Since we are watching the plight of the Thompsons in Australia over cow manure, this submission titled “Unsustainable cow manure” on sustainable energy sent to me by Paul Driessen seemed appropriate. I put solar on my own home and a school in my school district. Without “OPM”, they would not have been viable, so he has a point- Anthony
Sustainable, affordable, eco-friendly renewable energy, my eye
Paul Driessen
Seek a sustainable future! Wind, solar and biofuels will ensure an eco-friendly, climate-protecting, planet-saving, sustainable inheritance for our children. Or so we are told by activists and politicians intent on enacting new renewable energy standards, mandates and subsidies during a lame duck session. It may be useful to address some basic issues, before going further down the road to Renewable Utopia.
First, when exactly is something not sustainable? When known deposits (proven reserves) may be depleted in ten years? 50? 100? What if looming depletion results from government policies that forbid access to lands that might contain new deposits – as with US onshore and offshore prospects for oil, gas, coal, uranium, rare earth minerals and other vital resources?
Rising prices, new theories about mineral formation, and improved discovery and extraction technologies and techniques typically expand energy and mineral reserves – postponing depletion by years or decades, as in the case of oil and natural gas. But legislation, regulation, taxation and litigation prevent these processes from working properly, hasten depletion, and make “sustainability” an even more politicized, manipulated and meaningless concept.
Second, should the quest for mandated “sustainable” technologies be based on real, immediate threats – or will imaginary or exaggerated crises suffice? Dangerous manmade global cooling morphed into dangerous manmade global warming, then into “global climate disruption” – driven by computer models and disaster scenarios, doctored temperature data, manipulated peer reviews, and bogus claims about melting glaciers and rising sea levels. Shouldn’t policies that replace reliable, affordable energy with expensive, intermittent, land-intensive, subsidized sources be based on solid, replicable science?
Third, shouldn’t inconvenient sustainability issues be resolved before we proceed any further, by applying the same guidelines to renewable energy as courts, regulators and eco-activists apply to petroleum?
Most oil, gas, coal and uranium operations impact limited acreage for limited times – and affected areas must be restored to natural conditions when production ends. Effects on air and water quality, habitats and protected species are addressed through regulations, lease restrictions and fines. The operations generate vast amounts of affordable, reliable energy from relatively small tracts of land, and substantial revenues.
Wind turbines generate small amounts of expensive, unreliable electricity from gargantuan installations on thousands of acres. Turbines and their associated transmission lines dominate scenic vistas, disrupt habitats and migratory routes, affect water drainage patterns, impede crop dusting and other activities, and kill bats, raptors and other birds, including endangered species that would bring major fines if the corporate killers were oil or mining companies. And yet, wind operators receive exemptions from environmental review, biodiversity and endangered species laws that traditional energy companies must follow – on the ground that such rules would raise costs and delay construction of “eco-friendly” projects.
Kentucky’s Cardinal coal mine alone produces 75% of the Btu energy generated by all the wind turbines and solar panels in the USA, Power Hungry author Robert Bryce calculates. Unspoiled vistas, rural and maritime tranquility, and bald eagles will all be endangered if 20% wind power mandates are enacted.
The Palo Verde Nuclear Power Station near Phoenix generates nearly 900 times more electricity than Nevada’s Nellis Air Force Base photovoltaic panels, on less land, for 1/15 the cost per kWh – and does it 90% of the time, versus 30% of the time for the Nellis array. Generating Palo Verde’s electrical output via Nellis technology would require solar arrays across an area ten times larger than Washington, DC.
Building enough photovoltaic arrays to power Los Angeles would mean blanketing thousands of square miles of desert habitat. Once built, solar and wind systems will be there just this side of forever, since there will be no energy production if we let them decay, after shutting down whatever hydrocarbon operations aren’t needed to fuel backup generators that keep wind and solar facilities operational.
Wind and solar power also mean there is a sudden demand for tons of rare earth elements that weren’t terribly important a decade ago. They exist in very low concentrations, require mining and milling massive amounts of rock and ore to get the needed minerals, and thus impose huge ecological impacts.
