I’ve made this argument before but this photograph demonstrates the need so well. The orange-brown coloring in the sky, I didn’t add that, well I contributed to it since I’m using fossil fuels for energy also, but this is the reason we have to switch to alternatives and stop burning fossil fuels.

That crap in the air, we breath that, and so does every other oxygen breathing organism. It doesn’t stop there, heavy metals present in coal, mercury, radioactive elements, uranium, radium, these things too get dispersed in the air, and we breath them, and they settle out, and get into the food chain. Then we catch a salmon and get an unhealthy dose of mercury. All of our food gradually becomes slightly radioactive.

If we produce our electricity through clean renewable technologies and switched to electric vehicles, then we wouldn’t have that ugly brown cloud hanging over us, we’d have clean clear healthy air.

Chernobyl was the world largest nuclear disaster to date, yet, the people living in the exclusion zone near the reactor actually have better health and lower death rates than their cousins living in major cities. That’s not to say that nuclear radiation is good for you, it is to say that urban pollution is worse!

Up to this point it’s been me here sharing my ideas about how to create a sustainable future so that we can live well and our children can live well and our children’s children. Something that can’t happen if we continue down the path we’re on.

But I’m just one person, just one mind, and there are more than six billion of us on this planet. If we put our minds together we should be able to come up with a lot more solutions than any individual.

So.. I’ve added a new feature, Sustainable Future Forums. Just click on the big button on the right sidebar. It’s new, it’s not very fancy yet, it’s in it’s infancy but with your participation will change. Register, it’s instant and painless, and then you can post.

When president Bush speaks of a hydrogen economy, he is talking about using hydrogen as a fuel. In this context, hydrogen is only an energy storage medium not an energy source. Energy had to be expended separating the hydrogen from water and because efficiencies are never 100%, less will be recovered than expended.

Hydrogen can allow a fixed energy source such as a nuclear power plant to provide energy for mobile applications such as vehicles and do so in a less environmentally harmful manner than fossil fuels and providing the primary source of energy is sustainable, it can do so in a sustainable manner.

Hydrogen can be a source of energy if we can utilize it in a fusion reactor but presently political and economic forces prevent implementation. Deuterium and tritium are the isotopes of hydrogen that are likely to find application in fusion reactors. Tritium doesn’t exist naturally except in trace amounts but could be readily bred by placing a lithium blanket around the reactor. Liquid lithium also has some properties that improve the performance of a fusion reactor.

In terms of hydrogen’s use as an energy storage medium for transportation and other portable applications it has potential with some caveats. Water vapor is a far more effective greenhouse gas than is carbon dioxide, so increasing water vapor content of the atmosphere will increase greenhouse effects however additional clouds will reflect more light, so how that will balance out remains a subject of speculation.

A group of scientists working on alloys for advanced semiconductors discovered that if you drop pellets of an aluminum-gallium alloy into water, it reacts with the water. The oxygen in the water reacts with the aluminum alloy to form aluminum oxide, the hydrogen is released and can be used as a fuel. The gallium is released and can be re-used. Gallium prevents aluminum from quickly developing an oxide layer that prevents significant reaction.

Scientists envisioned this as a way to retrofit gasoline cars to use hydrogen but this would be a poor use of this technology. Spark ignited internal combustion engines have a mechanical efficiency of around 20%. They can achieve up to about 37% at their optimum operating point but only a hybrid vehicle can approach this. Hydrogen is a low octane fuel and requires a reduction in engine compression with a corresponding reduction in thermal efficiency.

Fuel cells have achieved 50% efficiency. Between controller and electric motors, the drive train efficiency is around 85%, so 42% system efficiency can be achieved this way, far better than with an internal combustion engine and the generation of nitrous oxides is avoided.

The recombination of hydrogen and oxygen in a fuel cell is an exothermic reaction and can result in temperatures in the ceramic membranes of 900°C. If this heat is captured and utilized to generate power, significantly higher vehicular system efficiencies are possible. This doesn’t speak to the efficiency of hydrogen generation, around 85% is typically achievable in a commercial electrolyzer.

This means that your electricity to wheel efficiency with a fuel-cell vehicle is going to be around 35%, if hydrogen is burned in an internal combustion engine, only about 17%. In this scheme of aluminum – gallium pellets the actual efficiency in which electricity is converted to hydrogen is not documented but I suspect it’s going to be significantly less.

Consider an all-electric vehicle. A lithium ion battery can return about 80% of the energy used to charge it, that in connection with a 85% efficient drive train can yield an electricity to wheel efficiency of 68%, far better than hydrogen fuel cell vehicle.

