Treating the Power Grid as a Dumping Ground: Green Intermittency Costs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Navy Railgun Weapon Promises Quite a Barrage

It could take up to a decade to find its way into shipboard systems - and the budget for the final weapon is now in some doubt.

The energy level has jumped from 0.5 megajoules to 1.5 megajoules. Even at one megajoule, the projectiles hit with the force of a one-ton car striking a wall at 100mph. _DailyMail

DailyMail

The Navy began pursuing the railgun in 2005, and for now, there are only lab prototypes of the weapon. But already the Navy has set a world record (see video below) for muzzle energy used in a weapon--33 megajoules. According to Defense Market, a shot of that magnitude could potentially reach "extended ranges with Mach 5 velocity."

Ellis said, the Navy has awarded contracts to BAE and General Atomics to build prototypes that "are more tactical in nature."...when the railgun is finally deployed, it is likely to be used--or at least be ready for action--in several different kinds of missions. First, Ellis explained, it could be used from a ship to fire inland in support of marines as they come ashore.

At the same time, because the weapon's range is so long, it could allow a Naval ship that features the railgun to defend itself from sea-borne threats long before it can itself be attacked, or from missiles fired from land or sea.

Now it's on to the next phase of the project. According to Ellis, that phase includes demonstrating that it's possible to fire a railgun at a rate of 10 rounds per minute _CBS

9 Second Clip of Record Setting Naval Rail Gun Shot

To supply it, Raytheon’s building a “Pulse Forming Network” or PFN. That's a large power system that stores up electrical power and then converts it to a pulse that is directed into the gun's barrel, John Cochran, the railgun program manager in Raytheon's Advanced Technology Group, told CNET’s News.com. _FoxNews

The US Navy desperately wants to put this gun onboard its attack ships, but it is not clear whether the railgun will be used by land forces or sea forces, if it ever does make it through all the levels of financing and final approval.

This electromagnetic catapult weapon may be a glimpse into the future of medium distance ballistic weaponry, particularly if it can achieve pinpoint accuracy over hundreds of miles distance. Providing the massive amounts of electricity required over a sustained attack might well require a nuclear reactor, along with Raytheon's pulse-forming network.

A Pandemic of Malthusian Illiteracy

Global economy optimists however say that "Malthusian illiteracy" lurks behind remaining adherents of Peak Oil theory - which basically says conventional oil production will stagnate and fall but demand will go on growing. _MarketOracle

As knowledgeable analysts come to understand that oil demand, rather than oil supply, is currently in the driver's seat, some of the impetus behind the peak oil panic has subsided. And yet the "Malthusian Impulse" continues to drive many observers, against their more rational proclivities. Still, global hydrocarban reserves continue to grow, year after year, and oil demand is slated to decrease in time.

New sources for transport fuels are likely to come from many directions, including new gas-to-liquids (GTL) technologies. Oxford Catalyst's microchannel GTL technology is very much in demand, as are other new varieties of GTL technologies. The market for GTL fuels may be more than 20 million barrels per day! Imagine the impact of that huge new supply on the global oil market. (Note that approximately between 5 and 10 million barrels per day could be produced via GTL from currently flared gas alone. Stranded gas could double that number.) More information at this PDF white paper download from Velocys, creator of the Oxford Catalysts microchannel technology.

A more conventional source for GTL transport fuels is the large scale technology championed by Shell.

In 2011, Shell began shipments from its Pearl GTL project in Qatar...The project is able to produce 140,000 b/d of fuel and 120,000 b/d of ethane and condensates... _Petroleum Economist

And that is just the beginning. As long as the huge price spread between the cost of natural gas and the cost of crude oil remains, more and more GTL projects will kick in to take advantage of this "easy money."

Second and third generation biofuels from biomass technologies are beginning to come on line, slowly (consult Al Fin Energy blog for updated news on this topic). Advanced biofuels technologies are not likely to take an appreciable bite out of crude oil demand for another 5 or 10 years. As long as natural gas prices stay this low, only the most efficient biofuels projects will be able to compete in the liquid fuels markets without government subsidies. But by the year 2030 if the technology continues to develop, the writing will be on the wall. This is a biological world, after all.

Advanced nuclear power technologies are likely to aid the development of new fuels technologies of all kinds, supplying safe and abundant power and heat for a multitude of energy development projects from oil sands to oil shales to biomass and aquaculture projects in cold climates, irrigation and desalination of saltwater in arid climates etc etc.

