Human Population and the Earth’s Resources.

Part 5. of an essay on Global Warming with A. Koewius, put here for comments.

While accepting that the earth-system is a complex set of interacting mechanisms that transport heat from the equator and tropics toward the cooler polar regions, the influence of CO2 (and other greenhouse gases) in the atmosphere is expected to cause an accompanying elevation in the Mean Global Temperature (MGT) as its concentration increases. At the outset of this project, one of us (CJR) had looked askance at the geological record of temperature over time and felt unconvinced by the argument that humans were entirely culpable for rising CO2 levels and that in any case, there were profound periodicities in the temperature and CO2 levels over time. In particular, that every 100,000 years, an interglacial maximum occurs, during which the earth warms by 10 or more degrees as a mean, and the level of CO2 and indeed methane increase in accord with this. After perhaps 10,000 - 20,000 years the interglacial period comes abruptly to an end and the next ice-age ensues. This and other cycles is evident from ice-core samples taken over the past 750,000 years, extending to depths of three or more kilometres.

On detailed inspection, an unexpected result emerges and which is counterintuitive to the commonly understood global-warming model in which increases in CO2 act as a forcing factor to a rise in the planetary temperature. Indeed, it is found that there is a lag in converse to this notion: that the earth first begins to warm out of the ice-age and the atmospheric gases then increase in concentration; not the reverse. Global warming “deniers” (as is not too strong a term to use to label them, given the white heat of emotion that has entered the subject, and the huge amounts of money involved both in terms of grants for climate modelling research and far more the costs of various carbon-elimination schemes) often cite this as evidence that the GW model is wrong and that the earth may well be heating-up but by some unspecified mechanism that is unconnected with the levels of Carbon in the atmosphere.

To be sure, there are many uncertainties in detail, and we will only know the truth about climate change when the experiment has been fully conducted in real time, i.e. only those living in the year 2100 will know what the climate is like then. All else is theory, as is true of the present effort as discoursed in this essay. Nonetheless, if the degree of global warming is likely to be as severe (up to 6 degrees Centigrade) as some models predict, with such attendant catastrophic effects on global climate, we are left with a question almost like bookmakers’ odds, as to how much we are prepared to gamble on the race - the survival of the human race and its civilization.

The betting-odds as defined by a scientific “consensus” - if there can ever be such a thing in the methodology of real science - are that we must make drastic cuts in our emissions of carbon into the atmosphere, or face unparalleled perils for humanity. However, it is not a single horse we need to review the pedigree of, in making our bets, since the business of whether we curb our carbon emissions is not simply a matter of choice but it is inevitable that we must burn less carbon, for the underpinning reason that fossil resources such as oil, gas and coal are available in only limited amount; hence their supply will fail our relentless demand for them, in short order - a mere “spike” in terms of the longevity of human civilization.

There is an Arab proverb that goes something like: “My grandfather rode a camel; my father drove a car; I ride a jet-plane; my son will ride a camel.” In an amusingly quirky way this points to the essential consequences of what has been dubbed “peak oil”, but peaks are appearing for many other resources, of energy in the form of gas, coal and uranium, and of many other pivotal elements upon which a population of 6.7 billion has grown. Simply put, there are too many of us and thus we are using-up too much of the earth’s resources too fast. It has been estimated that if each member of this vast population of species lived at a U.S. level of consumption, it would take 5 “earths” to provide for them, and the figure is not so much lower - and far in excess of this single earth that we have in reality - for all other Western countries.

Yet, in the illusion of limitless growth, which is the fundamental tenet of capitalism, each of the vastly populous developing nations such as China, India and others in Asia and South America, aspires to this collective absurdity, which even the present “haves” in the industrialised West cannot maintain for much longer; let alone that the “have nots” draw similarly on the bestowal of the planet, laid down millennia past. If we accept that we must use less fossil fuels, an action that assists both purposes of curbing carbon emissions, in the interests of mitigating climate change, and of putting the brakes on getting through them too fast, we step into the quagmire of how we are to go about this in practical terms. In the midst of the present recession, all attention certainly at governmental level across the world, is beamed onto how we can “restart growth”. Perhaps we can’t. Maybe we are witnesses to the end of capitalism and we need to converge our efforts - with the remaining resources available to us - upon a truly sustainable plan, which the status quo of “growth” and any projections based on it is not.

