the power grid and this is absolutely critical towards the end of solving our nations energy issues and adopting renewable clean energy sources on a large scale. Our congressman appear to be completely ignorant of these issues, it's up to you to educate them!

Fox News Bill O'Reilly Lies About Reverend Jeramiah Wright

noreply@blogger.com (Nanook) — Thu, 01 May 2008 00:30:00 +0000

Fox News has portrayed Reverend Write as a hateful, bigoted, and anti-American. They have used out of context sound bytes towards this end. In the interest of accuracy in journalism, I located this video recording of Reverend Writes sermon after 9/11 so that you can here the sound bytes in context.

Online Videos by Veoh.com

Now that you've heard it in context, I will add that I think his message, that hatred begets hatred, terrorism begets terrorism, is right on. I believe that the Bush administration has lead us down the wrong path, a path that leads only to misery, death, and destruction. You'll note that I'm a white guy, this isn't a black-vs-white thing that Fox is trying to make it out to be, it's about a path of love and respect for life and God's creations verses a path of hatred, death, and destruction.

Fox News

noreply@blogger.com (Nanook) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 10:13:00 +0000

Personally, I am of the opinion that Fox News is evil; anything but fair and balanced, but this interview is worth seeing.

I wish there were more people with the intelligence and fortitude to do what this preacher did in this interview.

Don't Eliminate Gas Tax

noreply@blogger.com (Nanook) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 10:04:00 +0000

Eliminating the gas tax will not benefit consumers. Supply and demand sets the pump price, the gasoline tax only determines what percentage of that pump price goes to the oil companies.

I think what we ought to be doing is slapping a serious import duty on imported oil and distillates to encourage domestic production, balance our trade deficit, strengthen the dollar, and provide funding for clean renewable domestic energy alternatives.

Priorities

noreply@blogger.com (Nanook) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 09:12:00 +0000

We've got a food emergency on this planet right now and it revolves around energy. The US produces a quarter of the worlds food and our ability to produce that food has been crippled by high energy costs and low availability. High energy costs have also diverted a portion of food production into biofuel production.

The value of the dollar has taken a large dive because of the high cost of the war in Iraq, and because of the huge amount of oil that we import without sufficient exports to balance those imports.

Because until recently the dollar was also to a large degree the worlds currency, many nations around the world held many dollars, and as they see the value falling they've looked for other places to invest, and commodities have been the big winner. Unfortunately, those commodities include things like corn, wheat, and rice, and the result has been a increase in the price of food above and beyond the energy costs involved in foods production.

World demand for oil has exceeded current production capacity. The price of oil now exceeds $100 / barrel and it appears to be headed towards $200 in the not too distant future.

While the high prices of oil has resulted in increased discovery activity and increased discovery, and now we know to look for oil in places we wouldn't have considered in the past; and that very much oil remains, there are real problems with tapping that oil.

Specifically, abiotic oil exists and in large quantities. The larger of the two Brazilian super-giant fields recently discovered gives all indications of not being biotic in nature, based upon carbon isotope ratios. To those of us who have been paying attention this is not surprising. Most of the oil we've tapped to date has been biological in nature because we've drilled where we expect to find it, in sedimentary deposits.

But now we know, drill through the granite or basalt basement rock in locations where that rock forms a cap, and we will find oil that has seeped up from the Earth's mantle. Generally on land, the crust is too thick, most of this oil is out of our reach with current drilling technology, but the crust is thinner in the oceans and there we can drill through and find this oil, and hence the most recent super giant fields in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Brazil.

So that abiotic oil requires drilling in deep ocean, or very deep through land in a few locations where the crust is thin enough or where geological upheavals have allowed oil to get past that barrier and still be trapped by something above it, such as in over thrust zones.

There is a world-wide shortage of rigs capable of tapping these deposits and in the case of deep ocean deposits it will take 5-10 years from discovery to production.

Then we have heavy oil near the surface. Most of the oil near the surface is heavy crude because without non-porous material covering it, the lighter elements evaporate leaving only the heavier elements. We lack the refinery capacity to utilize this heavier oil. Getting at it is also often difficult because it's high viscosity does not allow it to flow like lighter oils thus requiring technologies like steam injection or outright mining.

