Gore to throw insults on 60 minutes

As James G and Evan have alluded, estimates of “peak oil” very much depend on how it’s defined. My definition is more in tune with James G’s, which Evan thinks is a different question: the peak in cheap oil is coming, if not already here. I think the DOE study I cited in an earlier post lays out the issue well. If you don’t like that one, read one of the other ones they cited. Is it a unanimous verdict? Not quite. But even the most optimistic (and still credible) projection requires a very broad definition of the term “peak oil”, little attention to cost of production, and considerable faith in future technology (and if “you” believe the last when it’s applied to oil production, why wouldn’t you extapolate to other technologies?). So in that respect, if you ignore the fact that oil is becoming more costly and difficult to find, and more costly, difficult, and would require large capital investments to extract, and more costly, energy-intensive, more toxic, and more of a drain on other resources to refine in necessary quantities, then yes, “peak oil” is no more than a chimera. But to the extent that you don’t ignore all those things, then it’s not.
And third, I think that the wealth the world creates in the next 30 years, if we go all out, will produce the power and tech to deal with almost any problem. Including global warming, if it turns out to be a problem.
In that respect it appears we largely agree. We do seem to have a major disagreement on the best strategy to attain that goal.

Solar panels have reduced in price enormously and are set to continue to do so. Is there a good reason why we can’t have an entire roof made of them? Geothermal energy is free, just needing a heat pump. Between these two simple measures, how much money could we save? There are many other similar ideas that just need funding. Oil is only essential if you believe it to be and this belief has caused the crisis. An orderly transition shouldn’t hurt any more than dependence on costly oil does already. As for the money to fund these alternatives (some of which are just a one-off payment) – we seem to find money incredibly easily whenever we need to fight a war. And ironically most of the wars lately seem to be about protecting the oil supply. So is the oil economy really saving us money or costing us money?

The weight of all those panels might be an issue. It also depends on where you live. Here in Seattle the sun comes in at a shallow angle, we don’t get good sun for solar. That and it being overcast for about 4 months out of the year, at least, also makes us a bad candidate.
Geothermal is free, if you can afford to have it installed. And if you have the property. What if you’re in an apartment? Can geothermal provide heating and AC to an entire apartment complex? I know solar can’t. Even a full roof of solar panels won’t power everything in a modern house, I don’t believe (I could be wrong).
Oil is essential for a lot more than just home heating and power. Everything to do with plastics uses petroleum. The entire transportation industry relies on it. Solar can’t cut it there, and until hydrogen can step up to the plate, we’re stuck with oil. Even then, is adding more water vapor to the atmosphere better than adding CO2?

Thanks for the link, Rico. Unfortunately it didn’t really do a lot to explain what “geothermal” really does. I had a couple different thoughts on it, but have no engineering background to fall back on. Heck I barely graduated High School (through boredom, not lack of intelligence 😉 ).
One of my thoughts was cooling. Since underground areas, caverns, cellars, etc, have extremely constant temps of something like 50 degrees, geothermal would be a great way to cool a home, by running water through long pipes to cool it, then to use the cool water to cool air. Don’t know how practical it is, or how much such a system would cost to install.
But I guess the real issue is heat. I don’t know that there’s enough geological activity in enough places to be able to provide complete geothermal power. And how reliable would such power be? Old Faithful might be faithful but is everywhere that consistent? I just don’t know, and not afraid to say so.
And what happens if magma starts coming up out of your geothermal vent? Or you end up with Old Faithful in your back yard? Who gets to pay to clean that up?
Again, I think it would be a great thing to explore and exploit, but I have the feeling that groups like Greenpeace, club of Rome, and others would still have a problem with it, since their goal is the de-industrializing of the west, and keeping poor nations poor. Their founders have said so, not in so many words, but nearly so.
I’m not so keen on wind power, since turbines require a large industry to produce, and are prone to failure (and potential death to local inhabitants).
And Solar, while fascinating, is a potential albedo-changing element to the landscape, and could potentially cause more problems that it fixes. Imagine the change in albedo from billions of dark panels all over the planet.

