Guest Post by Ira Glickstein
The December 2010 issue of the Atlantic shows an amazing turn-around by some of the Global Warming warmists! Yes, they are still tuned in to the CAGW crowd predicting imminent climate change disaster, but … BUT, some have reversed themselves on their previous ‘ol devil coal! Turns out we need coal to generate Watts of electricity for our electric cars and, they say, we can do it in a way that is environmentally correct.
The cover story, by respected author James Fallows, is titled Why the Future of Clean Energy is Dirty Coal. {Click the link to read it free online.}
Recall that, only last year, a leading alarmist, NASA’s James Hansen, one of the key science advisors on Al Gore’s The Inconvenient Truth movie, wrote:
“..coal is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet. … The dirtiest trick that governments play on their citizens is the pretense that they are working on ‘clean coal’… The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death.”
Fallows writes:
“To environmentalists, ‘clean coal’ is an insulting oxymoron. But for now, the only way to meet the world’s energy needs, and to arrest climate change before it produces irreversible cataclysm, is to use coal—dirty, sooty, toxic coal— …”
Amazingly, while atmospheric CO2 is still the bogeyman of what alarmists say is an imminent Global Warming disaster, coal, which is nearly all carbon and generates CO2 when burned as intended, is part of the solution! Fallows writes:
Before James Watt invented the steam engine in the late 1700s—that is, before human societies had much incentive to burn coal and later oil in large quantities—the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was around 280 parts per million, or ppm … By 1900, as Europe and North America were industrializing, it had reached about 300 ppm.
Now the carbon-dioxide concentration is at or above 390 ppm, which is probably the highest level in many millions of years. “We know that the last time CO2 was sustained at this level, much of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets were not there,” Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State, told me. Because of the 37 billion annual tons of carbon-dioxide emissions, the atmospheric carbon-dioxide level continues to go up by about two ppm a year. For perspective: by the time today’s sixth-graders finish high school, the world carbon-dioxide level will probably have passed 400 ppm, and by the time most of them are starting families, it will have entered the 420s. …
Michael Mann told me. “What we have with rising CO2 levels in general is a dramatically increasing probability of serious and deleterious change in our climate.” He went down the list: more frequent, severe, and sustained heat waves, like those that affected Russia and the United States this summer; more frequent and destructive hurricanes and floods; more frequent droughts, like the “thousand-year drought” that has devastated Australian agriculture; and altered patterns of the El Niño phenomenon, which will change rainfall patterns in the Americas. …
You should recognize Michael Mann as the creator of the deceptive “hockey stick curve” at the center of many of the Climategate emails. (See this and this and this and this.) Note also the standard line that, whatever happens to the weather: hotter, colder, dryer, wetter, stormy, calm, sunny, cloudy, … whatever, it is all due to high CO2 levels (even if they don’t plow your streets after a blizzard :^)
So, what is the solution? Fallows writes:
Isn’t “clean energy” the answer? Of course—because everything is the answer. The people I spoke with and reports I read differed in emphasis, sometimes significantly. Some urged greater stress on efficiency and conservation; some, a faster move toward nuclear power or natural gas; some, an all-out push for solar power and other renewable sources …
Note the mention of nuclear, also a bogeyman of the green crowd until a few years ago. In this regard much of the world is ahead of us. When I bicycled in France a few years ago, you could see nuclear power plant cooling towers in much of the countryside (except near Paris – I guess that is where the professional environmentalists live) and France generates most of its electricity using nuclear energy. It will take the US quite a while to catch up, but it is good to see a mainstream liberal literary magazine starting to lead the way. The above paragraph also mentions natural gas, a fossil fuel, ahead of “solar power and other renewable sources” stuck in at the end. It seems they finally realize that we need energy and, at least for the next decades, it will continue to be coal, burned in a cleaner way, plus nuclear and natural gas.
