The Energy Thread

I'm on a train typing with my clumsy fingers so I'll make this short, but I think there is a strong likelihood that when the global economy "recovers", oil prices will once again shoot through the roof (they're already way above what was thought of as a crisis level by GWBush after Katrina, which prompted him to release much of the US strategic reserve in order to stabilize prices - at the time I think they were in the $70s range, now they're in the $90s).

The only reason they dropped from the levels they were at in 2007-2008 (100-140s) is the Great Recession. Supply didn't increase, demand dropped. As demand starts to increase, we're quickly running against hat supply limit again, driving up oil prices and food prices synonymously, since US presidential hopefuls and the corn industry thought it was a great idea to tie the food and oil markets together through corn ethanol. Whoops!

The bleak (but not bleakest) scenario is a series of price spikes coming in tandem with new recessions, each time the new spike oil price and demand getting a little lower, each recession cutting even deeper.

:/

heh, I have a friend of a friend who allegedly is a doomsday nutjob now after watching a documentary on peak oil while high. I feel like if I had that news while high today it would have sent me over the edge.

that bleak scenario doesn't seem that bad - the US dies a slow death. my mind fast forwarded to the mad max + clockwork orange scenario where droogs be in my house, raping my dog.

I dunno it's pretty easy to see that if uh people can't afford food anymore in the states + easy access to guns = some heavy shit

regarding the wikileak about saudi production,this article rightfully points out that it wasn't news to the peak oil crowd,who have been trying to get anyone to pay attention to the issue for years now.

here's the important part:

Were the Wikileaks revelations a game changer in the world of oil? Hardly. All the basic, but horribly muddled, information in the cables was already public. And, the flat trend of oil production for the last several years has been plain for all to see. Still, governments and societies largely prattle on as if nothing is wrong. Well, perhaps one thing did change. U.S. government officials are now known to have spoken the words "peak oil," albeit in secret cables. At last the feckless corporate media has reason to ask them why. But will they?

it's amazing that we still live in a world where the statement 'there is a finite supply of certain natural resources' is treated like a politicized argument instead of, ya know, an incredibly basic fact

Fracking
Fracking
Fracking
Fracking
Fracking

we are fucking ourselves

Among The Times’s findings:

¶More than 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater was produced by Pennsylvania wells over the past three years, far more than has been previously disclosed. Most of this water — enough to cover Manhattan in three inches — was sent to treatment plants not equipped to remove many of the toxic materials in drilling waste.

¶At least 12 sewage treatment plants in three states accepted gas industry wastewater and discharged waste that was only partly treated into rivers, lakes and streams.

¶Of more than 179 wells producing wastewater with high levels of radiation, at least 116 reported levels of radium or other radioactive materials 100 times as high as the levels set by federal drinking-water standards. At least 15 wells produced wastewater carrying more than 1,000 times the amount of radioactive elements considered acceptable.

Results came from field surveys conducted by state and federal regulators, year-end reports filed by drilling companies and state-ordered tests of some public treatment plants. Most of the tests measured drilling wastewater for radium or for “gross alpha” radiation, which typically comes from radium, uranium and other elements.

Industry officials say they are not concerned.

Was sad to see "Gasland" lose the best documentary award last night as frack drilling is a pretty fucking U & K issue right now.

read these two fucking paragraphs

A confidential industry study from 1990, conducted for the American Petroleum Institute, concluded that “using conservative assumptions,” radium in drilling wastewater dumped off the Louisiana coast posed “potentially significant risks” of cancer for people who eat fish from those waters regularly.

The industry study focused on drilling industry wastewater being dumped into the Gulf of Mexico, where it would be far more diluted than in rivers. It also used estimates of radium levels far below those found in Pennsylvania’s drilling waste, according to the study’s lead author, Anne F. Meinhold, an environmental risk expert now at NASA.