If mountaintop removal to extract high quality coal at reduced risk to miners is unacceptable and unsustainable – how is it eco-friendly and sustainable to clear-cut mountain vistas for wind turbines? Blanket thousands of square miles with habitat-suffocating solar panels? Or remove mountains of rock to mine low-grade rare earth mineral deposits for solar panel films, hybrid batteries and turbine magnets?
Since any undiscovered US rare earth deposits are likely locked up in wilderness and other restricted land use areas, virtually no exploration or development will take place here. We will thus be dependent on foreign suppliers, like China, which are using them in their own manufacturing operations – and selling us finished wind turbines, solar panels and hybrid car batteries. The United States will thus be dependent on foreign suppliers for renewable energy, just as we rely on foreign countries for oil and uranium.
To claim any of this is ecologically or economically sustainable strains credulity.
Green jobs will mostly be overseas, subsidized by US tax and energy dollars – other people’s money (OPM). Indeed, Americans have already spent over $20 billion in stimulus money on “green” energy projects. However, 80% of the funding for some of them went to China, India, South Korea and Spain, and three-fourth of the turbines for eleven US wind projects were made overseas. This is intolerable, indefensible and unsustainable. But it gets worse.
Denver’s Nature and Science Museum used $720,000 in stimulus money to install photovoltaic panels and reduce its electricity bills by 20 percent. The panels may last 25 years, whereas it will take 110 years to save enough on those bills to pay for the panels – and by then four more sets of panels will be needed.
As to biofuels, the US Navy recently waxed ecstatic over its success with camellia-based eco-fuel in fighter jets. But the PC biofuel costs $67.50 per gallon, versus $5.00 per gallon for commercial jet fuel.
To meet the 36-billion-gallons-a-year-by-2022 federal ethanol diktat, we would have to grow corn on cropland and wildlife habitat the size of Georgia, to get 15 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol – plus switchgrass on farmlands and habitats the size of South Carolina, to produce 21 billion gallons of “advanced biofuel.” By contrast, we could produce 670 billion gallons of oil from frozen tundra equal to 1/20 of Washington, DC, if the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge weren’t off limits.
OPM-subsidized ethanol also means a few corn growers and ethanol refiners make hefty profits. But chicken and beef producers, manufacturers that need corn syrup, and families of all stripes get pounded by soaring costs, to generate a fuel that gets one-third less mileage per tank than gasoline.
Hydrocarbons fueled the most amazing and sustained progress in human history. Rejecting further progress – in the name of sustainability or climate protection – requires solid evidence that we face catastrophes if we don’t switch to “sustainable” alternatives. Computer-generated disaster scenarios and bald assertions by Al Gore, Harry Reid, John Holdren and President Obama just don’t make the grade.
We need to improve energy efficiency and conserve resources. Science and technology will continue the great strides we have made in that regard. Politically motivated mandates will impose huge costs for few benefits. Sustainability claims will simply redistribute smaller shares of a shrinking economic pie.
“Renewable” energy subsidies may sustain the jobs of lobbyists, activists, politicians, bureaucrats and politically connected companies. But they will kill millions of other people’s jobs.
Let’s be sure to remind our elected officials of this along their campaign trails – and on November 2.
And what exactly prevented Americans from setting up their cities in a compact way too? Even within America, that twofold difference in energy usage between the US and Europe doesn’t apply uniformly – your average person in the big cities in the Northeast uses not much more than an European, while in Texas they probably use a lot more than twice as much. So it sprawl wasn’t always the only alternative. But a giant failure of markets and democracy made sure that the US finds itself in the trap it is right now – when the oil shortages hit, the suburbs and exurbs will be essentially unlivable
GM says:
September 21, 2010 at 5:56 pm
robr said:
September 21, 2010 at 4:56 pm
Sustainable energy: GM and the like.
The ethanol discussion, was mainly addressed to “the like”, the carrying capacity was addressed to you specifically.
Kum Dollison says:
September 21, 2010 at 6:30 pm
Ted Patzek is an oil company activist (worked 7 years for Shell, founded the Southern California Oil Consortium.) Pimental is pushing coal to ethanol. Their numbers were horrible. NO ONE pays any attention to them.