Fallows continues:
“Emotionally, we would all like to think that wind, solar, and conservation will solve the problem for us,” David Mohler of Duke Energy told me. “Nothing will change, our comfort and convenience will be the same, and we can avoid that nasty coal. Unfortunately, the math doesn’t work that way.”…
Coal will be with us because it is abundant: any projected “peak coal” stage would come many decades after the world reaches “peak oil.” It will be with us because of where it’s located: the top four coal-reserve countries are the United States, Russia, China, and India, which together have about 40 percent of the world’s population and more than 60 percent of its coal. …
“I know this is a theological issue for some people,” Julio Friedmann of Lawrence Livermore said. “Solar and wind power are going to be important, but it is really hard to get them beyond 10 percent of total power supply.” …
What would progress on coal entail? The proposals are variations on two approaches: ways to capture carbon dioxide before it can escape into the air and ways to reduce the carbon dioxide that coal produces when burned. In “post-combustion” systems, the coal is burned normally, but then chemical or physical processes separate carbon dioxide from the plume of hot flue gas that comes out of the smokestack. Once “captured” as a relatively pure stream of carbon dioxide, this part of the exhaust is pressurized into liquid form and then sold or stored. …
“Pre-combustion” systems are fundamentally more efficient. In them, the coal is treated chemically to produce a flammable gas with lower carbon content than untreated coal. This means less carbon dioxide going up the smokestack to be separated and stored.
Either way, pre- or post-, the final step in dealing with carbon is “sequestration”—doing something with the carbon dioxide that has been isolated at such cost and effort, so it doesn’t just escape into the air. … All larger-scale, longer-term proposals for storing carbon involve injecting it deep underground, into porous rock that will trap it indefinitely. In the right geological circumstances, the captured carbon dioxide can even be used for “enhanced oil recovery,” forcing oil out of the porous rock into which it is introduced and up into wells.
According to Fallows, China is in the lead on this clean coal technology, with help from American and other western corporations. While it is good that at least some of the Global Warming alarmists are warming up to coal as a necessary part of the solution, it would be better IMHO, if they were also more realistic about the actual dangers of climate change and the likelihood (again IMHO) that most of the warming of the past century is due to natural cycles not under human control and that we are likely already in a multi-decade period of stable temperatures, and perhaps a bit of cooling.
Yes, I think we need to do something about the unprecedented steady rise in CO2 levels, but we have to do it is a way that will not destroy our economies or force us to drastically reduce our lifestyles. One thing I agree with James Hansen about is that an across-the-board carbon tax, assessed equally against all sequestered fuels (coal, oil, natural gas) and collected at the mine, well, or port, is the best solution, far more suitable to the task than the “cap and trade” political scam, and more likely to work.
Rather than have governments pick winners (and mess up as they did with corn ethanol subsidies that raised food prices and reduced gas mileage without doing much to control CO2 emissions) I prefer to tax carbon progressively a bit more each year and let industry and other users decide for themselves how to adapt to the higher prices. Nothing stimulates action and invention like saving your own money. Nothing wastes money like government taking money from “Mr. A” and giving it to “Mr. B” for the “good of society”.
I’m working on a future posting that will propose use of gassified coal along with enhanced CO2 farming as a clean coal implementation that may make sense in a decade or so. I hope to post it next week.
***************************
Another story in the same issue of the Atlantic is about famed physicist Freeman Dyson and The Danger of Cosmic Genius.{Click the link to read it free online.}
They write:
In the range of his genius, Freeman Dyson is heir to Einstein—a visionary who has reshaped thinking in fields from math to astrophysics to medicine, and who has conceived nuclear-propelled spaceships designed to transport human colonists to distant planets. And yet on the matter of global warming he is, as an outspoken skeptic, dead wrong: wrong on the facts, wrong on the science. How could someone as smart as Dyson be so dumb about the environment?
Does it occur to them that the CAGW warmists and alarmists may be the ones who are wrong?
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Re:Christopher says:
January 1, 2011 at 9:09 am
So many error and so little time. I’ll address just one:
“So, is the sea level rising? Yes, direct observations show that it is rising, and in fact on the upper end of the model predictions from 20 years ago.”