For NiMH cells, the charge efficiency can be between about 65 and 98%. A lot of the efficiency with NiMH cells depends on the intelligence of the charger, they are very efficient right up to where they are almost fully charged, then efficiency drops rapidly at high charge rates so a good charger will have a thermal sensor, charge at a high rate until it detects the battery getting warm, then top it off with a trickle charge.

On the discharge curve, a high discharge rate will reduce efficiency, the degree to which this is true varies widely from one manufacturer to the next. For maximum efficiency, choose a cell with good high current discharge characteristics. Consider using an ultracapacitor to spread load spikes. In addition, an all-electric vehicle can use regenerative breaking to recover energy improving the overall efficiency even more.

An all electric vehicle wins hands down in terms of electricity to wheel efficiency over hydrogen fueled vehicles, even those using high end fuel cells. However, if electricity is generated from fossil fuels, even an efficient all electric vehicle will result in an overall fuel to wheel efficiency of only around 31%, and in that case a diesel hybrid will do better. Of coarse what is desirable is to utilize renewable or essentially inexhaustible energy sources to generate the electricity.

By essentially inexhaustible I mean something like controlled hydrogen fusion or properly managed fission generation. There is enough deuterium in the worlds oceans to provide our energy needs for 15 billion years.

Properly managed fission would utilize integral fast reactor facility instead of the one-pass system we have now. Such a system could extract approximately 96% of the energy content of uranium (or thorium) while producing no actinide waste thus eliminating the 50,000 year storage problem, contrasted by our current one-pass system that extracts less than 1% of fuels energy potential and creates waste that will need to be isolated for 50,000-100,000 years.

The high efficiency of such as system would make extraction of uranium from seawater a practical fuel source and would make nuclear power viable for millions of years. It would still produce short-term fission product waste but that represents a much smaller problem than plutonium and other actinides, approximately 300-500 years verses 50,000-100,000 years.

Right now though it happens that wind power is the least expensive means of generating electricity. It also happens that the variability of wind is not such an issue with fuel production as we only have to worry about average production rates and have enough hydrogen storage facilities to bridge the periods where production is inadequate due to slow winds.

Overall though I am skeptical of the hydrogen economy, I think all-electric vehicles will provide the main alternatives to fossil fuel powered vehicles.

The Future of Man

As we approached the year 2000 many people pronounced the end of the world was upon us because our modern technology depended upon computers using software did not have provisions for representing the date beyond the year 1999. Running Eskimo North, an Internet Service Provider, and being familiar with the internals of computer software I thought this highly unlikely. I did expect some glitches, but I didn’t expect the world would end.

I did hope that a new millennium would bring a new focus on the long term survival of the human race, which in turn would require a broader focus on the well being of our planet and all of the species that inhabit it. The year 2000 coming and going was probably a relief to many who feared our technological world would grind to a halt, but it was a disappointment to me. I wasn’t disappointed that the world didn’t end, but I had hoped for a paradigm shift that did not occur.

Evolution has given human beings two opposing prime directives, individual survival and propagation, and group survival and propagation. Imagine an individual who was completely selfless, no individual survival instinct, out on the African savanna, spots this hungry lion and thinks to himself, “I just can’t stand the sight of that poor suffering lion, I think I’ll just go feed myself to him so he can have a full belly.” That individual has just eliminated himself from the gene pool. The result today is that save for the occasional mutation, people today possess self-survival instincts.

Groups of people in the past that had group survival instincts and cooperated towards that end, had a higher likelihood of survival than those that did not. Hunting large game on the savanna was more likely to succeed as a cooperative group effort. By extension, members of those groups were more likely to survive and reproduce.

In psychological terms, this manifests itself as the “Id” and the “Superego”, and we are a balancing act between the two. Those are the two things which motivate us, no matter how much we bury and disguise them. Someone who leans heavily towards self-survival, they are labeled as selfish and greedy, someone who leans heavily towards group survival, they’re selfless, altruistic.

Two economic systems illustrate the extremes of these two prime directives, and because neither system does an adequate job of balancing these, both are inadequate. Capitalism, appeals to the self-survival, get as much resources as you can, compete. Socialism, group survival, do the best thing for the whole, cooperate.

In a capitalist economic system, there is no consideration of the needs of the group and large infrastructure projects are difficult to accommodate. Individuals compete for resources without any consideration of the group good. Individuals do things that profit them but harm the group. Externalized costs are not accounted for. For example, power companies burn coal to generate electricity, altering the atmosphere and dispersing mercury and other toxic and radioactive elements into the environment. They do not bare the costs of the health issues they impose on the surrounding community.

A capitalistic system, by failing to account for these externalized costs, not only fails to take into account the needs of our species, let alone other species with whom we share this planet, but it also is less efficient in producing goods and services as it could be if all of those costs were adequately accounted for. In a capitalistic system, when a small number of competing entities control an important resource, the markets can be artificially manipulated resulting in great harm to the group collectively.