So typical, don’t like the message attack the messenger. So let me see, I will take a tractor, filled with gas, plow a field, then disc the field, then use it to plant the seeds, apply the fertilizer, spray it for weeds, spay it for insects, and then harvest it. I will fill trucks with corn and haul it to be fermented. They will grind it, mash it, rinse it ferment it, filter it, and distill it. It will then be trucked to a refinery to be formulated. Oh and I forgot the energy to produce the Nitrogen, the Potassium, the Phosphorus, the insecticide, the herbicide, and the Lime. Gee that sounds so much more efficient than drilling, pumping to a pipeline and distilling with some catalytic cracking.
The development of the human mind also includes things like learning the laws of nature and realizing that their immutability, and modifying one’s behavior accordingly. As George Mobus (http://questioneverything.typepad.com/about.html) likes to say it we are smart but we aren’t wise. We will only become wise when we realize that the world doesn’t exist for us to forage on it and there are certain limits which we can’t break.
You sound like someone who sees evolution as a progressive process towards some more sophisticated and “advanced” outcome, If that’s the case, you have zero understanding of evolution (at least you aren’t creationist, which is a plus, given how significant the overlap between them and those who deny AGW and the limits to growth is – because religion that’s the root of it all).
Top Per Capita Automobiles by country
# 1 United States: 765 motor vehicles per 100 p
# 2 Luxembourg: 686 motor vehicles per 100 p
# 3 Malaysia: 641 motor vehicles per 100 p
# 4 Australia: 619 motor vehicles per 100 p
# 5 Malta: 607 motor vehicles per 100 p
# 6 Italy: 566 motor vehicles per 100 p
# 7 Canada: 563 motor vehicles per 100 p
# 8 New Zealand: 560 motor vehicles per 100 p
# 9 Austria: 558 motor vehicles per 100 p
# 10 Japan:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/tra_mot_veh-transportation-motor-vehicles
Well, interesting topic and comments. A few observations:
GM – You are one sick puppy, aren’t you?
pedex – get off the “peak oil” or “peak anything” crap. The Williston Basin (Bakken Formation) now shows something like 465 billion barrels of in situ resource (only part of which will be extracted). That’s brand new – and more oil than old M. King ever imagined in the US. There’s now discoveries in another formation below the Bakken that the oil patch thinks might even be bigger.
Chevron and BP, in the last three years or so, announced discoveries beneath the salt in deep-water Gulf of Mexico, both of which were estimated in the 15 to 20 billion barrel range. These are early finds in this terrane, which has previously been beyond our capability to explore because the salt obscures seismic exploration. Massive computing power allows us now to get meaningful data out of the seismic responses. Brazil, by the way, in just the last few years, has reported about 35 billion barrels of new reserves, similarly below the salt, in a portion of the rift sequences off their east coast. We haven’t even begun to explore the rift basins off our east coast, most of Africa’s west coast, and so on.
Recent discoveries of “tight shale gas” in several basins in the US suggest resources of a few quadrillion cubic feet of natural gas. This is just the beginning of such exploration (I believe there’s a huge new play in Poland, for example). There are massive quantities of gas in the Persian Gulf, Australia and elsewhere that are undeveloped because the economics aren’t there. These are far more likely to be produced before we cover the US in wind farms.
We have coal to last for a couple centuries at current production rates. There is uranium up the wazoo still to be discovered and produced (and also to be recovered from depleted reactor rods). And I haven’t even touched on tar sands and oil shales. All of these things – barring some miraculous breakthrough in wind generation technology or in solar electrical generation – will ultimately be exploited. So far, we’ve basically eaten the cherry off the top of the banana split. (Most oil fields yield something less than 50% of the initial in situ resource – some as little as 10%-15%. If push comes to shove, you could mine these fields to recover, more or less, the total resource. Again, economics dictate. Someday, however, that might be feasible.)
GM says:
September 21, 2010 at 5:45 pm
Ultimately, the only reliable source of negative entropy we have (unless a technological miracle occurs very soon) is the sun, but the flow is very limited and diffuse. So things like infinite economic growth are absolutely impossible, and it doesn’t take much knowledge or understanding to figure that out, yet the people (usually economists) who like to talk about the “base of the resource pyramid” don’t possess even that rudimentary understanding of things
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That would be true if the entirety of humanity possessed your imagination.
Ultimately, what you don’t understand, even in a rudimentary way, is that while there are finite elements, there is an infinite way we can use them. More importantly, there is an infinite way we will learn to use them. We’ll run out of energy as soon as we acquiesce thinking to people such as yourself. Until then, we’ll be fine.