Regulators have theorized that passing drilling waste through the plants is safe because most toxic material will settle during the treatment process into a sludge that can be trucked to a landfill, and whatever toxic material remains in the wastewater will be diluted when mixed into rivers.

last 3 paragraphs of the article are so infuriating...i just want to die

feels like fucking sodom where you can't even find 10 good people in the entire city. what is wrong with everyone. (been drinking, warning)

basically, the energy industry is looking for more ways to ruin western pennsylvania

>:[

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0fAsFQsFAs

basically, the energy industry is looking for more ways to ruin western pennsylvania most of the country

I'm kind of involved (very remotely, in a supporting, non-productiony capacity) in CSG in aus and I've recently had to contact potential local suppliers to us in these remote areas, they're all v v keen for the business, even tho yes there has def been carcinogenic gases found around the place amongst other issues. It's going to be an interesting few months ahead..will post itt with any updates/backlash encountered.

please do thx
also holy shit re that nyt article

Fracking-assisted earthquakes in Arkansas

GUY, Ark. — Everybody around here is getting used to the earthquakes, and that does not sit well with Dirk DeTurck.

Dirk DeTurck pointed to drilling equipment from his home. “I think people are getting comfortable” with earthquakes, he said.

He sent out 600 fliers and made, well, had to be around 100 phone calls, trying to attract people to his meeting on earthquake preparedness. And yet on a recent Tuesday night, he stood in the local school cafeteria and looked out at only a dozen or so people, including two women from the local extension homemakers club who had scheduled their own meeting on the topic a couple of weeks later.

“I think people are getting comfortable,” said Mr. DeTurck, a former Navy mechanic. “I mean, they have in California. They’ve become real comfortable with the shaking.”

Whether they have become comfortable is debatable, but the people of Guy, a town of 563 about an hour north of Little Rock, have had to learn to live with earthquakes.

Since the early fall, there have been thousands, none of them very large — a fraction have been felt, and the only documented damage is a cracked window in the snack bar at Woolly Hollow State Park. But in their sheer numbers, they have been relentless, creating a phenomenon that has come to be called the Guy earthquake swarm.

This was followed by the Guy media swarm, with reporters pouring in through the surrounding orchards and cow pastures to ask residents what the quakes feel like.

Mr. DeTurck and many others described a boom followed by a quick, alarming shift, a sensation one man compared to watching the camera dive off a cliff in an Imax movie. Some say they have felt dozens, others only four or five, and still others say they have only heard them.

They do, however, have similar suspicions about the cause.

ZS, and anyone else interested. I just got a mail advertising a large number of fully funded Phd studendships in "Energy Demand" based at the UCL and Loughborough. Let me know if you'd like me to forward.

Thanks for thinking of me, Ed! :)

I'm stuck in the United States (and more specifically, Maryland) for the next few years because my fiancee goes to grad school here, but I've recently been thinking about switching back into the university-world to grab a Ph.D. I'll keep the program you mentioned in mind.

It's intriguing to me that I keep seeing one or two (though usually one) small, stand-alone wind-power generators in random places, like you do with cellphone towers. In strip-malls, near buildings, that kind of thing. Does anyone know the production abilities of just one little windmill? Is it like having a small patch of solar panels or something? I mean, these are big windmills, but not quite to my eye like those towering ones you see off the highway.

my company's did some small wind projects awhile ago (altho nothing on the single-turbine scale). how much power they generate varies pretty widely depending on - duh - the wind, but max capacity is probably around 50 kW or so for smaller domestic applications.

done

guys: thorium nuke power

tell me about it. wiki makes it sound like a magic bullet, so there's gotta be a catch somewhere, right?

never heard of it

http://news.change.org/stories/thorium-nuclear-energys-clean-little-secret

Let's review some of the key benefits of thorium. It's abundant (because we've never used any of it); it doesn't require the costly and time-intensive refining process important for uranium, and the waste it produces becomes inert in one hundred years as opposed to hundreds of thousands of years. It's nearly impossible for terrorists to manipulate for weapons production. There's more: the annual fuel cost for a one gigawatt thorium reactor is approximately six hundred times lower than that of a uranium reactor, which requires 250 times more of the raw element.

Thorium as a nuclear fuel
Thorium, as well as uranium and plutonium, can be used as fuel in a nuclear reactor. A thorium fuel cycle offers several potential advantages over a uranium fuel cycle including much greater abundance on Earth, superior physical and nuclear properties of the fuel, enhanced proliferation resistance, and reduced nuclear waste production. Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), has worked on developing the use of thorium as a cheap, clean and safe alternative to uranium in reactors. Rubbia states that a tonne of thorium can produce as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal.[14] One of the early pioneers of the technology was U.S. physicist Alvin Weinberg at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, who helped develop a working nuclear plant using liquid fuel in the 1960s.