Other factors leading to a decreased demand for crude oil includes the increasing use of both natural gas and biomass as feedstock for the vast chemicals industry -- an industrial sector previously dependent upon petroleum for feedstock. (see Al Fin Energy blog for much more)

The ongoing global economic downturn and demand destruction extends from Europe to Japan to the US, and is beginning to put stress on the Chinese and Indian economies -- despite all the rah! rah! hype about the coming age of the Chindian global economy. Many nations which have maintained hefty consumer subsidies for transport fuels are being forced to reduce the subisidies. More downward pressure on demand.

Malthusian theories are appealing for their simplicity. And yet the never-ending and never-fulfilled Malthusian predictions of doom ignore the most salient and disruptive human technology of all -- the goal-oriented innovativeness of the human mind.

Despite the best efforts of energy-starvationists in the Obama administration, in the EU bureaucracy, in national bureaucracies of EU nations and advanced nations around the globe -- the prospects for abundant energy and fuels in the future are quite good, as long as the clowns in power do not destroy the economies they oversee.

If you have abundant clean energy and fuels, everything else is doable.

Previously published at Al Fin Energy and Al Fin Central

How to Survive an Apocalypse in the Suburbs

The suburbs may not seem to be the best place to survive an apocalypse, but some people think it can be done.

Who knows how everything will shake out when the world goes to hell, but the suburbs may be well positioned to thrive with fewer resources, as Brown points out. Suburbs are close enough to the city to be convenient and encourage community building, yet spread out enough to offer yards and substantial garden space. (Suburban soil is also usually less contaminated than urban soil.) The houses are large enough to accommodate multigenerational households and cottage industries, which some demographers predict as coming trends. _CityPaper

Popsci
But you and I know that to well and truly survive an apocalypse in the suburbs, you are going to need a lot of juice -- in more senses than one. You will need plenty of fluids, true. You will also need plenty of heat and electrical power to survive the winters and power air conditioners through the summer. In a third sense of the word "juice", you will need plenty of clout and respect. And what better way to gain the respect of one's extended neighbors, than to have your own functioning nuclear power plant in your backyard?

Consider the thorium molten salt reactor, pictured above:

The MSR design has two primary safety advantages. Its liquid fuel remains at much lower pressures than the solid fuel in light-water plants. This greatly decreases the likelihood of an accident, such as the hydrogen explosions that occurred at Fukushima. Further, in the event of a power outage, a frozen salt plug within the reactor melts and the liquid fuel passively drains into tanks where it solidifes, stopping the fission reaction. “The molten-salt reactor is walk-away safe,” Kutsch says. “If you just abandoned it, it had no power, and the end of the world came--a comet hit Earth--it would cool down and solidify by itself.”

Although an MSR could also run on uranium or plutonium, using the less-radioactive element thorium, with a little plutonium or uranium as a catalyst, has both economic and safety advantages. Thorium is four times as abundant as uranium and is easier to mine, in part because of its lower radioactivity. The domestic supply could serve the U.S.’s electricity needs for centuries. Thorium is also exponentially more efficient than uranium. “In a traditional reactor, you’re burning up only a half a percent to maybe 3 percent of the uranium,” Kutsch says. “In a molten-salt reactor, you’re burning 99 percent of the thorium.” The result: One pound of thorium yields as much power as 300 pounds of uranium--or 3.5 million pounds of coal.

Because of this efficiency, a thorium MSR would produce far less waste than today’s plants. Uranium-based waste will remain hazardous for tens of thousands of years. With thorium, it’s more like a few hundred. As well, raw thorium is not fissile in and of itself, so it is not easily weaponized. “It can’t be used as a bomb,” Kutsch says. “You could have 1,000 pounds in your basement, and nothing would happen.”

Without the need for large cooling towers, MSRs can be much smaller than typical light-water plants, both physically and in power capacity. _PS

And the advantages of the thorium molten salt reactor go on and on. Even many greenies are on board for thorium MSRs.

It is likely to be touch and go to get Obama's nuclear regulatory commission to license the safer, newer, cheaper nuclear plants, but nuclear engineer Kirk Sorensen has founded a company named Flibe, to build and market the devices. Even if he has to go to China to build the reactors, you can always have one smuggled into your country of choice and installed in your back yard under a small carnival tent -- to hide it from annoying satellites.

Remember, if you have a reactor like this, you will have all the juice you could possibly need. You could even build a giant dome over your entire neighborhood and give it the climate of Tahiti year-round, if you like. Tropical fruits taste quite good, particularly in the middle of typical apocalyptic mass food shortages.