Socialism fails because it seems to assume that people have only a group survival instinct and it attempts to train individual survival instincts out of people. People become unmotivated and non-productive. In a socialistic system, those in power can skew distribution such that they personally benefit at the expense of the group collectively.

We need an economic system that recognizes both the group and individual survival directives that are genetically hard-wired into our behavior patterns while at the same time recognizes both the needs of the individual which may be unique, and the needs of the group. We need a system that provides reasonable individual rewards commensurate with individual effort yet at the same time provides for large infrastructure and group collective needs. We need a system that takes care of those who for reasons beyond their own control, are unable to take care of themselves. We need a system that recognizes that other species are equally part of the world biosphere and balances their needs with our own.

The world seems to be experimenting with a mixture of socialism and capitalism. China has privatized many industries but places limits on foreign investment and retains partial ownership of key industries. This approach insures that the interest of the people as a whole remains represented in industry while allowing an individual to profit from his or her efforts.

Other countries allow total private ownership but use regulations and tax incentives to encourage socially responsible behavior on the part of corporate entities.

Energy, Greed, Reality, Options…

In the United States, group interest has been ignored. Enron manipulation of the electricity market and big oil manipulation of the petroleum sector cause artificial shortages, wars, environmental damage, resulting in great social harm.

Some individuals have reacted by going off grid and becoming self-sufficient. For those who can that’s great but their numbers aren’t large enough to affect the behavior of major corporate entities. If there is to be a future for our country, and indeed for the world, somehow we have to regain balance between the needs of individuals, the group that is the entire human race, and life on this planet as a whole.

In the 1970’s the Arab oil embargo resulted in real fuel shortages, long lines at the pump, ridiculous even-odd day rationing (ridiculous because it has absolutely no impact on consumption), and high fuel prices. In the 1970’s we didn’t have much in the way of technological alternatives. Today, there are many viable alternatives but they require some changes in the way we do things.

Today, there is no real energy shortage as such, there is however a shortage of liquid fuels used in the transportation industry and often for heating. Adequate hydrocarbons exist such that we could burn them for energy for a long time if availability were the only issue, but availability is not the only issue. Environmental costs exist and limit the amount of energy that we can obtain this way.

We ample renewable energy sources available to us, however, many of these options are intermittent or variable in nature. Solutions to this problem abound however. It is the lack of political will and artificial manipulation of the energy markets by existing powers that prevent their implementation. Most of these resources are not directly applicable to vehicular transportation. To be used for transportation they require some intermediary storage mechanism such as electrochemical batteries, ultra-capacitors, or by making hydrogen that can be used in a fuel cell. However, an intermediary step could be to displace fossil fuels used for fixed power generation with alternatives and then use those fuels for transportation while other technologies are perfected and deployed.

Liquid Transportation Fuels

Let us take a look at the future of oil and hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons are made up of hydrogen and carbon. Hydrogen is the most plentiful element in the universe, carbon the 4th most abundant (after helium and oxygen), and both of these elements are present in abundance on Earth. Hydrogen and carbon both chemically combine with other elements so not all hydrogen and carbon has formed hydrocarbons. For example, lot of hydrogen is tied up in water, and a lot of carbon is tied up in carbonate minerals and carbon dioxide.

While we can argue about the origins of hydrocarbons on Earth, whether they are the result of abiotic or geological processes (I believe evidence supports the existence of both with some qualitative differences), what we can say for sure is that hydrocarbons present in the earth’s crust exhibit a great deal of variability in their chemical makeup. They vary in the ease at which they can be extracted and the environmental damage resulting from their extraction. They vary in their contaminate makeup, sulfur being one of the most common contaminates.

Carbon is very versatile chemically. It has four valence electrons available and can form single, double, or triple bonds with other carbon atoms as well as individual bonds with up to four hydrogen atoms. It can form long or short chains as well as rings. The combinations possible are essentially unlimited and this is what makes carbon an element that is the basis for life as we know it.

The smallest hydrocarbon molecule commonly found in nature is methane, a carbon atom with four hydrogens attached. This is the principal component of natural gas and probably the most abundant hydrocarbon in the Earth’s crust. Natural gas generally will contain some other light hydrocarbons that are gaseous at room temperature. Medium sized hydrocarbons are generally liquid at room temperature and even larger molecules solid. Hydrocarbons containing only hydrogen and carbon are “pure” hydrocarbons. However, molecules made up principally of hydrogen and carbon may also bind to other elements such as nitrogen or sulfur forming impure hydrocarbons.