Sea levels have been rising since the end of the last Ice Age. The models of 20 years ago predicted the rate of rise would increase dramatically over the ensuing 20 years. It has not. Instead, the averaged rate of rise since satellite began recording global average sea levels has DECLINED from 3.2mm/year to 3.1mm/year.
The simple fact of the matter is that almost NOTHING the models of 20 years ago predicted has come to pass. In a sane world, the basic underlying assumption of the AGW climate models (positive feedback to CO2 forcing) would have long since been discarded.
W Abbott says:
December 31, 2010 at 6:24 pm
“Shale Gas – harrywr2 – “lets do the math” Or rather, lets look at the math as it was done. Over the last 100 years. Concerning oil reserves. Proven reserves grow and grow and grow. “peak oil” just keeps slipping away.”
How about we agree ‘Peak’ anything is an economic discussion, not a geologic discussion.
I’ll happily agree that geologically, coal, oil and natural gas never run out.
In 1978 US electrical generation from oil reached it’s highest level and was second only to coal. It has since declined. ‘peak oil consumption’ in other then the transportation sector occurred in 1978.
In the late 1960’s oil was cheap, it was going to remain cheap forever, we built oil fired power plants, built huge housing subdivisions without bothering to put natural gas lines in the the street and drove around in cars that got 6 MPG. By the late 1970’s the ‘cheap forever’ oil was gone. I had to pay the junkyard to take my 6 MPG Oldsmobile.
The wellhead price of natural gas is pretty low at the moment.
The city gate prices vary quite a bit though. In October they were between $4.22 in California and $7.89 in New Hampshire.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/natural_gas/data_publications/natural_gas_monthly/current/pdf/table_17.pdf
If I look at monthly generating statistics Natural gas accounted for 39% of all the electricity generated from fossil fuels in August.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table1_1.html
If I look at generating capacity, natural gas already represents 40% of total capacity and 50% of fossil fuel generating capacity.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat1p2.html
EIA estimates are normally ‘economically recoverable’ estimates.
I.E. How much can we can get at a price relatively close to the current price.
We currently import 3 trillion CF of natural gas from our good Canadian friends. What happens if the Chinese offer our good Canadian friends more then we do for their natural gas?
I’m not saying using a bit more natural gas is not a good idea, just that we should maybe stop and think about what percent of our eggs we want to put in that basket.
Claude Harvey:
When I have a little more time (have to run out shortly) I’ll do a bit more research into model predictions on sea level rise and historical trends in sea level on geological time frames. In the meantime, if you can post some links to papers or data sources to speed up that search, I’d greatly appreciate it.
As you point out, direct observations do show continuing sea level rise. So the question is: what model of natural processes explains this continuing rise?
As an aside, you say that postive feedback to CO2 forcing is an assumption of AGW climate models, but from my reading there is direct evidence to believe CO2 is a forcing factor in climate. As well, if you don’t include CO2 forcing in the models, proof-testing the models against known data gets worse, not better. I know this is a whole other topic, and I don’t necessarily want to sidetrack us from the first one, but do you have any pointers to research or models that accurately simulate climate without the CO2 forcing?
I genuinely want to make sure I understand all sides of this issue.
[Christopher, yes CO2 rise does drive temp up, but not as much as the GCMs (global climate models) claim, else the steady CO2 rise of the past decade and a half would have increased average temperatures by more than they have increased. None of the standard GCMs predict what has occured, therefore the models are wrong at least with respect to CO2 sensitivity. In another decade, we may see stabilization and even some global cooling. So how do the models, to some extent, retrodict the past century? They ignore or downplay the effects of multi-decadal ocean and solar cycles, and model clouds incorrectly, and make up for that by overplaying CO2 sensitivity. Given a number of points, you can come up with any number of equations for smooth lines that link them, but that does not make the theory of the equations true. For a start, they need to predict the future, and the GCMs don’t. Ira]
Re: Christopher says:
January 1, 2011 at 10:34 am
For the satellite record of average sea level rise go to:
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
Note the apparent break in the trend beginning in 1996. That break has now reduced the average over the recorded period from 3.2mm/yr. to 3.1mm/yr. That change was quietly posted several months back and without the breathless announcements that would have accompanied the change had the rate of rise broken in the “increasing” direction.