GM, I enjoy engaging, half empty people are just as interesting as half full people, but at some point, you should address reality. In the same fashion that we’re not all going to burn to death in some sort of death/heat spiral, we’re not anywhere close to being out of energy availability.
In my finite, limited abilities and knowledge, I’ve shown where we have two separate sources of potential energy that would and could fit quite well in the society that we live in today. I’m going to go out on a limb and state that I believe there are people out there that can see even more potential reliable, efficient energy right now.
We’ve made a hydrogen vehicle. We know how to burn methane. Fission/fusion? Don’t you think that may carry us for a bit? What about when we learn a more efficient way to harness the sun and wind? Or grass growing for that matter? Yeh, no way we can spare room for one more person. We must be done by now, Malthus said so. SOB was wrong then, and he’s still wrong. Time has shown this. You’d do just as well as believing in Nostradamus. Tarot cards, anyone?
The right proportion is determined by some (a half for example) portion of the lowest available estimate for the long-term carrying capacity of the planet. And you want it to be the lowest estimate because there are huge uncertainties in any such calculation, but the one thing you absolutely never want to do is exceed carrying capacity. It is elementary risk management and common sense. If you are interested in what that number is, it is probably lower than 100 million (possibly in the single digit millions).
The pension crisis is the result of improperly set up social system and inflated people’s expectations. Nobody had pension just 100 years ago, people were working until they died. That’s been forgotten. But it doesn’t matter what people’s expectations are, what matters is what the physical reality is. If there will be no economic growth because of peak oil and other resource shortages, then there will be no pensions and no amount of democracy and free markets can change that, because the laws of nature are very undemocractic.
This is probably the 25th time I have to explain on this blog that:
1. If we are the plateau of oil production and it will take another 20-30 years just to develop the technology (and it isn’t clear at all whether it is possible to develop it, people like to believe in magic, because that’s how it is in the movies – everything is possible, but real life ain’t like the movies), then that technology will do nothing to help solve the crisis.
2. Electricity does nothing to address all the other resource shortages we face. On any realistic timeline for development and deployment of breeder and thorium reactors, before this happens at the scale needed, agriculture will have long collapsed due to depletion of aquifers and of phosphorus reserves.
And as I have explained another 25 times here, you need inconveniently huge installations to harvest enough of that energy, installations for which , neither the raw material, nor the capital, and most importantly, the time, are available.
What does “40% economic growth in a day” have to do with sustainability and where did you come up with that??? The only thing that 40% economic growth in a day can do is make us 40% more unsustainable every day. When I see such statements, I begin to seriously doubt the sanity of the people they come from
Negligible??? Even now a single aluminium extraction plant can easily use the power needed to supply a city of 100,000. How is this negligible??
Another dimwit who can’t understand the very simple difference between original oil in place and recoverable reserves or the just as simple concept of rock porosity and its implications for oil production…
@ur momisugly JimF
right from wikipedia
“The Bakken Formation, initially described by geologist J.W. Nordquist in 1953,[2] is a rock unit from the Late Devonian to Early Mississippian age occupying about 200,000 square miles (520,000 km2) of the subsurface of the Williston Basin, covering parts of Montana, North Dakota, and Saskatchewan.”
“Besides being a widespread prolific source rock for oil when thermally mature, there are also significant producible reserves of oil within the Bakken formation itself.[3] Oil was first discovered within the Bakken in 1951, but efforts to produce it have historically met with difficulties. An April 2008 USGS report estimated the amount of technically recoverable oil within the Bakken Formation at 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels (680,000,000 m3), with a mean of 3.65 billion.[4] The state of North Dakota also released a report that month which estimated that there are 2.1 billion barrels (330,000,000 m3) of technically recoverable oil in the Bakken.[5]”
you might wanna quit talking out your butt and actually do some reading, sorry buddy but a few billion barrels of marginal EROI oil aren’t gonna make much difference
Bakken is new huh? no its been known about for DECADES
as far as the Gulf of Mexico goes, look up the production totals for the fields there, you will notice something that sticks out like a sore thumb: low field size, rapid depletion rates, and increasingly difficult drilling issues
And what happens when the temperature starts to drop due to overproduction (as has happened in real life).