Crude oil is a mixture of all of these different sized molecules dissolved in each other. Crude oil may also contain various impure hydrocarbons, most commonly compounds including sulfur. They are separated by boiling points using the process of fractional distillation at an oil refinery.

Gasoline generally consists of molecules consisting of 6-12 carbon atoms. This is the part of the crude oil fraction that boils between about 50°C and 200°C. Diesel oil consists of that fraction that boils from between 200°C and 350°C. Diesel and lighter distillates have the most commercial value. Heavier distillates like bunker oil and tars are less valuable. They have to be heated to a high temperature to lower the viscosity enough to flow. Still heavier fractions won’t even vaporize before decomposing into “coke” and really aren’t useful for anything.

A light crude oil might contain 15% distillates that are the right weight to become gasoline without cracking. A heavier crude may contain none. In the United States, about 45% of the petroleum market is gasoline. With a lighter crude, a substantial portion of the distillates will be lighter (smaller molecules) than desired, and a process called “reforming” combines lighter molecules to form heavier molecules. In this process hydrogen atoms are removed from the molecules (so the carbon has a free electron to bond to another carbon atom of another molecule forming a larger molecule). The process is endothermic so heat energy is supplied, but the hydrogen and some of the other gases given off by this process are used as fuel to provide this process heat.

Heavy crude contains no distillates that are the right weight to become gasoline initially and it contains no lighter distillates that can be reformed into appropriate weight molecules. Instead, larger molecules must be cracked. As with reforming, this involves the heating of distillates in the presence of a catalyst, and like reforming the reaction is endothermic. However, unlike reforming, hydrogen is needed to terminate the carbon chain of the new molecules formed when a larger molecule is cracked. Additionally, cracking requires higher temperatures than reforming. Cracking is a net consumer of hydrogen which requires energy from some other source to provide the necessary hydrogen. Higher temperatures also require more energy input.

Between starting with no natural gasoline weight distillates, and requiring more energy input to convert heavier molecules into the appropriate weight hydrocarbons, heavier crude produces less product per input barrel, and as a consequence refineries are not willing to pay as much for heavy crude.

Sulfur is a common crude oil contaminate as is nitrogen. Sulfur in particular must be removed for environmental reasons. In addition to environmental issues, sulfur and nitrogen poison the catalysts used for cracking and reforming and so they must be removed before these processes can be performed. The process of removing sulfur requires hydrogen, and that requires energy, so high sulfur crude is undesirable. Crude containing more than 2.5% sulfur is known as “sour crude”. Crude with less than 2.5% sulfur is known as sweet crude. As with light crude, refineries are willing to pay more for sweet crude because it requires less processing and energy input.

Given this the demand for light sweet crude is stronger than heavy sour crude, the oil fields which have been most heavily exploited have been those which contain sweet light crude. The majority of the oil remaining that is easily reached is heavy sour crude. Not all refineries are equipped to handle heavy sour crude.

In addition to being more difficult to refine, heavy sour crude is more difficult to extract. It’s increased viscosity means it does not flow as easily from the reservoirs. Techniques such as steam injection to heat it and reduce the viscosity or the injection of solvents must be used. Steam requires an energy source, so here again more energy must be expended to recover heavy crude. Some crude is so heavy it can not be made to flow, it must be mined. The Alberta tar sands are an example. In Alberta much of these tar sands are within a couple hundred feet of the surface and can be strip mined, but in other locations these deposits are located too deeply for strip mining and other methods of recovery are being explored.

Russian geologists have largely believed that oil is of geological origin. Western geologists largely believe that it is a fossil fuel. Personally, I believe it is both. The oil that we’ve tapped in the west has been largely of biological origin but oil of abiotic origin remains largely untapped. Russia has become the worlds second largest oil producer (and for very brief period before the government seized Yukos, the worlds largest).

Conventional oil is found in sedimentary deposits, which is where you would expect to find it if it is created from decaying organisms. However, oil can also be found underneath granite and basaltic capstone formations and deep within the Earth’s crust. Oil below the bedrock has been found in Russia, Viet Nam, India, and right here in the United States in Utah and the gulf of Mexico. Western geologists have come up with various alternate explanations. Preliminary tests suggest that the deep field found in the Gulf of Mexico is a super-giant field and the same is also true of the deep oil found in Utah. Both fields contain the desirable sweet light crude. However, drilling to that depth is expensive.

So what is the bottom line? The bottom line is that liquid fuels are going to get more expensive because either we have to drill deep for them (and in the case of the Gulf of Mexico field also we have to go through 5,000 feet of water before going down another 15,000 feet into the sea floor) or we have to utilize heavy sour crude which results in less finished product from initial crude stock and higher refining costs. Add to this a world-wide shortage of drilling rigs and increasing demand from India and China and prices can only go one way in the near term and that’s up.