The historic and relentless rise that has gone on ever since the last Ice Age (sometimes in fits and starts) is generally attributed to thermal expansion to the oceans as warmer temperature slowly works its way down into the depths (the oceans are a monstrously large heat sink).
For those interested in truth for its own sake, I also recommend the following site:
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/
There you can see the satellite record of global average temperature at various altitudes updated daily. It should be a real eye-opener. After all the media hype about 2010 having been such a hot year, note the the temperature at 14,000 feet (the typically agreed upon standard altitude for measuring “average”) had returned to and today remains at the 20-year average. Nothing you will see on the satellite charts is remotely consistent with past predictions of the AGW climate models.
“Seek and ye shall find”. If you seek truth, you can find it. If you seek that which you wish to see, you can find that too. The choice is yours to decide.
Dear Ira:
Where did you get the “philosophy” that oil and gas are “fossil fuels”? My guess is the same place you got the AGW mythology. Don’t you know that everything “they” have taught us is wrong? Sometimes 180° wrong?
Where did the methane, ethane, and higher hydrocarbons come from on Titan? Fossils? I think not (although some desperate warm-earthers have proposed that ages ago, biological processes were the culprit. Dinosaurs of Titan?) The Russians have solved this dilemma decades ago, and that is why they know where to drill now—above fault areas where the high heat and temperature achieve what you and others have shown here through the discussion of the chemistry of carbon.—and the Russians have switched from net importers to net exporters of hydrocarbons in the last two decades.
Oil and gas are not primarily of biological origin, of this I am convinced (I am a physical organic chemist, but the logic is there for any non-chemist to analyze—Google “abiogenic oil, and see the reasons that oil is likely produced via inorganic chemistry, and why oil cannot be formed biologically, and decide for yourselves).
Let’s be neutral here, and give up the “fossil fuel” moniker, and use “hydrocarbon fuel” instead. It is more scientific.
[Bubbagyro, abiogenic petroleum (Wikipedia) would be a nice theory, if true. But, concludes this detailed 2006 paper (Resource Geology) “This theory is therefore invalid.” Sorry about that. Ira]
What I find very ironic, being a sceptic and all of global warming and thusly crave that the religious climate hippies produce evidence, is the fact that when it comes to CO2 concentration, levels, everyone agrees even though the supposedly evidence is just the same as the evidence for CAGW which pretty much boils down to that because nobody has been able to find any other explanation then it must be so and so.
So what are the actual evidence that the rise in global average concentration of CO2 is human induced this time around when we even can’t explain the earlier rises when humans presumably wasn’t around?
Essentially I have a problem finding the studies that actually prove, empirically, it is because of the presence of human industry that the ppmv of CO2 is rising.
Or am I supposed to allow the childish logical train of thought that goes something like this: Humans burn coal and oil. CO2 levels are rising. Therefore humans are the cause of CO2 levels rising.
Of course when looking a wee bit closer, “everyone” knows the rise is not 100% of human emissions, humans only cause part of the rise. Looking even closer it could be as low as 5% of the total, apparently. Going further, one is lead to believe that these 5% is some sort of a tipping point, so humans are the cause and are to be blamed anyway.
The science behind the cause of CO2 rise, if there actually is any that can be labeled science, is, apparently it seems, as ludicrous as the pseudo science behind CAGW.
Re: 1DandyTroll says:
January 1, 2011 at 12:18 pm
I think if you take a look at the infamous, 450-thousand-year chart The Goracle used to incorrectly prove that CO2 drove temperature (it’s actually the other way around), you can draw a reasonable conclusion as follows:
The current level of CO2 is 75 to 100 parts per million higher that it was during previous temperature peaks similar to today’s. That additional CO2 concentration is probably man’s industrial contribution.