Geothermal isn’t infinite, in fact it is very limited – we can only harvest as much energy as the Earth releases into space, and I don’t know the number, but given that this is flow over the whole surface of the planet, the harvestable amount isn’t very big.
Mod tips and notes not loading. Found this at the BBC. Russian’s to build eight floating nuclear power plants for the arctic. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-11381773
Like is said…………………….
Peak oil is a myth but really do we need oil, no
Geothermal power uses high tension cables much less impact than pipeline.
Geothermal cables deliver usable power to point of use
Pipelines only transfer energy, it needs to be stored and processed.
You do not need expensive generating infrastructure with geothermal, no boilers. Mass production of cheap simple steam turbine gensets will bring down costs easily.
New generator designs are lightweight robust and very efficient.
Will somebody go for it.
All the experts in Iceland should be fully utilsed expanding their proven use of the technology. Indeed they should tap up the banks that claim the people owe them to fund a massive expansion and they can share the profits to recoup their losses.
Justa Joe says:
September 21, 2010 at 7:34 pm
“Top Per Capita Automobiles by country……..”
Nice, meaningless statistics, not to mention highly questionable.
“And what exactly prevented Americans from setting up their cities in a compact way too? … your average person in the big cities in the Northeast uses not much more than an European, while in Texas they probably use a lot more than twice as much. So it sprawl wasn’t always the only alternative. But a giant failure of markets and democracy made sure that the US finds itself in the trap it is right now – when the oil shortages hit, the suburbs and exurbs will be essentially unlivable” -GM
cuckoo… cuckoo…
The respective economies of Texas and the Northeastern big cities are vastly different. Well Texas actually has a productive economy for one thing.
http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/us/A0861503.html
Some are built in mountainous areas. Tehachapi [sp] comes to mind.
Poor GM. You’ve got so many things backwards that its almost impossible to have a debate with you. I’m reminded of Einstein’s remark to a student’s math paper. “That’s not right. That’s not even wrong!”.
Your premise is that the world’s resources are finite and that exceeding them will be a disaster. The assumption that this will happen on a time scale relevant to current decision making is farcical. If it is for your great great grandchildren’s sake that you take this position, may I suggest that the economic collapse of the United States due to an inability to service the national debt is far more likely to take their lives, and generations sooner, than will the planet’s resources being depleted.
Your premise continues that the only rational solution is a decreased population. Regulated and enforced by who? This is a case of the cure being far worse than the disease. Experiments by humanity with central planning of anything on such a scale have not only repeatedly failed, the corruption and violence that ensued as those who had power clung to it in the face of their failure, took tens of millions of lives.
As for your solution itself, may I point out that the first world, which you seem to accuse of having committed some crime simply because they became the first world, already has a birth rate below the replacement rate. It is the 3rd world that continues to expand the population of the planet. How do you propose to “control” the impending disaster to humanity the 3rd world is causing?
As a last example of not even being wrong, my I draw attention to your contention that in a collapse of available resources, the concentrated urban communities will be better able to survive as they will need less resources per capita to sustain themselves while the sprawling rural communities will wind up destitute. What utter nonsense. Where do you think that the food the concentrated urban communities consume comes from? Who will be better off, those close to the food sources or those who cannot eat unless food is transported en masse to their location? Who will drink dirty water from a stream, and who will stare at a tap from which water doesn’t flow at all? Which one would you rather be?
I choose to be neither. Free markets have solved problems that our parents couldn’t even conceive of, let alone the solution as well. Were we able to visit our ancestors of just 100 years ago, we would seem to them to be powerful sorcerers who command immense magic. If we could go back 200 years, we would be seen as gods.
So stuffit. You want to propose a solution today, for a problem that won’t present itself for generations, based on the assumption that nothing new in the way of technology and problem solving will ever happen again, and the solution you propose is the true root of evil. The control of the many by the few for the good of all, but which inevitably collapses, and in its death throes takes the lives of many to enforce a system that utterly fails to achieve even a mirage of its stated goals. Central planning of anything humanity has ever attempted on a large scale has ended in disaster. Central planning of population levels globaly would result in something unspeakable.