But don't get cocky. Once residents of surrounding suburbs and neighboring cities catch on to the fact that you had the foresight to prepare for the apocalypse, they will want a large piece of what you have. That is where juice -- and knowing how to use it -- truly comes in handy.

More on this topic in a future posting.

Thorium Can Fuel the Next Millenium

For humans to enjoy a clean and abundant energy future, they will need to move to energy from nuclear reactions -- which means nuclear fission, for now. Thorium is the main alternative to uranium as a large-scale nuclear fuel. Here are some basic facts about thorium:

Thorium is a naturally-occurring, slightly radioactive metal discovered in 1828 by a Swedish chemist, Jons Jakob Berzelius, who named it after Thor, the Norse god of thunder. The silvery white metal is found in small amounts in most rocks and soils, where it is about three times more abundant than uranium. Typical garden variety soil commonly contains an average of around 6 parts per million (ppm) of thorium.


Applications
Thorium oxide, also called thoria, has one of the highest melting points of all oxides at 3300°C. When this oxide is heated in air, thorium metal turnings ignite and burn brilliantly with a white light. Because of these properties, thorium has found applications in welding electrodes, heat-resistant ceramics, light bulb elements, lantern mantles and arc-light lamps. Glass containing thorium oxide has a high refractive index and dispersion and is used in high quality lenses for cameras and scientific instruments.
Sources and geographical distribution

The most common source of thorium is the rare earth phosphate mineral, monazite, which may contain up to about 12 percent thorium phosphate; however, the average is closer to a 6-7 percent range. Monazite is found in igneous and other rocks but the richest concentrations are in placer deposits, concentrated by wave and current action with other heavy minerals. World monazite resources are estimated to be about 12 million tonnes, two-thirds of which are in heavy mineral sands deposits on the south and east coasts of India. Australia is estimated by the USGS to host approximately 24 percent of the world’s thorium reserves. A large vein deposit of thorium and rare earth metals have been discovered in the Lemhi Pass region of Idaho and Montana.

Going nuclear
Although not fissile itself, thorium has started to reemerge as a tempting prospect to employ as fuel in nuclear power reactors. Thorium 232 will absorb slow neutrons to produce uranium 233, which is fissile (and long-lived). The irradiated fuel can then be unloaded from the reactor, the uranium 233 separated from the thorium, and fed back into another reactor as part of a closed fuel cycle. Alternatively, uranium 233 can be bred from thorium in a blanket, the uranium 233 separated, and then fed into the core.

The use of thorium-based fuel cycles has been studied for about 40 years, but on a much smaller scale than uranium or uranium/plutonium cycles. Basic research and development has been conducted in Germany, India, Japan, Russia, the UK and the USA. China and India have been among primary catalysts in research efforts to use it. Test reactor irradiation of thorium fuel to high burn-ups has also been conducted and several test reactors have either been partially or completely loaded with thorium-based fuel.
Thorium can be used in Generation IV and other advanced nuclear fuel cycle systems.

China has been working on developing the technology for sodium cooled fast reactors which are a type of liquid fluoride thorium reactors (LFTRs). The advanced breeder concept features a molten salt as the coolant, usually a fluoride salt mixture. This is hot, but not under pressure, and does not boil below about 1400°C. Much research has focused on lithium and beryllium additions to the salt mixture. In mid-2009, AECL signed agreements with three Chinese entities to develop and demonstrate the use of thorium fuel in the Candu reactors at Qinshan in China. _UraniumInvesting

The best ongoing source for information on thorium energy is Kirk Sorensen's blog "Energy from Thorium".

Kirk is featured in the introductory video below. You can click on the YouTube icon on the video below to watch the vid at YouTube, and to find links to several related videos -- some of them well over an hour in length.

Another blog dedicated to the molten salt reactor is the Nuclear Green blog.

Here's more on thorium, from a piece in Popsci from last summer:

An abundant metal with vast energy potential could quickly wean the world off oil, if only Western political leaders would muster the will to do it, a UK newspaper says today. The Telegraph makes the case for thorium reactors as the key to a fossil-fuel-free world within five years, and puts the ball firmly in President Barack Obama's court.


Thorium, named for the Norse god of thunder, is much more abundant than uranium and has 200 times that metal's energy potential. Thorium is also a more efficient fuel source -- unlike natural uranium, which must be highly refined before it can be used in nuclear reactors, all thorium is potentially usable as fuel. _Popsci

Another basic overview on thorium

Yet another overview from Wired

Taken from an earlier article published at Al Fin Energy

Small Modular Reactors Set to Thrive in Post-Obama Age

A global race is under way to develop small-reactor designs, says Paul Genoa of the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry body in Washington, DC. He estimates that more than 20 countries have expressed serious interest in buying mini-reactors.