It is chilling that if a logistic function is fitted to global population statistics - albeit that the rate of growth is in decline; but the population is still growing - similar to that which may be applied to resource depletion e.g. oil, a peak in population occurs in the year 2028 at 7.1 billion (not much more than there are of us now), and then the numbers fall dramatically to 2.5 billion by 2100. This flies in the face of the predicted “over 9 billion by 2050” given by the WHO in an effort to encourage us to breed less. Almost certainly, a peak scenario of this kind, if real, will be a mirror of a peak and decline of the resources that such a huge population is dependent on to exist. Thus, even controlling population, as must be done, is a choice out of our hands. Even feeding so many may prove impossible, let alone that all meet a Western standard of living.

The issue of food production applies to the industrialised developed nations in the West perhaps more than anywhere else, since we have grown to depend on an industrialised system of agriculture which relies entirely on oil for tractor fuel and natural gas to make artificial nitrogenous fertilizers, since the quality of soil has fallen to a level that it would be effectively “dead” without constant external inputs of fertilizers, and useless to grow anything on. Without oil, we have no working farms, and even rock phosphate which is the basis of phosphorus fertilizers peaked over 20 years ago - thus our methods of food production, the most fundamental essential for human survival is living on borrowed time. Clearly, we must break our dependence on fossil resources, of all kinds.

There are many who are persuaded that no fundamental changes in lifestyle, in the West at least, are necessary. In the U.S. the car is king, in part due to the large distances routinely traversed in getting to work and the need to escape from urban dormitories to find amenities like schools, shops etc. Europe is not so much different, and air-travel too is a normal feature of life both for business and pleasure. Those who might also be quite appropriately called “deniers” - to the resource dearth issue - comfort themselves that we will simply switch from and oil-based economy to a hydrogen economy, or a totally electrified system with personal transport preserved in either scenario. This is unlikely in the short term, or ever, since the provision of fossil fuels, most pressingly oil, is under imminent threat, and there is insufficient time remaining to inaugurate and install anything close to 600 million vehicles as currently grace the world’s highways. Hydrogen powered and electric planes are unlikely to ever be a serious contender and all in all, a relocalisation of society appears on the cards, from the increasingly global to one that uses far less transport. If the loss of oil and gas is forced upon us abruptly, the result will be anarchy, since we will suddenly be without mechanisms for food production and distribution and the means to earn money with which to buy what is available.

The issue of time is almost criminally negligent, since even ignoring M. King Hubbert’s “peak oil” warning of 1956, when he worked for the Shell Development Company, the later oil-shocks of the 1970s made clear the vulnerability of the West upon the price and availability of cheap oil. In 1973, the Arab OPEC nations decided to punish the West for its support of Israel during the Yom Kippur (also called the Ramadan) War, and by closing its valves by a mere 5%, the price of oil shot up by 400%. The Iran Iraq conflict in 1979 had a similar effect due to a reduction in the supply of cheap oil onto the world markets. Oil and economies are inextricably linked and it has been speculated that the hike in the price of a barrel of oil to nearly $150 triggered the stock market crash last summer (2008) and augered-in the present recession. The price of oil is now around $70 again per barrel, up from around $25 only a few months ago, and a further crash is on the cards if it rises once more toward its previous high. There were various projects begun in the 1970s to find substitutes for oil, including making oil from algae, which is enjoying a renaissance - but once cheap oil came back onto the markets, the incentive for such alternatives evaporated and many (such as the US Algal Oil project) were discontinued on grounds of cost. If the price of oil rises above $100 a barrel some of these schemes, including the environmentally filthy fabrication of synthetic “oil” from the tar sands, and getting “oil” by cracking primordial kerogen from “oil shale”, will become economically appealing .