JamesG, Jeff & Jeff Alberts,
Huge advances are being made in Solar. It’s just that much of it is off the average person’s radar. This company is working on some pretty cutting edge solar film technology.

The holy grail of renewable energy came a step closer yesterday as thousands of mass-produced wafer-thin solar cells printed on aluminium film rolled off a production line in California, heralding what British scientists called “a revolution” in generating electricity.
The solar panels produced by a Silicon Valley start-up company, Nanosolar, are radically different from the kind that European consumers are increasingly buying to generate power from their own roofs. Printed like a newspaper directly on to aluminium foil, they are flexible, light and, if you believe the company, expected to make it as cheap to produce electricity from sunlight as from coal.

I got this link from Rico a while back, but since he hasn’t noted it, I will. My guess is that weight for a roof full of these would not be a significant factor.

Jeff Alberts (15:51:33): Thanks for the link, Rico. Unfortunately it didn’t really do a lot to explain what “geothermal” really does. I had a couple different thoughts on it, but have no engineering background to fall back on. Heck I barely graduated High School (through boredom, not lack of intelligence).
No need to explain. I have plenty of friends in situations like yours — very smart people, but not a lot of formal education. I also have others who have lots of formal education but not a lot of common sense, or “street smarts”. Where I fall on that scale myself I don’t care to speculate. I am of the opinion that genuine stupidity, while incurable, is rare whereas ignorance, while commonplace, is curable as long as it’s not willful. At any rate, I like what Mac Rebennack (aka Dr. John) had to say about it (in a tune called, “Qualified”): Your edjumakashun ain’t no better than what you understand”. Said in another way, I tried to never allow school to get in the way of my edjumakashun, lol!
With that in mind, try going back to the link I cited and read the MIT study that is linked to at the bottom of the article. That’s the one everyone references. And if that excites you, read the rest of them too. Be prepared for your eyes to get tired. Just so you know though, if that happens before your brain starts to smoke you’re either not paying attention or you’re a better man than me, lol!
But if you don’t want to spend the time, let me summarize: an enhanced geothermal system (EGS) is one where you drill two wells (or more, if needed) deep into the earth’s crust where the rocks are really hot, create a reservoir between the two by artificially fracturing the rocks between them, then injecting water (or some other fluid) into one (the injection well), letting the water heat up as it travels to the second well (the production well) where, by virtue of convection, it comes back the surface to run a turbine before it’s injected back.
And how reliable would such power be? Old Faithful might be faithful but is everywhere that consistent? I just don’t know, and not afraid to say so.
I’m glad you asked! I love talking about this stuff. First, the up side…
The “capacity factor” (which is the percentage of time a plant is able to achieve its rated capacity) of existing utility scale geothermal plants is well over 90%. In that regard, they rival major hydroelectric plants and outperform nuclear. In other words, they run pretty much all the time, which makes them ideal as “base power” plants. Existing geothermal plants are cheaper than dirt, too — or at least cheaper than coal (even ones without any scrubbers to get rid of the most harmful “traditional” pollutants).
As far as future depoyability, the MIT study gives a very thorough estimation of that. The bottom line is: if it becomes a mature technology it can be deployed almost anywhere — in the US or elsewhere in the world. In other words, with a few exceptions, (and again, assuming the technology becomes mature) geothermal plants can be located just about anywhere they are needed (which reduces the need for long transmission lines). They are very scalable, meaning they can be built to accommodate a small community or a large city. They occupy a smaller surface footprint than just about any other power source (the size of the plant itself is about the size of a coal or gas-fired plant, but without the mining and transportation concerns associated with either), and they emit essentially nothing except heat (which can already be recaptured more readily than CO2). And since the “fuel” is supplied by the earth itself (and the water is re-injected), it’s free. And if you know where to drill, they’re cheap to build, too.
Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? And if it is true, why aren’t they everywhere already? That brings up the down side…
As far as I can tell, there is one major techological hurdle standing in the way: artificially stimulating a fracture reservoir in the necessary rock substrata. As far as I know there are no other fundamental technological hurdles. But that one’s a biggie. And as far as I know it’s only been attempted once, at a site called Habanero in Australia. And the results of that site are still pending. A second site is soon to happen in The Geysers, CA. The Australian site is the “real thing” — i.e., they’re drilling deep in a location that is not especially different than much of the rest of the world. The Geysers location, on the other hand, is an attempt to regenerate a more “traditional” geothermal location that originally had naturally occuring super-heated water but subsequently went dry. If successful, the Australian site could be game-changing — it could open up possibilities for geothermal in a good 2/3 of the global landmass over the next few decades. The outlook on the Geysers site, on the other hand, is more limited but shorter term — it could revolutionize geothermal in places where magma pockets exist closer to the surface. That includes a considerable amount of the US west of the Rockies. Either way though, the “closed circuit design”, where you have an injection well in one place and a production well in another, is the big remaining hurdle. That’s a bit of a simplification, but not that much.
As something of an aside, your question about Yellowstone, or about magma coming up the well hole in any other place, is a non-issue. We’re talking about tapping a miniscule portion of a very, very large resource. However, the possibility that artificially fracturing the rock strata could cause earthquakes of low to marginal intensity is a real concern. Then again, it’s no more of a concern than the potential consequences of sucking out millions of gallons of oil from other locations — or subterranean water, for that matter. Florida, southern Indiana, parts of Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, among others I am unaware of, are littered with examples of that. Think sinkholes.