As to whether that contribution makes much of a difference one way or the other, compare it to the total volume of gasses in the atmosphere. You’ll have a hard time convincing yourself the a 1/4-inch man-made tail is wagging a 100-yard-long dog.
1DandyTroll says:
January 1, 2011 at 12:18 pm
The devil is in the assumptions: the CO2 warm-earthers use a residence time for CO2 of hundreds of years, whereas it has been proven that it resides for approximately 4 years. Almost all of their assumptions, from the former to saturation levels for light absorption of CO2, to sun variance being negligible, to water vapor having a positive forcing, to dozens of other ASSumptions, are just plain wrong. Purposively wrong, in my opinion. Because all of the assumptions are skewed to the warm-earther side of the equation.
Harry,
We seem to want to have an argument; except we keep agreeing about everything. Our energy ‘eggs” will not end up in the same basket as long as we have a free market in energy. Natural Gas isn’t a very good motor fuel, at least it has “issues” – ask the transit people what they deal with using CNG for buses. As for the Chinese outbidding us for Canadian gas – well – issues again – transport of of LNG isn’t cheap.
But it is exciting we have plentiful and affordable gas to generate electricity – just the something that gas does extremely well. It’s the perfect fuel for small distributed stations. Small distributed generating stations are by far the most efficient way to add generating capacity. Peaking capacity.
The article is about clean coal, ie, carbon sequestration & “renewable electrical energy.” I just think these new discoveries concerning shale gas make those aforementioned sources uneconomical in a free market. Maybe I shouldn’t have used the word, “revolution,” but shale gas will redirect our energy future completely away from coal and renewables and bio-fuels. I believe the economics are too compelling for us to do otherwise.
Christopher says:
January 1, 2011 at 9:09 am
In fact, today’s models accurately reproduce temperature over the last 100 years, but only when the effect of CO2 is included.
Christopher, if you think about that statement, instead of simply repeating it as some kind of confirmation of CO2CAGW – which is so far not your fault – you will hopefully see that particular claim as actually quite “telltale” in helping to establish instead that ipcc Climate Science is completely bogus, and is really only a massive Propaganda Operation.
Because the full truth is that the ipcc Climate Science GCM’s can’t reproduce/postdict the GMT reconstructions without using atmospheric CO2 concentrations, but at the same time the Models can’t make any substantial, correct predictions with CO2!
So – as a bogus, propagandistic substitute – the “Climate Scientists” have led you to believe that their Models’ postdiction record is very important in verifying their CO2AGW hypothesis just by emphasizing it to you, a tactic which has obviously worked, when it isn’t!
The real question should be, why aren’t the ipcc Climate Scientists touting their Models’ predictive record? Here’s why: because that record is abysmal! It’s so abysmal that the ipcc Climate Scientists often tell us they are not even making predictions but instead “projections”, which you might recognize as only an intentionally obfuscatory, rhetorical, “word game”, which is exactly what it is!
In fact, as a result of the consistent objective failure of Climate Science’s CO2CAGW predictions over time, we now see that the ipcc Climate Scientists have finally been reduced to merely launching an increased Propaganda effort after something noticeable happens, to try to make people think it hasn’t happened before and is due to CAGW by implication – that is, just because they are saying you should notice it, and you trust them – when it always turns out that the event is nothing new in the history of weather or climate events and is therefore not explained by CO2CAGW just because it happens.
The Climate Scientists even try to change or erase their past predictions/”projections” about things which won’t happen because of CO2CAGW, such as very severe and snowy UK Winters, into events which suddenly confirm CO2CAGW – again, by virtue of some convenient ad hoc mechanism – and by denying they made the past predictions in the first place, when the predictions are still easily found on the record!