What We Should and Should Not Do

Fighting over remaining easily accessible light sweet crude is what not to do. The Bush administrations policy of using military force to try to secure Iraq’s oil deposits has proven to be a dismal failure. In addition to inflicting a great deal of death and suffering, it’s resulted in a significant decrease in oil production in Iraq while at the same time increasing oil consumption.

The right thing to do is to adapt and we’ve got plenty of options. If we handled our energy crisis in an intelligent manner, we could even become a net exporter of energy. We could create millions of jobs in the process, balance our trade deficit and federal budget. We could create prosperity for our country and significantly improve the economic outlook for the rest of the world. Let’s look at some of our options, and there are many.

First we should look at reducing demand, this won’t eliminate depletion of natural resources but it will reduce the rate at which that depletion occurs and it will reduce the amount of renewable energy that we need to find to replace fossil fuels. Conservation is the most cost effective method of reducing fossil fuel demand. That is to say we have to spend less to conserve a given amount of energy than to replace it.

Plug-in hybrid vehicles can eliminate most of our oil import needs because there is enough surplus electrical generating capacity on the US grid to provide for almost all of our automotive transportation energy needs.

In the United States in 2005, 49.7%, almost half, of the electricity generated comes from coal fired plants, 19.3% comes from nuclear, 18.7% from natural gas, 6.5% from hydroelectric, 3% from petroleum, and 2.9% from other sources. I haven’t been able to find complete statistics that are more recent but the amount of petroleum generated electricity dropped between 2005 and 2006 and that of natural gas increased. The share that wind contributes also increased to about 1%.

Nuclear plants can’t be throttled dynamically to accommodate the daily shifts in demand. It takes several days to bring a nuclear reactor back up to normal power levels after being shut down. Coal fired plants also can not be throttled rapidly because of the thermal mass of the combustion bed and together these sources make up about 70% of our energy generation capacity. Hydro-electric, petroleum, and natural gas fired plants can adjust more rapidly but these make up less than 30% of our energy mix.

The electricity demand at night is about 30% less than it is during the day. Surplus capacity is presently wasted. That wasted energy could be powering plug-in hybrid vehicles.

If we were to displace more of the fossil fuel fired generators with other sources, then natural gas could be liquified via the Fischer-Tropsch process which produces a synthetic diesel fuel of zero sulfur content and very high quality and displace a significant portion of the imported oil used for transportation. Coal too can be turned into a liquid fuel. Although that process is more expensive, it is done routinely in other parts of the world such as South Africa where the majority of their automotive fuel is derived from coal.

The bulk of our automotive transportation energy could come from electricity but what of trucking? It is not practical to replace fossil fuels with batteries for trucking, the energy requirements are too great and long haul trucking wouldn’t tolerate the downtime required for charging.

Diverting fuel presently used for electricity generation would provide fuel for trucking. This is not sustainable, coal and natural gas deposits will eventually deplete, but can buy us some time while alternatives are being developed. We should rebuild and electrify our railways and move the bulk of goods and products by rail rather than by truck. This eliminates our dependence on foreign oil imports to move goods and services about our country as well as air pollution associated with burning diesel.

To replace natural gas, coal, and oil used for power generation we can use a mixture of wind, solar, ocean energy, geo-thermal, biomass, and nuclear. Each has unique advantages and limitations.

Wind is cheap, presently in the range of 4-6¢ per KWh with newer wind turbine installations tending to be less expensive near 4¢ per KWh because newer large turbines are more cost effective. The coal fired plant capacity being replaced runs around 4.6¢ per KWh without carbon sequestration and around 6¢ per KWh with carbon sequestration. Replacing coal with wind is actually an economically favorable change.

Because of the variability of wind, it is estimated that the current grid could only support about 20% of our energy mix coming from wind power. Denmark presently makes slightly more than 20% of their electricity from wind generation. The United States enjoying greater geographical diversification should be able to absorb a larger percentage of wind generated power.

A super-grid, a superconductive high voltage DC transmission system encompassing both the western and eastern United States, in which liquid hydrogen is both a cryogenic coolant and a fuel being distributed, would allow a higher percentage of wind power in the mix and surplus capacity could be used to create hydrogen fuel for vehicles and stationary fuel cells. Such as system would have additional advantages. There would be no copper losses (losses due to electrical resistance are referred to as copper losses even though the wires are largely made of aluminum). There would be no losses due to electromagnetic radiation. There would be no health concerns, no leukemia, caused by low frequency radiation from the power grid. DC transmission systems, unlike their AC counterparts, are immune to solar flare and space weather induced failures. Replacing our existing transmission infrastructure with such a grid system would be equivalent to gaining a 15-20% increase in generating capacity through elimination of transmission losses.