Ordinarily, if oil were to stay over $100 / barrel for any period of time, that would rapidly drive investments necessary to increase production. However, with the worlds eyes on global warming, investors are afraid that they will not be able to recoup their investments and thus we are not seeing the investments necessary to address this shortage.

Ideally, we'd all switch to renewable energy sources and be done with the whole oil and global warming issues, but this is not something that can happen immediately, infrastructure needs to be built and this takes time and capital investment.

Here in the United States, this is a big problem because with our economy already wrecked, the capital necessary to make this conversion, an estimated 200-400 trillion dollars, does not exist.

It is my belief that we need to do whatever we need to do to stop the outflow of capital from this country immediately. We have to stop importing oil and depend only upon our own resources, and we have large amounts of resources domestically.

T. Boone Pickens is investing up to 10 billion to build a 4000 megawatt wind farm in the Texas panhandle, not because he has gone green but because he expects to make money on it.

But we can only build wind farms and solar so fast and those will address much of our electricity needs, but until we have more electric vehicles, until we electrify our railways, and until we have some method of producing high-density liquid fuels from electricity or other energy sources, we will still need hydrocarbon fuels.

To that end, I think we should be depending upon our own resources instead of importing oil from Saudi Arabia or elsewhere. We have more coal than any other country in the world; at current usage enough for another 300-400 years. In my view, we should be building coal to liquids plants and using that rather than imported oil. The reason for this is that it removes the incentives for wars on foreign soil which are far more environmentally devastating than coal production and because it will keep the capital from flowing out of the country so that it will be available to invest in clean renewable technology.

I believe we should build wind and solar as absolutely fast as we can and we should put windmills and solar farms where they will produce the most energy first, and then as we displace the need for coal and natural gas fired plants, we should divert that coal and natural gas into liquid fuels for transportation.

I also believe we should be building at least a dozen or so forth generation helium cooled actinide burning fast flux nuclear fission plants with integral pyrolytic fuel reprocessing, and I believe we should put a complex of these plants in the area that is presently intended to be the Yucca mountain repository.

The reason is this; no civilization lasts the 50,000 to 100,000 years that is required for existing waste to decay. If we bury that stuff, we leave a huge burden for future human populations. We owe it to future generations not to do it. Further; in that existing waste, we've extracted less than 1% of natural uraniums energy capacity.

These 4th generation nuclear fission plants can burn those long lived actinides, extract 60x as much energy from them as the original nuclear reactors did producing them, and eliminate a 50,000 to 100,000 year storage problem, leaving waste that will only need to be stored for 300 years, which can reasonably be done at Yucca. By placing the reactors inside the repository, if any accident does happen, the radiation will be contained at least as good as the waste would have. And when the reactors have done their jobs and need to be decommissioned, they will already be in their final resting place.

Such a facility could contribute tens of gigawatts to the electrical grid and the electricity generated can pay for it's operation rather than having waste disposal being a burden on tax payers. And with everything in that facility including integral reprocessing, the existing waste only needs to be shipped there and after that no waste will be transported providing no opportunities for terrorists. The pyrolytic recycling process does not separate the actinides from each other, so at no point is any material produced that would be useful for making bombs.

I think though right now, we need to pull all the stops out on domestic energy production and get completely free from any reliance on imported energy. A massive program to do this will create jobs and fix the economy. Discontinuing the importation of oil will do wonderful things for the value of the dollar. And ending our reliance upon middle eastern oil will eliminate our incentive for wars there.

Carbon Dioxide - The Real Carbon Danger

noreply@blogger.com (Nanook) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 07:20:00 +0000

Most people believe that carbon dioxide is a serious threat to the future of the planet. I happen to share this belief, but for very different reasons than those which are predominate in the media.

I believe that carbon dioxide is not a direct thermal threat planet wide, the reason for this is that the predominate absorption line of carbon dioxide is at approximately 13-15 microns and the gas concentrations are already at the point where 99.99% of the radiation in this band is absorbed within ten meters at atmospheric pressure. Increases in carbon dioxide levels won't change this appreciably but they will broaden the absorption line. The net result is that increased CO2 will warm the Earth but nowhere near at the rate suggested by many.

