Tag Archives: energy

October 2018 in Review

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Most frightening stories:

  • The Trump administration has slashed funding to help the U.S. prepare for the next pandemic.
  • I read more gloomy expert opinions on the stability and resilience of the global financial system.
  • A new depressing IPCC report came out. Basically, implementing the Paris agreement is too little, too late, and we are not even implementing it. There is at least some movement towards a carbon tax in the U.S. – a hopeful development, except that oil companies are in favor of it which makes it suspicious. There is a carbon tax initiative on the ballot in Washington State this November that the oil companies appear to be terrified of, so comparing the two could be instructive, and the industry strategy may be to get a weaker law at the federal level as protection against a patchwork of tough laws at the state and local levels.

Most hopeful stories:

  • There is no evidence that kids in U.S. private schools do any better than kids in U.S. public schools, once you control for family income. (Okay – I admit I put this in the hopeful column because I have kids in public school.)
  • Regenerative agriculture is an idea to sequester carbon by restoring soil and  protecting biodiversity on a global scale.
  • Applying nitrogen fixing bacteria to plants that do not naturally have them may be a viable way to reduce nitrogen fertilizer use and water pollution.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

  • New tech roundup: Artificial spider silk is an alternative to carbon fiber. Certain types of science, like drug and DNA experiments, can be largely automated. A “quantum internet” could mean essentially unbreakable encryption.
  • Modern monetary theory suggests governments might be able to print (okay, “create”) and spend a lot more money without serious repercussions. What I find odd about these discussions is they focus almost entirely on inflation and currency exchange values, while barely acknowledging that money has some relationship actual physical constraints. To me, it has always seemed that one function of the financial system is to start flashing warning lights and make us face the realities of how much we can do before we are all actually starving and freezing in the dark. It could be that we are in the midst of a long, slow slide in our ability to improve our physical quality of life, but instead of that manifesting itself as a long slow slide, it comes as a series of random shocks where one gets a little harder to recover from.
  • I read some interesting ideas on fair and unfair inequality. Conservative politicians encourage people not to make a distinction between alleviating poverty and the idea of making everybody equal. These are not the same thing at all because living just above the poverty line is no picnic and is not the same thing as being average. There is a strong moral case to be made that nobody “deserves” to live in poverty even if they have made some mistakes. And simply “creating jobs” in high-poverty areas sounds like a nice conservative alternative to handouts, except that there isn’t much evidence that it works.

illegal oil trade

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This article from Yale says there is a large illegal trade in oil. My first thought was that if countries or companies are producing oil, don’t they have the right to sell it to whoever they want? It turns out, oil is being stolen and sold by groups or even individuals who are not the actual producers in some cases, and in other cases it is being smuggled or laundered by producers who are under international sanctions.

In some cases, subnational actors openly export oil despite official prohibition by central governments. The Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq maintains it is their region’s constitutional right to export oil independently, in defiance of the central government. With Baghdad withholding the region’s 17 percent of budget share, the regional government sought economic independence through hydrocarbons and found a degree of international sympathy, given its role in combatting ISIS and hosting 1.9 million refugees and internally displaced people. The unrefined product was sent via pipeline through Turkey’s Ceyhan port, loaded by various Greek shipping companies on tankers, then stored in Malta or Israel until buyers were found. Shifting routes of Kurdish oil tankers can be observed on sites like tankertrackers.com…

With 90 percent of the world’s goods, 30 percent of which are total hydrocarbons, traded by sea, much of the illegal fuel trade is conducted on water. Two thirds of global daily oil exports are transported by sea, reports the UN Conference on Trade and Development, and a staggering 64 percent of international waters are areas beyond any national jurisdiction. Non-state actors offshore West Africa, Bangladesh or Indonesia take advantage of loopholes created by international law and the law of the sea. Transfer of illegal fuel is often done ship to ship on neutral waters – with one ship commercially legal, recognized as carrying legitimate imports at the final port of destination. Thus, illegal crude from countries such as Libya or Syria finds its way to EU markets.  Recently Russian ships have been found involved in smuggling oil products to North Korea through ship to ship transfers.

Armed theft and piracy also occurs. Hijackings off the coast of Somalia resumed in 2017, the first since 2012, after the international community reduced enforcement. Beyond jurisdictional issues, many governments are overwhelmed by other maritime security threats and cannot prioritize the illegal trade. In fact, fuel traders have reported that the problem is so pervasive that many companies calculate in advance for losses up to 0.4 percent of any ordered cargo volumes.

 

can we use energy again and again?

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I’ve had a few colleagues mention this story on making jet fuel out of industrial waste.

“This fuel takes waste, carbon-rich gases from industrial factories, and gives them a second life so that new fossil fuels don’t have to be taken out of the ground,” Virgin Atlantic founder Richard Branson told The Guardian. He added that this flight was a big step toward making the new fuel blend part of the mainstream…

Jennifer Holmgren, LanzaTech’s chief executive, said that her company has shown that recycling waste carbon emissions into jet fuel is possible. She added that we should look at waste carbon as an opportunity, because it can be reused again and again.