Solar can be a significant part of the mix. Electricity demand is about 30% greater in the daytime and in the south where sunshine is most abundant, demand peaks at the same time that solar power production peaks because much of the southern United States electricity consumption is related to air conditioning. There are also solar power generation schemes such as solar chimneys that use thermal mass to store heat and continue to generate electricity overnight and for several days without sunlight.

The Western United States has huge largely untapped geothermal resources. We need to tap these resources. Hydroelectric has become somewhat controversial because it is being blamed for interfering with fish spawning and the decline in fish stocks. Oddly, the collapse of most of these fish species didn’t happen until thirty years after the dams were built, you can draw your own conclusions but personally I think blowing up dams to restore fish runs is not a good plan. Installing fish ladders were none exist, now that makes good sense.

We should exploit these and other renewable energy sources to the maximum. We should have a nothing less than a national crash program to develop and bring nuclear fusion online commercially. The basic science is already done. People who say it is impossible are either not educated with respect to the current state of controlled nuclear fusion or they have vested interests in competing energy sources.

Most biomass crops take almost as much energy to grow and process as they ultimately yield. However, using a different method of converting biomass into fuel where hydrogen is supplied by an external source that utilizes solar energy for the electrolysis of water, the amount of land needed for biomass can be substantially reduced and net energy production substantially increased.

Fermenting sugars and starches into ethanol only uses a small portion of the plant and produces a fuel that can only be used as an additive to gasoline and the energy content is much lower than gasoline. However, there is a lesser known higher alcohol called butanol that can replace gasoline directly up to 100% in an unmodified gasoline engine. Butanol is less corrosive than ethanol and has a much higher energy content. While still slightly less than that of gasoline (105,000 btu/liter verses 115,000 btu/liter), in tests fuel mileage while running on butanol exceeded that of gasoline. There is much speculation as to the reasons for this. It may be that it’s uniform molecular size promotes more even and complete combustion. It may be that it’s higher octane (108 octane) causes modern cars to advance timing and operate more efficiently.

Until recently, fermenting biofuels to butanol was an inefficent process but recently but David Ramey and his company Environmental Energy Inc, have developed a two-step fermentation process that converts 46% of the feedstock into fuel.

I’ll continue this on another post, but suffice it to say that if we’d spent what we’ve spent on the Iraq War instead on energy independence and sustainability; we’d be free of foreign oil and have a thriving economy by now.

I took Sustainable Living News out of the sidebar because nothing new was showing up and I didn’t care for the general approach they seem to be pushing for a sustainable future.

The direction the articles seemed to be taking was that it is necessary to live a very simple impoverished life in order to live in a sustainable manner. I don’t believe this at all, I believe God has blessed us with abundance if only we would stop wasting it and use it cooperatively.

I don’t believe an impoverished barely self-sustaining lifestyle is necessary for a sustainable world, and I believe those people that are sending out that message are discouraging many people from taking the steps we need to take to achieve a sustainable living condition.

Hemp is efficient at turning sunlight into biomass. It can produce up to four times more fiber per acre than trees. It’s a very durable fiber and industrially useful fiber. The US Constitution was written on hemp paper, unfortunately, the text of the constitution hasn’t survived as well as the paper has. The text has proven incapable of withstanding attacks by politicians, lobbyists, and lawyers.

It’s outlaw status in the US is a shame because it forces the use of much less environmentally friendly alternatives for fiber and biofuel. Industrial hemp contains less than 1% THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. Hemp grown for drug use, contains more than 10% THC. Industrial hemp would not be sought for recreational drug use. Anyone who has ever tried to smoke marijuana of this quality would understand. The closest you would get to a high is a headache from carbon monoxide. Unfortunately, there is nothing rational about federal drug laws.

Take a look at this video link on the Science Channel, it shows how a form of biodiesel can be made and utilized to fuel diesel powered vehicles. Unlike other vegetable crops that biodiesel can be derived from, growing hemp requires very little energy or pesticides.

The psychoactive component, THC, is only one of a class of related compounds present in hemp called cannibanols. Obviously, hemp didn’t evolve these chemicals to get humans high. A clue to the purpose of these chemicals is the fact that hemp is the only broad-leaved plant that grows in arid regions. Cannibanols serve as a moisture barrier retaining moisture. This makes the plant a valuable crop because it can be grown in regions that are too arid for other crops without robust irrigation, but unlike cactus and other plants that grow in arid regions, it’s broad leafs make efficient use of sunlight allowing it to grow rapidly. In Canada, where it is legal to grow industrial hemp, it is the second most valuable crop after tobacco.