The Earth's blackbody temperature is around 285°K but the absorption lines of carbon dioxide that are relevant peak between 193-220°K. The amount of radiation from Earth absorbed by carbon dioxide is thus going to be more significant in parts of the world that are very cold, and we do see significant warming in Alaska, but Antarctica is actually getting colder. But to the degree with carbon dioxide affects Earth's temperature directly those are the places that are going to be affected directly.

I believe a larger concern are the chemical effects of carbon dioxide most notably on the worlds oceans. If you take a can of pop or beer, put it in the freezer, let it cool below freezing, and then pull it out and open it, initially it won't be frozen but it will rapidly, in just seconds, freeze.

The reason for this is that carbon dioxide dissolved in water forms carbolic acid. This depresses the freezing point of water. That is, it allows water to be cooled below 32F and remain liquid. Now, just as it depresses the freezing point in soda or beer, it also depresses the freezing point of ocean water. That is, water will become liquid at a lower temperature. Presently, there is about 50 times as much carbon dioxide dissolved in the ocean as present in the air, so there is already significant carbon dioxide in the oceans.

At many locations on the ocean floor, particularly along continental shelves, there are methane hydride formations, this is basically methane molecules trapped in ice. The amount of these hydrides far exceeds the carbon that we've burned in our history. Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, perhaps two hundred times as potent, both because the absorption lines of methane aren't yet saturated, and because they lie nearer the peak of the blackbody radiation from the Earth. All of that methane being released into the atmosphere would be a very bad thing.

A second issue is that increased carbon dioxide levels reduce the amount of oxygen that can be dissolved in the water. Most of the oxygen that is dissolved into the oceans is dissolved at the poles, because oxygen can dissolve more easily in cold water than warm, and then moved via the ocean currents. Those currents depend upon a salinity imbalance between high latitude and low latitude ocean water and as more fresh water enters the ocean diluting the salinity, those ocean currents are slowing. This is reducing the oxygen levels in the ocean water.

There are many forms of sea life that have carbonate shells that dissolve readily in carbolic acid; the raising of the acid levels in the ocean has the potential to kill coral reefs as well as all sorts of shell fish. As those shell-fish die-off they consume oxygen and again deplete the oxygen from the oceans.

And then we have the effect of nutrients entering the ocean, fertilizer run-off, sewage, animal waste. These things cause algae blooms near the surface which then blocks light from getting to deeper levels depriving deeper levels of oxygen. Further, the dying organisms near the surface sink, and then consume any remaining oxygen below. This is creating vast dead-zones in the ocean.

So we've got four big things driving lower oxygen levels lower in the oceans, three of which are completely carbon dioxide related, one of which is indirectly related. As the world demand for oil exceeds supply, and biofuels have been one place people have turned to resolve this; the increased use of fertilizers to grow these biofuels is contributing to the problem.

Now, there are a couple of reasons that oxygen levels in the ocean are very important. First, the worlds oceans make up 71% of the surface area of the planet. They supply 70% of our protein needs. If the oceans die, so does 70% of our food supply. So if you like to eat; healthy oceans are essential.

Where there is sufficient oxygen, bacteria in the ocean predominantly make their living by breaking down organic substances and oxidizing those substances. But where there is insufficient oxygen, near ocean thermal vents for example, bacteria have adapted to use sulfur instead of oxygen. Where as normal bacteria produce water and carbon dioxide, these sulfur loving bacteria produce hydrogen sulfide, which is deadly to humans and most life forms in concentrations of about 200 parts per million.

The largest extinction in the Earth's history, the Permian extinction, may well have been caused by a build-up of hydrogen sulfide when the worlds oceans went through a period of low circulation and oxygenation. During this same time frame there was also a large release of methane.

In my opinion, these issues are far more threatening than carbon dioxide build-up in the atmosphere.

Nuclear Fission Plant Efficiency

noreply@blogger.com (Nanook) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 10:46:00 +0000

Nuclear fission plants are currently enormously inefficient. At present, they extract only about .7% of natural uraniums thermal energy potential, and of that .7%, they convert less than 40% into electrical power.

In other words, their overall efficiency is only about .28%, less than 3 parts in 1000 of natural uraniums energy potential is utilized. This is actually a major reason that nuclear fission power plants produce so much long lived radioactive waste, because so much of that energy potential is not utilized.