At least eight different approaches are being developed, mainly in America and Asia, by an army of 3,000 nuclear engineers, according to Ron Moleschi of SNC-Lavalin Nuclear, an engineering firm based in Montreal. Regulatory and licensing procedures are lengthy, so little will be built until around 2017, he says. But after that the industry is expected to take off. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) estimates that by 2030 at least 40 (and possibly more than 90) small reactors will be in operation. It reckons that more than half of the countries that will build nuclear plants in coming years will plump for these smaller, simpler designs. _Economist

Economist
Obama's Nuclear Regulatory Commission is dragging its feet on nuclear energy -- particularly on new safer, more economical reactor designs such as small modular reactors (SMRs). But Obama's agenda of energy starvation, and its job-killing, industry-killing effects are living on borrowed time. In the real world, all forms of currently suppressed energy -- including small modular nuclear reactors -- will find a way.

Upcoming conferences on Small Modular Reactors:

19-20 April 2011 Conference in Columbia, SC, on Small Modular Reactors:

The conference is expected to draw about 120 people from about 60 companies and agencies around the world, such as China National Nuclear Corp., the International Atomic Energy Agency and Iraq Energy Institute. Also, industry heavyweights like Westinghouse, AREVA and GE have signed up, along with the U.S. Department of Energy, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the U.S. Army and utilities across the nation.

The conference, scheduled to be held April 19-20 at the Marriott Hotel on Main Street, is sponsored by SCE&G and organized by the Carolinas’ Nuclear Cluster and Nuclear Energy Insider _thestate

SMR Conference 23-24 May 2011 Washington, DC...._ Call for abstracts

Small modular reactors can be built more quickly, safely, and cheaply in a controlled factory environment. They can then be shipped to the site for a quick and inexpensive installation -- pre-loaded with fuel and ready to hook up.

The US Navy has been powering ships safely using small nuclear reactors for many decades. One of the most likely future suppliers of SMRs to the civilian market -- Babcock and Wilcox -- just received a new $2 billion award for Naval Nuclear Reactor Components.

But then, the US military has to actually accomplish something -- unlike the civil portion of the US government which generally does no more than consume scarce resources which would be put to better use elsewhere.

Short Primer on Liquid Fuel Nuclear Reactors

EnergyfromThorium
This is a re-published Al Fin article which was adapted from an earlier article at Al Fin Energy

Turn a Broken Down Backyard Pool Into A Compact Farm

We created GardenPool.org to document our journey of converting an old backyard swimming pool in to a way to feed our family and live more self-sufficiently. When we purchased our first home in Mesa, AZ on October of 2009, it came with a large, empty, and run-down pool. Rather than spending thousands of dollars in fixing the pool or having it filled with fill dirt we decided to design an inexpensive & self-sufficient urban greenhouse. Initially, we had anticipated self-sufficiency by 2012 but we achieved our goal by mid-2010. Our family gets about 8 fresh eggs a day, unlimited tilapia fish, organic fruit, veggies, and herbs 365 days a year. _GardenPool

The GP combines:

• solar power – harnessing and storing the sun’s energy
• water conservation – using less water and recycling waste water
• poultry farming – raising chickens
• aquaculture – raising tilapia fish
• hydroponic gardening – growing fruits, veggies, & herbs without soil
• organic horticulture – using natural methods to control garden pests
• aquaponics – the symbiotic cultivation of produce and fish in a recirculating hydroponic environment.
• biofiltration – natural water filtration method using biochemistry and duckweed.

_GP.org

If you have a backyard pool you would like to convert into a permanent food source, watch the video and visit the website.

Here is a bonus concept to think about: Scientists at MIT are perfecting new cheap catalysts for converting any kind of water into hydrogen or oxygen -- using electricity from a photovoltaic array. With hydrogen and oxygen, you can power a home fuel cell which can provide your home power, heat, and hot water -- even pure drinking water from brackish or polluted water..

Combine the two ideas -- the permanent micro-farm, with the make-your-own hydrogen and oxygen for a home fuel cell -- et, voila! You are halfway toward self-sufficiency. You may want to locate in an arid part of the world where the sun shines regularly, at not too high a latitude, so as to assure plenty of sunlight year round.

The technologies are coming which will make quasi self-sufficiency much cheaper and easier for almost anyone. Keep your eyes open.