GM said
Quote
Geothermal isn’t infinite, in fact it is very limited – we can only harvest as much energy as the Earth releases into space, and I don’t know the number, but given that this is flow over the whole surface of the planet, the harvestable amount isn’t very big.
Unquote
You cannot be real, would you care to substantiate that claim. One single volcano chucks out more energy than humanity has used.
Or, if a an oil well runs dry what do you do, quit????????. No you go and drill some more.
As they say practice makes perfect and the sources of Geothermal are manifold indeed.
Believe it or not, Big Nasty Oil has just the technology needed to drill very efficient and effective geothermal wells.
Golden Rule, if you dont believe that you can do something, you wont.
GM and pedex:
To the first of you. I clearly stated “in situ resource”. That you cannot read and understand that clear statement of economics simply shows what an arrogant yet stupid person you are. And, I still maintain that you are a monster in respect to your genocidal desires.
pedex: Do some reading beyond Wikipedia. The Bakken is the biggest oil rush in the country today, and resource estimates (not “reserves” – an economic term) have risen dramatically (probably with cause, but there may also be some stock pumping involved. Nevertheless it’s really big. As to the USGS – in my long experience – they are notoriously conservative in their resource pronouncements, but with good cause). Until you can show something that suggests you have even the slightest familiarity with economic geology – mining or petroleum – you rate beneath my butt as source of information.
GM says: September 21, 2010 at 2:50 pm
Mic says:
September 21, 2010 at 2:25 pm
GM says: September 21, 2010 at 12:11 pm
——————————————————————————–
GM: Who are the “we” you mention and how exactly are you going to do this may I ask
When I say “we”, I mean the whole of humanity. I think the choice is clear to anyone with two functioning neurons in their brain.
—————————————————————————————
GM. The whole of humanity! THE WHOLE OF HUMANITY! How, in the name of god do you think that YOU can induce the whole of humanity to do anything – at all! You can’t even induce anyone here to go along with your shall we say – thoughts. Such hubris.
Mic
Sustainable in the New Green Economy means 10,000 people working like serfs to support 1 feudal lord.
Where did I say that I can induce anyone to do anything? I didn’t neither I have any hope it is possible. and that’s the problem (and the source of any over bitterness you may sense in my writings) – the society we have built has absolutely no mechanism to make sure that in situation, where a tiny minority understands something of such impact for everyone that drastic action by everyone is required in order to preent a catastrophe, that drastic action is taken. Exactly the opposite – we have set up a perfect idiocracy in which it is considered almost a crime to be educated and an even bigger crime to say the truth about anything because someone’s feeling may get hurt. So my MIT+Caltech education and total lack of desire to sugarcoat things don’t work in my favor. Which I am perfectly aware of, but I will keep saying it as it is in the vain hope of changing some minds, as hopeless as it is. That’s the best I can do. That’s why I post here and I don’t post much on blogs that share my views.
Give me numbers. How big an eruption and how much energy?
And assuming you are correct, what does geothermal do to address the problems of topsoil loss, aquifer depletion, exhaustion of various mineral resources, general ecosystem collapse, etc.? Nothing. It will only speed up collapse due to those as it will artificially raise the short-term carrying capacity even more.
Of course, given the time it would take to build all those geothermal plants, collapse due to Peak Oil + Peak Water, Soil, Phosphorus and others will occur long before geothermal (in the unlikely case you are correct) makes any significant contribution to the energy mix.
And when you have drilled all sediment basins of the world, where do you drill next? Everest?
That’s a very likely outcome in the optimistic scenarios for where BAU will take us. Do you want to know what the pessimistic scenarios look like?
Apparently you are unaware that the first oil boom happened in Pennsylvania. I wonder what happened there since then…
Anyway, your “logic” is a complete non-sequitur. Just because Texas mines a lot of fossil fuels is absolutely no reason for why people in Texas should be living in McMansions and driving huge SUVs and pick up trucks for tens of miles from and to work. Absolutely no reason.
And it is a myth because? Your local preacher told you so? Or you read it in some book with fairy tales for 3-year olds? Or because you have looked at the data and they are still producing as much as oil in Texas and Pennsylvania as they were 100 years ago, the US never peaked in 1971, neither did the North Sea, Indonesia and the UK never went from net exporters to net importers, etc. Enlighten us please