Seems like making road surfaces out of fossil fuels would be a good wau of locking carbon away, no? My pessimism comes from experience, lol, of human nature.
Plastics are infinitely recyclable (really? Infinitely? There’s no loss in the process at all?), as long as they are infinitely recycled. That would mean forcing each and every person on the planet to recycle only the right plastics. And it would also mean that the recycling process doesn’t cause more pollution and cost than landfilling (which, incidentally, all the world’s garbage could fit in a relatively small area for centuries to come).
The problem with reducing the weight of passenger cars is that cargo carriers still have to be heavy. And it would pretty much do away with many freedoms, such as owning a pickup truck and an RV.
As for total urban area being so small, well, CO2 in the atmosphere is even smaller, so we shouldn’t worry about it, right? We already know of climate issues created by land use changes. Making cities even hotter with solar panels isn’t the way to go.
Not familiar with Aluminum air batteries. Better than Lithium ion? If so, why are all the manufacturers still using them?

JamesG, can you offer further reading on the aluminum/air battery? That’s one I haven’t heard mentioned before. But from the description on Wikipedia it sounds interesting. By the way, have you heard of the company, EEStor? Supposedly they’re in the process of building a commercial scale factory to produce a proprietary form of rechargeable ultracapacitor battery that has some amazing properties. It’s hard to say how much to believe about these little start-ups until they actually have product rolling off the production line, but fromrecent reports it sounds like they’re actually getting pretty close to that point. After several delays the news is now getting consistently positive.
Also FWIW, that solar thin film PV company Nanosolar that Stan mentioned just announced a big deal with some French company (I don’t remember the name) to provide large amounts of panels. It sounds like their production lines are now booked solid through 2010. On a more traditional (silicon-based) solar PV vein, this new start-up sounds very interesting. But again, until they start pushing product it’s hard to tell.
Solar thermal (aka as concentrated solar power, or CSP) is also taking off like crazy out here in the southwest. According to another article I read, over 100 applications for new utility scale CSP power plants were filed in various municipalities in 2007 alone. Considering their very favorable grid load following characteristics I’d say we’ll probably see CSP grid generation capacity double, maybe even triple every year for the next several years.
There are so many different alternative energy alternatives getting ever closer to the magic “cheaper than coal” benchmark that it’s getting hard to believe it won’t be reached in a few short years — provided governmental policy starts doing more to help than hinder. No matter who ends up president next year, I’d say that’s likely to happen. And that’s why I truly believe the debate over the significance of climate change as a determining factor in energy policy is a bit overblown. With the appropriate combination of cost-effective (i.e., cheap as coal) wind, solar, geothermal, batteries, and whatever else comes along, concerns about CO2 mitigation becomes largely irrelevant, because it will happen anyway — well, assuming the declining costs of renewable energy sources will keep pace with the decline they are likely to instigate in the costs of fossil fuels. It’s an interesting conundrum, eh?