High Alcohol Tolerance in Yeast Yields Rocket Powered Homebrew

Every beer homebrewer likes to tweak his brew from time to time, to maximise certain flavours or effects. Now scientists from the US and South Korea have found 4 genes in yeast that can be tweaked to create a highly alcohol-tolerant yeast. This means that instead of brewing a homebrew with 6% or 8% ethanol, you will soon be able to brew a beer at home with 30% or more ethanol. With yeast that powerful, I may have to get better at making wine and cider!

Researchers from S. Korea and the US have developed a strain of yeast with increased alcohol tolerance that could lead to more efficient and economical production of alcohol-based biofuels.

Yeast produces alcohol through microbial fermentation; however, at a certain concentration, the biofuels that are being created become toxic to the yeast used in making them, said Yong-Su Jin, an assistant professor of microbial genomics in the U of I Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition and a faculty member in the U of I’s Institute for Genomic Biology. “Our goal was to find a gene or genes that reduce this toxic effect.”

The team worked with Saccharomyces cerevisiae to identify four genes (MSN2, DOG1, HAL1, and INO1) that improve tolerance to ethanol and iso-butanol when they are overexpressed.

...Overexpression of any of the four genes remarkably increased ethanol tolerance, but the strain in which INO1 was overexpressed elicited the highest ethanol yield and productivity, with increases of more than 70% for ethanol volume and more than 340% for ethanol tolerance when compared to the control strain.

According to Jin, the functions of the identified genes are very diverse and unrelated, which suggests that tolerance to high concentrations of iso-butanol and ethanol might involve the complex interactions of many genetic elements in yeast.

For example, some genes increase cellular viability at the expense of fermentation. Others are more balanced between these two functions. Identification of these genes should enable us to produce transportation fuels from biomass more economically and efficiently. It’s a first step in understanding the cellular reaction that currently limits the production process.

—Yong-Su Jin

Further study of these genes should increase alcohol tolerance even further, and that will translate into cost savings and greater efficiency during biofuel production, he added. _GCC

Sure, they talk about alcohol as biofuel, but we really know what this is about, right (wink, wink)? Take a girl out for a drink, pour her a glass of beer, and before you know it she's become quite agreeable. But eventually the girls will catch on to what we've done, then we'll have to come up with another approach.

100 MW Factory Made Small Modular Reactor from ARC: Perfect for All Your Survival Needs

Advanced Reactor Concepts (ARC) is a firm based in Reston, Virginia. ARC intends to factory-build a 100 MW sodium cooled fast reactor which has already been proven at the Argonne National Lab West in Idaho.

Built to provide 20 years of power per fueling, the ARC 100 is perfect for your underground survival compound, to give you time to get back on your feet after an EMP or similar catastrophic event. Sometimes it is best to lay low for a decade or two, until things cool down.More from Idaho Samizdat Nuke Notes (from an entry in the 7th Carnival of Nuclear Energy):

Getting power out of the reactor

The inlet temperature, according to a specification sheet, is 355 degrees C. The outlet temperature is 510 degrees C. The outlet temperature is what is made available to the balance of plant. The reactor immersed in ambient pressure liquid sodium. The intermediate loop is also liquid sodium.

Transfer of heat to a turbine is being developed to use to Brayton Cycle which uses liquid CO2 yielding an expected 40% efficiency rate for heat transfer. However, Ali said the company is also working with turbine manufacturers to develop steam applications.

Answer on nonproliferation issues

In an answer to critics of nuclear energy who worry about bomb makers, Ali points out the fuel for the ARC-100 is sealed in the reactor, used for 20 years, and then returned to the factor, or a regional fuel center, for reprocessing. The customer doesn’t touch the fuel, stores any on-site, or manages the used materials.

“The customer never has access to the fuel.” Ali said.

According to the first phase design information provided by the company, the “fuel cartridge” is inserted in an underground portion of the reactor. There are no safety-related systems in the balance of plant. The reactor vessel installed underground and is 15 meters high with a diameter of about 7 meters. See conceptual image left.

The fuel itself is enriched to an average of 14% depending on customer requirements. The specifications for the fuel are found in a database developed for the EBR-II reactor which means extensive first-of-a-kind fuel testing required for some of the other fast reactor SMRs won’t be needed for the ARC-100.

“It is a proven metal-alloy fuel,” Ali said.

On the reprocessing side of the fuel cycle, creating new fuel for the ARC-100 does not involve separating pure plutonium that could be used in nuclear weapons. Instead, it keeps the plutonium mixed with other long-lived radioisotopes so that it cannot be used in making bombs.