I found this post by dave b and the calculations contained therein to be interesting. Clearly, weather patterns are changing but they aren’t changing in a globally consistent manner.

In Alaska and the northern hemisphere in general; it’s hard to believe it’s all global warming. I talked to a fisherman that fishes off of Sitka, seeing 60°F water temperatures when they are below 40°F here in the Puget Sound. I suspect under water volcanic activity.

Heat doesn’t flow from colder to hotter, there has to be a heat source local to that area under water.

I just got through reading an article regarding buying surplus solar panels and measuring output in watts. The article was completely wrong and made me cringe so I thought in the interest of education I’ll elaborate on why so hopefully people will avoid making this mistake.

People with a little electrical knowledge know that watts = volts × amps. This article suggested calculating the power output of a 12 volt solar panel by measuring the short circuit current and multiplying by 17, because 17 volts is usually approximately the open circuit voltage of a 12 volt panel under full sunlight.

This does NOT yield the power a solar panel can produce, the voltage will decrease as the load increases. Load the panel to the point where the load decreases the voltage to 12 volts, measure the current at that load, and multiple that current by 12 volts. The short circuit current will be higher than the current at normal load, and the unloaded voltage will be higher than the voltage at a normal load, but you get neither of those let alone both at the same time, under load, so those numbers are meaningless. The numbers that have meaning are those under normal load.

Talking to a friend last night, I learned something surprising… That after oil, the next largest traded commodity is coffee. That surprised me but then I don’t like coffee, so maybe if I were a typical Seattlelite coffee addict I’d see it differently.

It occurred to me that if it gets warm enough then the United States might have an appropriate climate for growing coffee. This could actually be good for America! Oh yea, we’d starve because we can’t grow food but hey and least we could all be wired while we’re starving.

So see it’s true, every silver lining does have a cloud, er yea that.

Might be a good time to invest in snowshoes though.. If you look at that graph in the previous post you’ll see that what follows every peak in CO2/temperature is a BIG decline in temp and that happens even if CO2 levels remain high.

I hope they’re successful with that attempt to clone a woolly mammoth, it might be just in time.

I know it’s heretical to suggest that we aren’t completely responsible for global warming but I’m going to make that suggestion. It would be happening to a substantial degree in our absence. I believe the relationship between CO2 and temperature is more complex.

Part of the problem is that we simply do not have good data. Look at the following graph (from Wikipedia):

I would like to bring your attention to several features of these plots. The first calls into question the reliability of the data, particularly when it comes to temperature determination.

There are two different sets of ice core data used, they overlap at 400,000 years ago. You will notice that the CO2 data between them agrees at least at that 400,000 year overlap.

Temperature determination is more problematic, I would suggest to the point of being essentially worthless except on a relative scale. Temperature determination is based upon deuterium concentration, but the deuterium concentration is nearly twice as high in the EPICA ice cores relative to that of the Vostok ice cores. At 400,000 years where these overlap, even on the adjusted scales, the levels are radically different. Perhaps it’s just me but this makes it difficult for me to trust the data.

The second thing I’d like to point out is that rising temperatures, as interpreted from deuterium concentrations, often proceed rising carbon dioxide levels and falling temperatures nearly always proceed, sometimes by a substantial time frame, the falling of carbon dioxide levels. My interpretation of this is that carbon dioxide levels are not the major determiner of global temperatures. If they were, rising and falling carbon dioxide levels would reliably proceed global temperature changes.

Global temperatures on Pluto are on the rise. Scientists in the linked article attribute this to lag, just as on earth where solar irradiation is highest at noon, but temperatures are highest at 3pm. I am skeptical of this explanation because Pluto lacks a thick atmosphere or oceans to retain heat, and certainly not for the fourteen years that it has been moving away from the Sun and simultaneously getting warmer.

Neptune, or at least it’s moon, Triton, is warming. Neptune itself also is warming. They blame seasonal changes, Triton they say is entering into it’s southern summertime which it does every several hundred years and it’s spring-time on Neptune. Uranus is also experience global warming. This two is ascribed to spring time on Uranus. Saturn is warming, so is Jupiter and Mars.

Alas, I can’t find any temperature trend data on Venus and Mercury, but if the seven planets (and various moons) for which data is available all show positive temperature trends, I think it’s a safe bet something more than carbon dioxide levels is responsible. That’s not to say that carbon dioxide levels have no effect, but it’s important to note that the carbon dioxide levels on Venus are around 300,000 times greater than Earths, so the effect on Earth from carbon dioxide levels probably is not that pronounced.