I did a little more research and what is happening here is that “waste” from the factories contains hydrocarbons that can be distilled into ethanol. This is a good idea, clearly. I just want to point out that there are only two possibilities here: either these people have come up with a perpetual motion machine allowing the same fuel to be “reused again and again”, or else the second law of thermodynamics is still in effect. I would tend to bet on the latter. Snark aside, what it must mean is that the energy source was always there, but technology has improved to the point where it can now be recovered economically. If that’s the case though, I wonder why the factories involved wouldn’t want to make use of the technology to improve their own efficiency while reducing their waste. If that is now an economical thing to do, it seems like that might be more efficient to do onsite rather than capture the waste somehow, concentrate it, transport it, process it, then transport it again. Unless there is some significant economy of scale involved that makes it all work. Anyhow, you can’t really be against energy efficiency or reduced pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, so bravo everyone.

September 2018 in Review

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Most frightening stories:

Most hopeful stories:

  • The Suzuki and Kodaly methods are two ways of teaching music to young children that may actually help them think later in life. Training in jazz improvisation may also be good for young brains in a slightly different way.
  • There are some bright ideas for trying to improve construction productivity, which has languished for decades. Most involve some form of offsite fabrication.
  • In energy news, there’s a big idea to produce half the world’s electricity from sunlight in the Sahara desert. Another idea for collecting solar energy in otherwise (ecologically) wasted space is solar roadways, and there are a few prototypes around the world but this doesn’t seem to be a magic bullet so far. Another big idea is long-term storage of energy to smooth out fluctuations in supply and demand over months or even years.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

The exponential climate action roadmap

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This report from the “Global Climate Action Summit” outlines a plan to actually meet the Paris agreement.

The Paris Agreement’s goal to reduce the risk of dangerous
climate change can be achieved if greenhouse gas emissions
peak by 2020, halve by 2030 and then halve again by 2040
and 2050. This is now technologically feasible and economically
attractive but the world is not on this path.

They identify actions in energy, industry, buildings, transport, food, agricultural, and forestry, as well as carbon capture and storage technology.

Here’s one more paragraph that caught my eye:

If current diffusion rates of renewable energy technology continue into the 2020s, the sudden drop in demand for fossil fuels before 2030 will create “stranded assets” – worthless pipelines, coal mines and oil wells – which could lead to losses on the scale of trillions of dollars by 2035. China and parts of Europe importing fossil fuels stand to benefit most from the bursting carbon bubble, while the US, Canada, Russia and others stand to lose an estimated $4 trillion if climate action falters now and so requiring stronger policies later to avoid catastrophes

long-term energy storage

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Vox talks about long-term energy storage, which could theoretically smooth out energy supply and demand fluctuations over periods of days or months rather than hours as today’s batteries do. Some of the ideas include thermal storage, flow batteries, electrolysis combined with fuel cells, and pumping water underground at high pressure.

half the world’s power from the Sahara

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There’s a big idea to provide half the world’s energy from solar panels in the Sahara desert, using the actual desert sand as a raw material to manufacture the panels. An interesting article in Science says that wind and solar farms on such a large scale could actually change the local weather drastically by altering wind and surface temperatures, ultimately increasing rainfall and allowing more vegetation in the desert.

In this study, we used a climate model with dynamic vegetation to show that large-scale installations of wind and solar farms covering the Sahara lead to a local temperature increase and more than a twofold precipitation increase, especially in the Sahel, through increased surface friction and reduced albedo. The resulting increase in vegetation further enhances precipitation, creating a positive albedo–precipitation–vegetation feedback that contributes ~80% of the precipitation increase for wind farms. This local enhancement is scale dependent and is particular to the Sahara, with small impacts in other deserts.

Could this work on Mars? I guess not, because you don’t have the water vapor in the atmosphere to begin with. Unless you get that alien ice breaker thing from Total Recall (the 1990 version, again, I don’t recognize the 2012 version’s right to exist) – why do I keep coming back to this movie?

August 2018 in Review

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Most frightening stories:

  • In certain provinces with insurgent activity, the Chinese government is reportedly combining surveillance and social media technologies to score people and send those with low scores to re-education camps, from which it is unclear if anyone returns.
  • Noam Chomsky doesn’t love Trump, but points out that climate change and/or nuclear weapons are still existential threats and that more mainstream leaders and media outlets have failed just as miserably to address them as Trump has. In related news, the climate may be headed for a catastrophic tipping point and while attention is mostly elsewhere, a fundamentalist takeover of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is still one of the more serious risks out there.
  • The U.S. government is apparently very worried about a severe cyber attack. Also, a talented 11-year-old can hack a voting machine.

Most hopeful stories:

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

high tech camp stoves

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I’m intrigued by these high-tech camp stoves from Biolite (note there may be other, similar products/companies out there, and I am not selling anything on this site.) They use fans and electronics to burn wood or other types of biomass very efficiently for cooking, supposedly produce minimal smoke, and can charge electronic devices. Some of them can charge their own batteries and/or hook up to solar panels to charge them.

passive house

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This article describes how an old home was retrofit into an extraordinarily energy efficient “passive house“.

I’m guessing the owners are not poverty-stricken. Then again, there must be some payback period and I wonder if it is measured in years or decades. If it pays back reasonably, there should be some kind of financial arrangement that would allow ordinary people to do this.