Next steps

Ali said the company is now holding “pre-application discussions” with the NRC ahead of formally submitting the reactor for design certification. Ali did not indicate a date when the firm would formally submit a package to the NRC. _ISNN

White paper on ARC-100 at Google Docs

A pre-loaded nuclear fuel cartridge that provides reliable power for 20 years between cartridge changes goes a long way toward providing optimal safety and confidence in a power source.

This article from Idaho Samizdat was featured in the 7th Carnival of Nuclear Energy. Another article featured in the same carnival which is a very useful expansion of the above Idaho Samizdat article can be found at Capacity Factor. The Capacity Factor article also looks at competing designs for liquid metal fast reactors.

Previously published at Al Fin Energy

Light of Future Night

This LED light bulb is packed full of rechargeable batteries, so that if the power goes down, you will still have 2 hours of light. Or just unscrew the bulb and use it as a flashlight. Source_Engadget

Light Up the Night With Your Heavy Breathing!

These unique algae-powered glow-lamps are charged by sunlight in the day, then fueled by your own CO2 at night. So do something that will cause you to breathe fast and heavy. Your algae will thank you for it.

Inspired by recent research into harnessing energy directly from plants, Netherlands-based designer Mike Thompson has come up with a concept for an algae powered lamp that runs on only sunlight, water and your breath.

Called the Latro (latin for thief), Thompson's concept design consists of a conical jar with a spout and a cross between a handle and a built-in straw at the top. Water is added through the spout, CO2 is added by breathing through the handle, sunlight enters from all sides and everything is in place to harvest energy from the algae. _Gizmag

Humans have used microbes to produce food and drink for several thousand years. Microbial fuels are destined to replace petroleum within 50 years. Why not also use microbes to produce electricity, and light? It is a microbial world.

Another Century of Crude Oil?

The following is excerpted from the October 2009 Scientific American article by Leonardo Maugeri, "Another Century of Oil?"

On fourteen dry, flat square miles of California’s Central Valley, more than 8,000 horsehead pumps—as old-fashioned oilmen call them—slowly rise and fall as they suck oil from underground. Glittering pipelines crossing the whole area suggest that the place is not merely a relic of the past. But even to an expert’s eyes, Kern River Oil Field betrays no hint of the technological miracles that have enabled it to survive decades of dire predictions.

When Kern River Oil Field was discovered in 1899, analysts thought that only 10 percent of its unusually viscous crude could be recovered. In 1942, after more than four decades of modest production, the field was estimated to still hold 54 million barrels of recoverable oil, a fraction of the 278 million barrels already recovered. “In the next 44 years, it produced not 54 [million barrels] but 736 million barrels, and it had another 970 million barrels remaining,” energy guru Morris Adelman noted in 1995. But even this estimate proved wrong. In November 2007 U.S. oil giant Chevron, by then the field’s operator, announced that cumulative production had reached two billion barrels. Today Kern River still puts out nearly 80,000 barrels per day, and the state of California estimates its remaining reserves to be about 627 million barrels.

Chevron began to markedly increase production in the 1960s by injecting steam into the ground, a novel technology at the time. Later, a new breed of exploration and drilling tools—along with steady steam injection—turned the field into a kind of oil cornucopia.

Kern River is not an isolated case. According to common wisdom, a field’s production should follow a bell-shaped trajectory known as the Hubbert curve (after the late Shell Oil geologist M. King Hubbert) and peak when half of the known oil has been extracted. Instead most of the world’s oil fields have revived over time. In a way, technology is the real cornucopia.

Many analysts now prophesy that global oil production will peak in the next few years and then decline, following the Hubbert curve. But I believe that those projections will prove wrong, just as similar “peak oil” predictions [see “The End of Cheap Oil,” by Colin J. Campbell and Jean H. Laherrère; Scientific American, March 1998] have been mistaken in the past. New exploration methods have revealed more of the earth’s secrets. And leaps in extraction technology have led to tapping oil in once inaccessible areas and in places where drilling used to be uneconomic. Advanced exploration and extraction methods can keep oil production growing for decades to come and could allow oil supplies to last at least another century.

Although oil and other fossil fuels pose risks for the climate and the environment, for now alternative energy sources cannot compete with their versatility, cost, and ease of transport and storage. As research into alternatives goes on, we will need to be sure that we use the oil we have responsibly.