Some countries are now investing in research to build thorium-based nuclear reactors. In May 2010, researchers from Ben-Gurion University in Israel and Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, received a three-year Energy Independence Partnership Grant to collaborate on the development of a self-sustainable fuel cycle for light water reactors.[15] According to the Israeli nuclear engineer, Eugene Shwageraus, their goal is a self-sustaining reactor, "meaning one that will produce and consume about the same amounts of fuel," which is not possible with uranium. He states, "the better choice is thorium, whose nuclear properties offer considerable flexibility in the reactor core design." Some experts believe that the energy stored in the earth's thorium reserves is greater than what is available from all other fossil and nuclear fuels combined.[15]

[edit]Key benefits
According to Australian science writer Tim Dean, "thorium promises what uranium never delivered: abundant, safe and clean energy - and a way to burn up old radioactive waste."[16] With a thorium nuclear reactor, Dean stresses a number of added benefits: there is no possibility of a meltdown, it generates power inexpensively, it does not produce weapons-grade by-products, and will burn up existing high-level waste as well as nuclear weapon stockpiles.[16] Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, of the British Telegraph daily, suggests that "Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium," and could put "an end to our dependence on fossil fuels within three to five years."[14]

The Thorium Energy Alliance (TEA), an educational advocacy organization, emphasizes that "there is enough thorium in the United States alone to power the country at its current energy level for over 1,000 years." [17] Reducing coal as an energy source, according to science expert Lester R. Brown of The Earth Policy Institute in Washington DC, would significantly reduce medical costs from breathing coal pollutants. Brown estimates that coal-related deaths and diseases are currently costing the U.S. up to $160 billion annually."[18]

what's the catch

that's what i want to know!

sounds like it wasn't pursued back in the day because it ~didn't~ have a weaponizable byproduct, whereas nowadays that's actually a good thing

I am certainly no expert but this popped up a few weeks ago and I did some reading. First off it needs some uranium mixed in with the thorium to get fission to ago and whilst most of the fission products are low half life materials (90%+) you still get some nasty long half life in there. Secondly, on the proliferation angle, although it would be hard for material to be used in a fission or fusion bomb there's still something you can use for a dirty bomb. Thirdly, I can't see anything in the technology that makes it inherently safe from meltdown or release of radioactive material in a reactor containment failure.

I discussed this above in August.

My impression is that thorium cycle nuclear wasn't used originally because its not as amenable to miniaturizing for naval use as the uranium cycle. Since Adm. Rickenbacker's nuclear submarine program was the seed of the civilian nuclear power industry and uranium was abundant, thorium wasn't pursued. A pure thorium reactor does produce U-233 in spent fuel, which can be used in nuclear weapons. Since U-233 can be separated from the thorium by simple chemistry, rather than the capital intensive huge centrifuge arrays required for enriching U-235 content of natural uranium, the thorium fuel cycle became suspect from the proliferation angle.

There are fuel cycle designs used to work around this (see Radkowski Thorium Reactor, but given the cost of a plant using established technology, I don't think we'll see any private investment in experimenting outside of India.

aha, that's where I must have read about it.

aha

http://www.wellhome.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Final-Thorium.png

^Much better than my comments. Too huge for my monitor.

just cutting and pasting bits from this article to underline how surreal it is to get to the bottom of anything right now

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42097170/ns/politics-more_politics/

WASHINGTON — Regulators should press ahead with approving construction licenses for new nuclear power plants despite Japan's nuclear crisis, President Barack Obama's top energy official said Tuesday.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu told a House panel that "the American people should have full confidence that the United States has rigorous safety regulations in place to ensure that our nuclear power is generated safely and responsibly." But he said that the administration "is committed to learning from Japan's experience."

Chu told reporters on Capitol Hill that he thought construction license applications pending at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission could proceed.

Story: Fire flares at Japan nuke unit with spent fuel, reactor

The NRC may decide in the fourth quarter of this year whether to issue such licenses to Southern Co and SCANA Corp to build two reactors each.

Chu said the agency had a lengthy and thorough process to review applications for new reactors.

"I think we're in good hands," he said.

The Obama administration has maintained its support for expanding use of nuclear energy despite renewed fears about its safety after the events in Japan.

Video: Could a nuclear meltdown happen in U.S.?