I think it’s far more likely that the bulk of global warming is due to increased solar activity. Please note that this does not necessarily equate to visible or infrared light. I believe there are other phenomena which are significant. The Sun’s magnetic interaction with the Earth is one of those factors. How is it that the Sun’s corona is millions of degrees when it’s surface temperature is only around 5600°K? Magnetic heating is how this is possible. Those magnetic field lines don’t end at corona, they continue out into space, interwoven into flows of particles, the solar wind, interacting with our planet and heating it. During periods of high solar activity, UV light output increases. UV is mostly absorbed in our atmosphere driving some chemical reactions but also producing heat.

Does this mean we should just relax and keep combusting hydrocarbons to provide for our energy needs? No, it does not, for several very good reasons. While there is no shortage of hydrocarbons, most of those that remain are inconvenient. They are either difficult to get at, requiring deep drilling, drilling in deep water, or complicated extraction, or they are contaminated with sulfur, or of an inconvenient molecular size, too large, viscous, and carbon rich, or gaseous. Yes, we do have technology for liquifying natural gas. We have technology for turning coal into gasoline or diesel. We have technology for cracking long chain hydrocarbons. All of these technologies are expensive but at the current price of oil not prohibitively so, but all of them are also polluting.

At current carbon dioxide levels of 380 ppm, we are also approaching the point where carbon dioxide levels are going to start causing substantial health problems. 500 ppm is considered the maximum safe occupational level. We’ve gone from 250 ppm to 380 ppm in the last century and the rate of increase is logarithmic so it will not take another century to reach 500 ppm. At 500 ppm, some people begin to experience discomfort, headaches and drowsiness. At 1000 ppm, many people are affected.

Carbon dioxide reduces the capacity for hemoglobin in the blood to carry oxygen. It also affects the acidity of the blood which has many health ramifications, most of which are unpleasant. For people who already have marginal capacity to oxygenate their tissues, this is literally a life or death issue.

The use of hydrocarbons for fuel also has scaling issues. It takes so much human energy and effort to generate energy in this manner that it limits economic growth and consigning many people to unavoidable poverty.

The changing climate will require even more energy consumption to adapt, we will have to irrigate regions that are dry to sustain food production. Water tables are already depleting faster than nature can replenish them so we will have to desalinate and pump water. This takes energy on a large scale.

Continuing to rely on hydrocarbons will result in more and more human labor going towards energy production, more health problems from pollution, and the hydrocarbons will become increasingly difficult to get at. Yes, we can drill to the mantel and extract more hydrocarbons, but doing so is expensive.

We should shift our energy needs preferably towards totally renewable sources like solar, wind, tidal energy, hydro, but also to long-term sustainable sources like geo-thermal, fission (if properly managed), and fusion. Fusion really is the holy grail of energy production since it can provide clean energy without substantial radioactive waste at a high density indefinitely. The Sun is a giant fusion reactor, it’s been providing energy for the last 4.5 billion years or so.

Nuclear fission is a dirty word, but our bad experience with it is largely the result of an industry managed by greed, doing things the least expensive way possible. If we move from one-pass U-235 fuel cycle to an integral reprocessing fast-flux actinide burning plants, we can have a supply of energy that can last millions of years and generate only short-term radioactive waste. Not as clean as solar or wind or fusion, but much better than current fission power plants.

Of the renewables I think wind is actually the most promising. It’s cheap, coming in at around 4.6¢/KWh, less even than coal, and much less than natural gas. The chief criticism of wind power, that it is an intermittent power source, has not stopped it from contributing substantially to Germany’s energy mix, and I think it could contribute to an even larger share here in the United States.

There are several reasons wind can make a larger contribution to our energy needs. First, geographical diversity. The United States is larger therefore when the wind isn’t blowing in one area, it’s blowing somewhere else. To fully take advantage of this we should build a new superconducting national super grid. The grid can be cooled to cryogenic temperatures by liquid hydrogen and serve simultaneously to transmit hydrogen and electricity.

We can take advantage of intermittent wind power by producing hydrogen during those times when the generation capacity exceeds our needs. We could also modify existing hydro projects by placing another dam downstream of the existing dam, creating a secondary reservoir, and during times of surplus generation, pump that water back from the lower reservoir to the upper reservoir to be used again to generate power when demand exceeds supply.

We could build desalinization plants to take advantage of times when production exceeds supply, and the same is true for water pumping stations. Smart metering in residential, business, and industrial settings could allow people to adjust their usage to target heavy usages to times when excess capacity exists.

In Germany, government subsidies have increased wind power usage somewhat, but really not a lot considering the costs. I think there are other things in the US that could be done to encourage wind farms. In Washington State for example, the best land for wind production is on the ridge southeast of Yakima, but that is at present part of an Army firing range. Surely, they could blow stuff up somewhere else.

I don’t know what the trick is but a better world for us and our children requires that we somehow get the political will to do this and wrestle control from the oil companies.