All That You Can’t Leave Behind
At a time when the world increasingly fears an approaching peak and subsequent decline in oil production, it may be surprising to learn that most of the planet’s known resources are left unexploited in the ground and that even more still wait to be discovered.

On the face of it, oil should last only a few more decades. In 2008, just before the economic meltdown slashed consumption, the world burned about 30 billion barrels of oil a year. Assuming that in the near future consumption resumed at 2008 levels and then stayed constant, our planet’s proven reserves of oil—currently estimated at between 1.1 trillion and 1.3 trillion barrels—would have about 40 years to go.

But proven reserves are only estimates and not fixed numbers. They are defined as the amount of known oil that can be recovered economically with current technology, so the definition changes as technology develops and as the price of crude varies. In particular, if supply tightens or demand increases, resale prices go up, and oil that was once too expensive to extract becomes part of the proven reserves. That is why most oil fields have produced much more than the initial estimates of their reserves assumed and even more than the initial estimates of their total content. Today only 35 percent of the oil in the average oil field is recovered, meaning that about two thirds of the oil in known fields remains underground. That resource is rarely mentioned in the debate on the future of oil.

Even a mature oil country such as the U.S., whose oil production has been declining since the 1970s (if not as fast as the Hubbert curve predicted), still holds huge volumes of unexploited oil under its surface. Although the country’s proven oil reserves are now only 29 billion barrels, the National Petroleum Council (NPC) estimates that 1,124 billion barrels are still left underground, of which 374 billion barrels would be recoverable with current technology.

On a global scale, the U.S. Geological Survey estimates the earth’s remaining conventional oil (petroleum) deposits to be around seven trillion to eight trillion barrels. But with today’s technology, know-how and prices, only part of that oil can be recovered economically and is thus classified as a proven reserve.

And there is more.

Only one third of the sedimentary basins of our planet—the geologic formations that may contain oil—has been thoroughly explored with modern technologies. Moreover, the USGS data do not include unconventional oils, such as ultraheavy oils, tar sands, oil shales and bituminous schist, which together are at least as abundant as conventional oil.

Thus, a country or a company may increase its reserves of black gold even without tapping new areas and frontiers, if it is capable of recovering more oil from known fields. Still, doing so is not always easy.

A Rocky Start
Contrary to common belief, oil is not held in great underground lakes or caves. If you could “see” an oil reservoir, you would notice only a rocky structure seeming to have no room for oil. But beyond the reach of the human eye, a world of often invisible pores and microfractures entraps minuscule droplets of oil, together with water and natural gas.

Nature created these formations over millions of years. It started when huge deposits of vegetation and dead microorganisms piled up at the bottom of ancient seas, decomposed and became buried under successive layers of rock. High temperatures and pressures then slowly transformed the organic sediments into today’s oil and gas. These fossil fuels soak the porous underground rock almost like water soaks pumice.

When such a reservoir is drilled, it behaves a bit like an uncorked bottle of champagne. The oil is freed from its ancient rocky prison, and the reservoir’s internal pressure pushes it to the surface (along with stones, mud and other debris). The process goes on until the pressure peters out, usually after several years. This initial, or primary, stage of recovery can usually yield between 10 and 15 percent of the oil in place. From then on, recovery must be assisted.

About one third of the oil left in a reservoir after the initial “champagne” release is called immobile oil—drops trapped by strong capillary forces within isolated pores in the rock. No technique exists yet to extract this part of the oil. The remaining two thirds, though mobile, will not necessarily flow into the wells on its own. In fact, usually about half of the mobile oil stays stuck inside the reservoir because of geologic barriers or low permeability, which happens when the pores are too narrow. The situation is even worse when the oil is not a light liquid but a heavy, viscous, molasseslike substance.

To help some of the remaining oil seep through the pores in the rock and come out of the wells, operators usually inject natural gas and water into the reservoir, in what is called secondary recovery. Injecting gas restores the lost pressure and forces oil that is sufficiently fluid to seep through the rock’s pores. Meanwhile, because oil is lighter than water, injection of water raises the oil toward the well, just like pouring water in a glass filled with olive oil would send the oil upward.

In the past decade or so, the distinction between primary and secondary recovery has blurred as companies have begun to apply advanced technology from the outset. One of the most important developments so far has been the horizontal well, an L-shaped structure able to deliver dramatically more oil than the traditional vertical drilling that has been used since the inception of the oil industry. The L shape enables horizontal wells to change direction and penetrate sections of a reservoir that would otherwise be unreachable. The method, first adopted commercially in the 1980s, is particularly suitable in reservoirs where oil and natural gas occupy thin, horizontal layers.