Of that .28% that is successfully extracted, about 17% will be lost in transmission line loss, and about 50% will go unused because it will at a time when there is less demand than there is electricity produced and nuclear fission reactors can not be rapidly throttled.

So by the time all of these losses are concerned, perhaps .1% or 1/1000th of natural uraniums energy potential is actually utilized and a much greater quantity of waste is produced than need be produced.

Almost all of these losses can be eliminated, many of them with economic benefits.

One of the places that I can see a fairly economical improvement in efficiency is the heat dissipated in the cooling towers. Although the water entering these towers is not hot enough to recover additional mechanical energy via the Carnot cycle, it still can be used for things like space heating or driving some low temperature industrial processes. In countries like Sweden this is already done, waste heat from nuclear plants is piped to cities to provide residential and commercial space heating. Another potential use is for agriculture as a source of heat to prevent freezing or to grow in colder climates than otherwise be possible. The heat is going to end up in the atmosphere anyway so why not use it to displace some other heat source that would be heating the atmosphere in addition?

Approximately 17% of the energy put into the electricity transmission system never makes it to the consumer. The bulk of that energy is radiative losses. That is, the energy is radiated away from the long distance AC power transmission lines. Not only is this energy wasted, but there are also negative health effects, most notably leukemia, associated with AC electromagnetic fields.

For lines longer than 300km, converting those lines from AC transmission to DC transmission is economical. It frees up some of the right away because clearance is no longer required because of radiation concerns. DC lines do not radiate energy. DC lines can cut that average 17% loss into the low single digit area. DC lines also substantially upgrade the power line's capacity because of two factors. First, the line can be run at the highest voltage the insulators are rated for as opposed to AC transmission where on average the voltage is only .707 that of the peak voltage. Second, on long AC transmission lines, heat causes mechanical sagging of the lines. This lengthens the lines and causes a phase shift over the length of the line which causes losses and additional heating. DC lines eliminate the phase issue allowing higher currents to be transmitted through the conductors. The combination of both higher average voltage and higher currents leads to substantially improved capacity over the same conductors with the same insulators. Lastly DC transmission eliminates susceptibility to either cascading power failures or space weather induced damage. Upgrading our transmission capacity this way would be the equivalent of adding about 15% more generating capacity to the nations electrical grids with no increases in pollution, thermal emissions, and improvements in reliability and health. It would also make it possible for intermittent renewable resources to provide a larger share of our energy needs.

A substantial portion of the energy produced by nuclear reactors at night and during low load times goes up the cooling towers because nuclear power plants, at least those of todays designs, can not readily be throttled up and down in power levels. There is enough surplus power at night to totally provide for all our daily commuting needs if that energy could be efficiently captured and used for that purpose. Doing that would eliminate our dependence upon foreign oil almost entirely because the percentage of oil used for our daily commute almost equals the two thirds that we import.

There are technologies available that would allow this. One technology is the plug-in hybrid and also all electric vehicles. The plug-in hybrid is a more practical alternative for many people because they're not restricted to the short range provided by a relatively low capacity battery pack. For long trips, they can fill up and slurp gas the traditional way. But the majority of commutes are less than 20 miles and so can be completed entirely on electricity.

There are some people out there trying to suggest that this may result in an increase in air pollution because 50% of the electricity we generate comes from coal, but this is misinformation, and the reason for it is, that coal fired plants, like nuclear plants, can not be rapidly throttled and thus they burn coal at night but the energy is just wasted. Plug-in hybrids will simply be using energy that otherwise would have been dissipated in a cooling tower and will generate no more heat at the power plant but eliminate pollution from burning gasoline within the electric range of the vehicle. The one exception to this would be the evening or night shift commuter that recharges during the day.

There are other ways this energy could be harnessed, some of which are being used with solar and wind farms today. There is a battery technology that uses liquid electrodes and relies on changes to the oxidation state of vanadium often called a vanadium redox battery, that can be used to store electricity on an industrial or utility scale. The vanadium redox batterys' capacity is limited only by the size of tanks used to hold the liquid electrode material. Vanadium redox batteries can be left in discharged states for long periods of time and don't degrade with charge cycles to any appreciable degree. The downside of these batteries is that their energy / volume ratio is too low to make them practical for anything but fixed installations.