And, getting back to the allegedly significant record of the ipcc’s Climate Science Models’ postdictions which “reproduce” the GMT record, the fact is that the Models ~”can’t postdict/explain the past GMT without CO2 concentrations”, because they’ve already dialed in that specific requirement as a necessary feature of their algorithms, then they just adjust the other factors probably involved – including clouds, which they say they don’t even understand – as needed to “reproduce” the official GMT’s! Almost anyone could do that easily, maybe even a Monkey in search of a banana, that is, if the Models didn’t have to also make predictions!
Christopher, there are a great many other “telltale” features of ipcc Climate Science which prove it is not doing real, Scientific Method, science – such as its refusal to publically show/publish its “materials and methods” work, and its claim that peer review by a few selected peers insures the “given truth” of the work reviewed, which is the direct opposite of how real science works.
So all anyone really has to do is to look and then make the easy call, instead of believing or trusting that the ipcc Climate Scientists could not possibly not be doing real science, as per the efficacy of the “Big Lie” tactic, and then also accepting or interminably chasing around all of ipcc Climate Science’s “anything goes” never ending Propaganda tactics.
The fact is that the real threat to the World are the goals of the ipcc Climate Science CO2CAGW Propagnda Operation itself. These “scientists” and their looting and controllist allies mean us no good.
Since Christopher brought up the dangers of rising sea levels, I’d like to warn about another sea-level danger that’s been overlooked or purposely ignored.
If you look closely at any videos, you can see that sea mammals barely clear the current ocean surface when they breathe. Although large whales clear the surface by several feet, many of the smaller animals like dolphins and seals barely get their nose or blowhole a foot above the water, so if sea levels rise more than that, the animals won’t make it to the top and they’ll all drown. Then the polar bears won’t have anything to eat. 🙁
W Abbott,
I’ll just put my ‘rule of thumb’ US prices on the table.
Nuclear = 1 cent/KW fuel + 6 cents/KW in interest payments.
Dirty Coal(no pollution controsl) = 1-4 cents/KW fuel + 2 cents/KW in interest payments.
Clean Coal = 1-3 cents/KW fuel + 4 cents/KW in interest payments.
Natural Gas = 4-8 cents/KW fuel + 1 cent/KW in interest payments.
For peakers, natural gas is the winner which is why we have 400GW worth of natural gas plants. For baseload it’s really location dependent.
I watch China pretty closely, they don’t have many peakers(they are still trying to make ‘base load’) and they’ve got 200GW worth of windmills in their 2020 energy plan that are going to need to be load balanced in addition to managing peak loads.
IMHO Clean Coal(without carbon capture) is worth a look if someone has a good supply of coal that costs less then $2/mmbtu delivered.
China and India both already import LNG, so they are already paying the price of liquification. So I don’t see that the cost of liquification will be a ‘deal breaker’ for them.
Personally I wouldn’t plan long term on well head price of natural gas to staying below $6/mmbtu. So I think long term a natural gas plants fuel cost is 6-10 cents/KW depending on location. Still cost effective for peaker units with a utilization rate less then 30%.
It seems like the only thing they agree on is that energy production must be government controlled.
Harry,
Do you work in generation?
The LNG gas that goes into China & India comes from Qatar? Market pricing will include transportation costs and Canadian gas will have a much lower delivered price to US customers via pipeline. Its really academic, world demand will drive pricing and availability. But there is a lot of stranded gas in the middle east and Russia. Why do you think well head prices for gas are going higher? Of late gas has trended lower as other hydro-carbon fuels rise. I assumed the lower pricing was do to the shale gas supplies coming “on line” What will cause the increase?
“Christopher says:
January 1, 2011 at 10:34 am
In another decade, we may see stabilization and even some global cooling….Ira]”
I do not believe we have to wait another decade. While Hadcrut3 and GISS DO agree that the last decade was the warmest by a few tenths of a degree, a closer look at Hadcrut3 reveals something interesting. (Although the year 2010 was very warm in both data sets, the warmth was more due to the relatively strong El Nino at the start of the year rather than CO2.) But despite the warm 2010, according to Hadcrut3, the average anomaly for the last five years (2006 to 2010) was 0.42. However the average anomaly for the previous five years (2001 to 2005) was 0.46. This basically means it cooled off during the decade.