None of these schemes will come on-stream quickly enough to compensate for the loss of conventional crude oil within a decade or so however and they will cost a fortune, given the unparalleled swathe of “new” engineering that would be necessitated. In the short order, it is the depletion of resources that is the greatest threat to humanity, with the effect of global warming perhaps as some future legacy to be reaped as a driver of climate change. On account of all the above, we need to move away from carbon based fossil fuels as quickly as possible.

The end sight is easy to envisage, on some ideal horizon of optimism. i.e. We give-up on the idea of the global supermarket and focus on local food production and economies, thus needing less in the way of fuel ab initio. Methods of regenerative agriculture (permaculture) are key in this respect, and it is estimated that 40% of human carbon emissions could be captured by soil if it were farmed using regenerative methods - e.g. deliberately moving around herds of grazing animals and growing cover crops. “Forest gardens”, which involve a symbiosis of species-diversity capture N and P nutrients naturally via a mixture of flora and fauna working in an interacting holistic ecology. Probably we cannot solve all our energy and resource problems nor support 7 billion people, but a planned way-down from our peak of excess is the only way to mitigate anarchy and the loss of the fruits of humanity, rather than the fearsome population crash that is sometimes called a “die-off”. It is this uneasy transition that poses the real challenge.

Saudi Oil Boss Says World Needs Fossil Fuels.

Despite the new green revolution, which points to lofty targets to curb carbon-emissions and a future greatly underpinned by renewable energy sources, a Saudi oil-leader has said that when the situation of what can be provided by renewables is evaluated objectively, they can provide only a minute share of the total energy requirement. He told the Royal Academy of Engineering last week that oil, gas and coal would remain the energy sources of choice, and that there were plenty of them left.

Addallah Jum'ah recently stepped-down as CEO of Saudi Aram-co, which is the state-owned oil company, and his statements will prove a red rag to a bull, unsurprisingly for environmentalists, but also economists and oil analysts - many who have worked for years in the oil industry - who have good reasons to believe we are close to the peak of oil production, and in any case that oil will run short within the near future rather than that we have hundreds of years left, which Mr Jum'ah's estimate of a remaining 15 trillion barrels would seem to indicate.

It is true that the sum-total of renewable energy (geothermal, wind, solar etc.) accounts for only 1% of total energy used throughout the world. However, Jum'ah thinks that while renewable energy production will grow at a greater rate than oil production, it will remain small. He said: "The volume of new energy supplied by renewables will still be only half of the additional energy provided by oil or by gas and only a fourth of the new energy expected to come from coal."

The reality of economic growth - the basis of capitalism - depends on all kinds of resources, not only of energy but of metals and other finite materials. Without them we cannot climb out of the present or future recessions, or sustain a viable global economy, and there is a great danger to be had in overestimating resources. The investment banking industry massively overstated its assets, thus fooling Western economies into the degree of slack left in the system. There appears to be little resource surplus left, leaving one to speculate that we are experiencing the painful death-knell of capitalism.

If the same happens with the oil industry as did the banking sector, we will suddenly find ourselves in deep trouble. Jum'ah's figure of 15 trillion barrels of oil left is apparently derived by including all sources - not just conventional crude, but unconventional oil such as from tar sands, and presumably to arrive at such a huge figure, shale and coal liquefaction. None of the unconventional sources of oil are likely to be cheap, and it is the dearth of cheap oil that will do its damage to the world economies and bring an end to capitalism.

Related Reading.
"Greens told no alternative to fossil fuels," By Domenic O'Connel and Jonathon Leake. http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/markets/the_gulf/article6543964.ece

Fuel from Algae within 10 - 15 Years.