Exploration tools have also improved over the years. Advanced 3-D imaging of the underground, for instance, which is based on how seismic waves bounce off the boundaries between layers of different rock composition, now offers more detailed understanding of the structure of existing fields, which helps in choosing where to drill to optimize recovery.

Imaging technologies now enable geologists to “see” what lies underneath layers of salt that sit unevenly distributed below the seabed and are sometimes thicker than 5,000 meters. Similar to frozen waters, salt formations used to represent a formidable obstacle because they blurred the seismic waves used to reconstruct an accurate image of the underground.

Such imaging breakthroughs, combined with more advanced offshore technologies, have made new parts of the oceans accessible to oil developers. At the time when the North Sea oil fields were developed in the 1970s, it seemed as if offshore technology had reached its most daunting milestone, tapping fields that lay below 100 to 200 meters of water and 1,000 meters under the seabed. But in the past few years the industry has succeeded in striking oil at depths below 3,000 meters of water and 6,000 meters of rock and salt. There have been at least three major ultradeep offshore discoveries: Thunder Horse and Jack in the Gulf of Mexico and Tupi off the coast of Brazil.

Scraping the Barrel
As wells have gone farther and deeper than ever before, technologies have also evolved to get more oil out of the rock after the first lines of recovery have run their course. Primary and secondary recovery stages together can bring the recovery rate to between 20 and 40 percent. To go beyond that, in what experts call tertiary recovery, it is usually necessary to make the remaining oil less viscous, which can be accomplished using heat, gases, chemicals and even microbes. Steam injection, among the oldest heat-based methods, was decisive in the revival of the Kern River Oil Field back in the early 1960s. The injected steam heats the overlying formation and enables oil to move. To this day, Kern River’s steam-injection project is among the largest of its kind in the world. A variant of steam-assisted recovery has been applied to tar sand deposits in Alberta that are too deep to be surface-mined.

Another heat-based process that has been tested in the field is burning a part of the reservoir’s hydrocarbons by igniting it with a heater while pumping air into a well to feed the combustion. The fire generates heat and carbon dioxide (CO2), both of which make oil less viscous; much of the CO2 also remains underground and helps to push the oil out. At the same time, the fire itself breaks the larger and heavier molecules of oil, once again making it mobile. The airflow can be controlled to limit oil that gets burned and to prevent the release of pollution into the surrounding environment.

A more common method is the high-pressure injection of gases such as CO2 or nitrogen into the reservoir. These gases can restore or maintain a reservoir’s pressure and can also mix with oil, reducing both its viscosity and the forces that can keep the oil trapped. In the U.S., CO2 extracted from volcanoes or from waste gases from power stations has been applied to oil recovery since the 1970s. The process is in use in about 100 ongoing projects, with dedicated pipeline networks totaling more than 2,500 kilometers.

The know-how accumulated in CO2 injection has opened the way for the capture and storage of CO2 from power plants—procedures that could help slash emissions of this greenhouse gas into the atmosphere and instead keep it underground for hundreds of years. The first commercial carbon capture and storage project has been active at the Sleipner field, off the coast of Norway, since 1996, and is storing one million metric tons of CO2 a year. This amount is small, considering that human activity alone is estimated to eject into the atmosphere greenhouse gases equivalent to around 50 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide every year. But the plant’s success serves as a proof of concept.

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Peak oil has never been an intelligent religion, but it is growing less and less bright every day.   If peak oilers knew one tenth as much about what is going to happen with oil supplies and prices as they pretend, they would be stinking rich from crafty investing.  

Between the Peak Oil Religion and the Climate Catastrophe Religion, a huge proportion of the world's nutcases can be grouped.  Add the Fundamentalist Muslim Religion and you have largely covered the world's majour delusions and problem children.  Throw in the Obama Zombies and that just about does it.   While still delusionary, the rest of the religions are not a significant threat to the future of abundance and sustainability.

Gasification: Coal and Biomass to Liquid Fuels

Plasma Gasification - Funny home videos are a click away
Gasification of coal and biomass to liquid fuels is one emphatic answer to the peak oil hysteria that afflicts so many otherwise intelligent humans. This video presents the gasification process in easy to understand terms.

Coal gasification is a cleaner way of using coal, and allows for carbon sequestration -- or preferably diverting of CO2 to algae bioreactors or controlled atmosphere greenhouses.

Biomass gasification allows for a sustained renewable form of solar energy that can provide either liquid fuels, high value chemicals, or clean baseload electricity.