I realize climate is defined by what happens over 30 years. But something else is going on with the climate. There are huge ocean cycles that form a sine wave every 60 years. And right now, we are at the point where we were in the 1950s where things were getting cooler for a few decades and some thought there would be an ice age in the 1970s.
However it is not just Hadcrut3 that showed a cooling during the decade. See the green bar graphs at: http://www.climate4you.com/GlobalTemperatures.htm#Comparing%20global%20temperature%20estimates
In all five cases, the average anomaly for the last five years was lower than for the last ten years. THIS INCLUDES GISS!
Re: harrywr2 says:
January 1, 2011 at 5:08 pm
“Natural Gas = 4-8 cents/KW fuel + 1 cent/KW in interest payments.”
Better check your numbers. The current generation of Combined Cycle Gas Turbine plants cost $550 per installed kw, produce a heat rate of 5,690 btu/kwh and run well north of 90% capacity factor. At current natural gas prices and interest rates in the U.S. that translates to around 3.5-cents per kwh for fuel and interest on a 100% leveraged project. That makes them, hands down, the economic machines of choice for base load generation and that’s what they’re being used for; not peakers.
[Bubbagyro, abiogenic petroleum (Wikipedia) would be a nice theory, if true. But, concludes this detailed 2006 paper (Resource Geology) “This theory is therefore invalid.” Sorry about that. Ira]
Dinosaur and fossil goo would be a nice comic book like “theory” to hand down to children, if it were true, Ira. But, concludes this detailed thermodynamic proof from The Origin of Hydrocarbon Species (2002):
Sorry about that.
Supporting the abiotic theory is the fact that “oil reappears from time to time in old deposits and long ago exhausted oil wells“, and that “crude oil minus the sulfur is a decent estimate of what the haze is” … on Saturn’s methane-rich abiotic moon, Titan.
[Khwarizmi,
the idea of abiotic origin of petroleum dates from the days when the now discredited phlogiston theory was also commonly accepted.{Deleted by Ira because I was mistaken, see Khwarizmi says: January 2, 2011 at 9:01 pm} We seem to have dueling references. I guess abiotic petrol could be true, but, even if it is, how does that change the thrust of this discussion? How much of it may there be and how accessible? By how many decades would this extend the horizon for sequestered hydrocarbons? Ira]On abiotic hydrocarbons:
As I recall from when I studied the concept… It can address the creation of lighter hydrocarbons, as with methane etc on Titan. But, on Earth it would operate at extreme depths, where very hot. Yes, the Russians made spectacular natural gas finds by following the theory. But, that could be millions of years of accumulations. The theory doesn’t explain much about the longer-chain hydrocarbons, which can be quite useful.
Plus coal is quite definitely a fossil fuel, with fossils found in it, and contains bitumen, a very thick form of petroleum, in various amounts depending on the grade of coal (see bituminous coal). I’ve yet to read why non-fossil abiotic petroleum would be found with a fossil fuel as it is with coal.
Abiotic petroleum sounds like a good theory, but it can’t account for all of the non-solid fossil fuels. It’s also frequently oversold. Even if happening right now as theorized, even if it ultimately results in an “endless” supply, there is still a replenishment rate. We could use it faster than it’s generated, deplete the stores in the ground. It also takes quite a long time to get it from where it’s generated up to where we can get at it.
We still need other energy sources than petroleum from the ground.
Ira – a lot of contemporary theories date from “the days when the now discredited phlogiston theory was also commonly accepted.”
In fact, the biogenic theory of hydrocarbon production (a.k.a., “cabbage and dinosaur”) was introduced by Geroge Agricola in the same century as phlogiston theory, and like that discredited theory, became widely accepted without convergent reasons.
Abiotic theory was first mentioned in the 19th century when phlogiston theory was already dead.