Obama has given his backing to building more nuclear power plants to help meet energy needs, fight climate change, and reduce dependence on fossil fuels.

His budget requests up to $36 billion for loan guarantees to help build new nuclear reactors. Nuclear energy currently provides about 20 percent of the country's electricity and proponents highlight that nuclear energy production results in virtually zero emissions of climate-warming greenhouse gases.

Chu's comments to reporters illustrated the depth of the administration's commitment to moving forward with nuclear energy expansion.

That commitment contrasts with some other countries, which have backed away from nuclear in the wake of the Japanese crisis.

Germany said it would shut down for at least three months all seven of its nuclear power stations that began operating before 1980 and Switzerland put on hold some approvals for nuclear power plants.

Video: 140,000 urged to stay indoors amid radiation leaks (on this page)

Safety concerns
Some lawmakers have questioned whether the United States should put a pause on nuclear, too. Senator Joe Lieberman, an independent, said Sunday Washington should "put the brakes" on new nuclear power plants until there is a full understanding of what happened in Japan.

Asked about the prospects for such a brake, Chu said only that lessons could be learned from the Japan tragedy.

"We have to take a hard look: Were there any lessons learned from this tragedy that can further improve the safety ... of our existing reactors?" he told a congressional committee. "It's probably premature to say anything except we will learn from this."

freakin energy thread over here

http://www.eia.gov/cfapps/state/state_energy_profiles.cfm?sid=CA

Natural gas-fired power plants typically account for about one-half of State electricity generation. California is one of the largest hydroelectric power producers in the United States, and with adequate rainfall, hydroelectric power typically accounts for close to one-fifth of State electricity generation. California’s two nuclear power plants account for about 17 percent of total generation. Due to strict emission laws, only a few small coal-fired power plants operate in California.

California leads the Nation in electricity generation from nonhydroelectric renewable energy sources. California generates electricity using wind, geothermal, solar, fuel wood, and municipal solid waste/landfill gas resources.

...

Due to high electricity demand, California imports more electricity than any other State. States in the Pacific Northwest deliver power to California markets primarily from hydroelectric sources, while States in the Desert Southwest deliver power primarily from coal-fired sources. A recent California law forbids utilities from entering into long-term contracts with conventional coal-fired power producers

can't figure out how to paste the consumption chart from that link in here unfortunately

Someone had a hissy fit on the earthquake/ tsunami/ nuclear thread about me posting the below comment so i'll post it here where it'll make no sense just to keep toys in prams.

It's all very well saying "Ooh, lets address our use of nuclear power" when there's already 250 million tonnes of waste that they don't know how to get rid of properly as it takes around 100k years to burn out, without counting what'll be used from now until they come up with a replacement.

― not_goodwin, Thursday, 17 March 2011 21:37 (1 minute ago) Bookmark

I'm not saying California isn't doing a pretty good job with respect to carbon emissions / gigawatt hour. Natural gas is way better than coal in this regard. I'm just pointing out that this is the landscape I'm looking at:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/Greenhouse_emissions_by_electricity_source.PNG

and I totally agree that coal is a huge problem, I just don't like nukes and coal being presented as an either/or scenario.

would've expected Sweden/Finland to be doing a little better there with the renewables tbh :(

I haven't confirmed whether that's lifecycle or operating emissions. Wind tends to have rather high upfront carbon emissions due to all the concrete in the footings, and somewhat disappointing system emissions in practice due to the current need to have 1 MW of combined cycle gas generation on standby for every MW of wind capacity. Gas plants are far less efficient when their output is cycling up and down to compensate for wind intermittancy.

The system that holds the most promise at the moment is utility scale concentrating solar thermal with onsite storage (as molten sulfur, for example). I'd like to pave the whole of Nevada with these:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jN490nJu10

They won't be built in California.

interesting - hadn't heard of that particular project before

although obviously various solar-thermal designs/projects have been bouncing around for a few years now

well that one technically is in California.

but obviously Vegas drove the project.

Most of the work in solar thermal has been in Spain, with only a couple little pilot plants in the Mojave. Ivanpah and a sister project at Coyote Springs are the first things I've seen in the U.S. that really takes a bite at efficiencies of scale.

xp: Fallout New Vegas has distorted my geography a bit. And, of course there's a lawsuit by conservationists against Ivanpah.