Another technology where geology makes it practical is hydro-storage where during times of surplus electrical generation, water is pumped up hill to a higher reservoir, and then during times of surplus it is allowed to run downhill through a turbine to generate electricity.

Then there are a few emerging technologies that could be used to turn surplus electricity into fuel. There are two technologies that can convert electricity, carbon dioxide, and water, into butynol, a 4-carbon alcohol that can be used as a replacement for gasoline in gasoline powered vehicles but provides better fuel mileage, power, and about 97% reduction in emissions. Although it's energy content is slightly lower than gasoline, other factors make it burn more efficiently resulting in better mileage and power.

One technology uses a reverse fuel-cell device that uses a catalyst to convert electricity, water, and carbon dioxide directly into butynol. Butynol can also be used as a jet engine fuel and is being considered as a renewable replacement by Virgin Airlines and this reverse fuel cell technology was developed to that end. An alternate method involves electrolyzing carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide and oxygen. The carbon monoxide is then combined with steam to create a gas that can then be catalytically converted into any number of hydrocarbon products, including butynol.

These plants could be built close to coal plants and then the carbon dioxide from the coal plant turned into automotive fuel rather than being released into the atmosphere or geologically sequestered. If we actually got to the point where we were using all of the CO2 produced by coal and gas fired plants, we could sequester carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere.

Greater improvements require more substantial economic investments, but making those investments would both improve globally our standard of living and reduce the burden of managing radioactive wastes that we will otherwise be leaving to future generations.

Most promising is a type of nuclear reactor that uses fast neutrons to fission not only U-235, but also U-238, thorium, and the transuranic elements produced in conventional fission reactors as well as those produced in these reactors. They would be combined with an integral pyrolytic fuel reprocessing facility to reprocess spent fuel on-site. The pyrolytic process does not separate plutonium from other transuranics and therefore does not at any point produce bomb-grade material. In addition, since the material would never leave the reactor site, there would be no opportunity for terrorists to intercept it during transit.

This type of plant uses a liquid metal such as sodium or lead, a liquid salt, or helium as a coolant. Helium has some significant advantages. It's already a gas so an over-power situation isn't going to turn the coolant into something not effective as such. These types of reactors automatically limit their reaction rate based on something known as Doppler spectrum broadening. Basically, to be absorbed efficiently and initiate another fission, a neutron must possess a certain energy level. As objects heat up, an atom may be moving either towards an approaching neutron, increasing the energy, or away from it, decreasing the energy, and in both cases the likelihood of an induced fission is reduced. So these reactors carry a negative thermal coefficient.

Helium allows operation at a high temperature which results in high thermal conversion efficiencies. Metal and salt cooled reactors operate at temperatures exceeding those of boiling water or pressurized water reactors, but less than those of helium gas cooled reactors. Other coolants are somewhat reactive, lead in particular is very reactive, and thus corrode plumbing, but helium is chemically inert. Sodium spontaneously combusts in the presence of air; so there are certain safety issues associated with it's use as a coolant.

These reactors, through their high efficiency, can reduce waste volumes to about 1% of that produced by a conventional once-through boiling or pressurized water reactor. In addition, by burning the actinides, the waste they produce consists only of fission products which only require storage for about 300 years (assuming no further treatment) rather than 50,000 required for the waste produced by existing reactors. Further, these generation IV burning reactors can use the waste from conventional reactors as fuel eliminating the need for long term storage.

There are additional technologies which can turn the longest lived fission produces into products that decay very rapidly reducing the storage requirements to around 20 years, however these technologies do require energy and thus reduce slightly the overall energy efficiency.

France and Japan are both pouring money into research and implementing these types of reactors, we should be as well. Properly implemented nuclear fission can provide for our energy needs for millions of years.

Because so much more energy is recovered from uranium this way; uranium from sources such as extraction from seawater become economical. This is what extends the fuel supply for so long. Because thorium can also be used as a fuel and it is 3x more plentiful in the Earth's crust than is uranium, this also extends the fuel supply considerably.

We do not have to have an energy crisis, nor do we need to have ever increasing levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, and neither do we have to live in poverty and fight wars over oil. There is plenty of energy to go around if we produce, distribute, and utilize it wisely.