So you have the story backwards. [Khwarizmi, you are correct. I read the source incorrecty on this point. Thanks for pointing that out. Ira]
When confronted with the reality of Titan, those previously seen ridiculing the abiotic theory eventually confess, “I guess abiotic petrol could be true…”. Then the strategy changes to one in which the abiotic reality could only represent an insignificant fraction of hydrocarbons on earth. e.g.,: How much of it may there be and how accessible?
Let me try to answer to that…
quote:
============
Petroleum geology
June 2003
Raining hydrocarbons in the Gulf
We’re dealing with this giant flow-through system where the hydrocarbons are generating now, moving through the overlying strata now, building the reservoirs now and spilling out into the ocean now,” (Larry) Cathles says.
[…]
Cathles and his team estimate that in a study area of about 9,600 square miles off the coast of Louisiana, source rocks a dozen kilometers down have generated as much as 184 billion tons of oil and gas — about 1,000 billion barrels of oil and gas equivalent. “That’s 30 percent more than we humans have consumed over the entire petroleum era,” Cathles says. “And that’s just this one little postage stamp area; if this is going on worldwide, then there’s a lot of hydrocarbons venting out.”
http://www.agiweb.org/geotimes/june03/NN_gulf.html
==============
New Gulf of Mexico discovery could increase U.S. oil reserves 50%
September 2006
http://www.mineweb.net/energy/999467.htm
=======================
Mexico discovers ‘huge’ oil field (Gulf of Mexico)
March 2006
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/4808466.stm
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A landmark study of more than 800 oilfields by Cambridge Energy Research Associates (Cera) has concluded that rates of decline are only 4.5 per cent a year, almost half the rate previously believed, leading the consultancy to conclude that oil output will continue to rise over the next decade.
Peter Jackson, the report’s author, said: “We will be able to grow supply to well over 100million barrels per day by 2017.” Current world oil output is in the region of 85million barrels a day.
The optimistic view of the world’s oil resource was also given support by BP’s chief economist, Peter Davies, who dismissed theories of “Peak Oil” as fallacious. Instead, he gave warning that world oil production would peak as demand weakened, because of political constraints, including taxation and government efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Speaking to the All Party Parliamentary Group on Peak Oil, Mr Davies said that peaks in world production had been wrongly predicted throughout history but he agreed that oil might peak within a generation “as a result of a peaking of demand rather than supply”.
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Cera analysed the output of 811 oilfields, which produce 19 billion barrels a year, out of total world output of 32 billion. These included many of the giants, including Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar, the largest known oilfield, which has been at the centre of the debate between peak oil analysts and their detractors.
In his book Twilight in the Desert, Matthew Simmons of Simmons & Co, the consultancy, said the big Saudi fields reached their peak output in 1981 but Cera yesterday said that Ghawar was not failing. “There is no technical evidence that Ghawar is about to decline,” said Mr Jackson.
January 2008
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Finally, the chemosynthetic autotrophic archaea that convert petroleum into carbohydrates, fueling life in the Gulf of Mexico (absent Corexit), do not lend much in the way of support to the “fossil” theory.
A belated happy new year to all!
I’m not big on carbon sequestration: I think we should start a “1000.org” to counter the 350 guys, contending that 1000 ppm is more realistic and beneficial for the environment.
However, if one is to play the game of sequestration and limiting carbon emissions, I wonder about the possibility of finding a different chemical pathway for carbon? For one, I know that calcium carbonate formation is exothermic. Perhaps it produces far less CO2 from carbon, but the benefit is that it has ZERO emissions. This is a purely natural phenomenon, happening under the ocean at all times. The end product is basically rock: Limestone.
Now I don’t know what the chances are of finding large reserves of elemental carbon to use, but presumably in the presence of coal or other fairly pure sources of carbon the reaction could be catalyzed and heat generated, the only byproduct of which would be rock. Perhaps it could even be formed in helpful end shapes: paving stones, bricks, garden gnomes.
The process would not likely be as intensive as burning, but I imagine it could be used to heat houses, for one. Anyone know a good way to induce the formation of calcium carbonate from raw carbon (or CO2) at a rate fast enough to produce usable quantities of heat?