According to Raffaello Garafalo, who is the executive director of the European Algae Biomass Association, it will take around 10 - 15 years to implement the production of fuel from algae on the large scale. Algae figure among some of the earliest living species on Earth, and it is speculated that crude oil (petroleum) may have originated from the decomposition ("cooking") of algae that had become absorbed into porous rock strata over many years. It is thought that although making fuel from algae is currently much more expensive by 10 - 30 times than standard biodiesel, the costs could be brought down to around $500 t0 $550 a tonne, which is about $68 - $75 a barrel, and close to the current price of crude oil.

I have noted previously that the escalation in the price of oil is likely to trigger another recession - a point made by another commentator today. Thus, on grounds of rising oil prices, the literal shortage of oil per se and the volition to cut carbon emissions, making fuel from algae looks to be a good move. There are, it must be admitted, a number of technical challenges that must be overcome before this becomes a practical strategy, but there has been research scale production during the past 5 years or so, and there was a major effort made in the United States, during the aferrmath of the 1973 oil shock, when the price of oil more than quadrupled in the wave of the OPEC nations, who decided to punish the West for its support of Israel over the Yom Kippur (also called the Ramadan) war by restricting the supply of oil by 5%.

Algae can be considered "carbon neutral" since as is the case for other forms of plant-life, they absorb CO2 through photosynthesis while they grow. There are additional energy costs attendant to the farming and processing of algae into fuel, for example by transesterification, as is done for other kinds of plant oil, e.g. rape- seed oil to make biodiesel. Another possible means for converting algae into fuel is through hydrothermal processing, which obviates the need to remove the water from it first, since by heating the raw material under pressure, the water it contains acts as a reactant and breaks the oil into smaller hydrocarbon fragments, which have therefore a higher thermal yield, similar to hydrocarbon fuels from crude oil, e.g. around 42 GJ/tonne over around 36 - 38 GJ/tonne for biodiesel. The energy costs for the latter process may be as low as half that required for the former, and standard procedure.

As I have noted previously, algae can be grown anywhere thus avoiding the competition on arable land between growing crops for food and crops for biodiesel.

Related Reading.
(1) "European body sees algae fuel industry in 10-15 years." http://www.reuters.com/article/GCA-GreenBusiness/idUSTRE5526HY20090603
(2) "$80 barrel could trigger new recession," http://peakoil.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=49343

Arctic Oil - How Much is There?

As projected efforts to grab what is left of the world's bestowal of oil range to further extremes, and into the Arctic - the Antarctic remaining so far sacrosanct - the question arises of how much oil can really be recovered from the Arctic? One might view such schemes to drill in the most inhospitable places on Earth as an act of desperation, since it will not be an easy task to recover oil from them, and the price of oil so recovered will inevitably reflect this difficulty. Almost 6% of the earth's surface (that's 30 million km^2) lies above the Arctic circle, and it is one of the most extreme environments on the planet. It is mostly locked in ice, without existing pipelines or other means for transportation of oil and gas.

That said, since it is rumoured that there may be one quarter of the remaining hydrocarbons on Earth there, it is an irresistible proposition. One possible bestowal of global warming/climate change is that formerly closed shipping-lanes such as the fabled North West passage are now passable, for significant portions of the year and so it might be possible to sail oil tankers up into the Arctic to carry oil to the rest of the world. It is a short-term benefit however, since we are now on the forty-year slide-down the back-end of Hubbert's peak, and now would be the time to implement in earnest alternatives, which as far as is possible are independent of oil, while we still have fuel in hand to do so. Otherwise it will simply be too late to avert the kind of catastrophic out-plays of a world so utterly dependent on oil when it runs out of oil - cheap oil at any rate, which is the only kind that can be recovered at anywhere near the 30 billion barrel budget that humankind relies on each year.

I am coming to the conclusion that we are witnessing the end of capitalism. This particular economic scene depends on perpetual growth and all evidence is that we are close to the peak of production, not just of oil and natural gas, but metals or various kinds, especially those used in the electronics industry. With insufficient resources to underpin it, as is now becoming evident, growth is impossible. Imagine a world without computers in ten years, or cell phones, Sat-nav devices and the whole caboodle of modern living, including 600 million cars on the roads.

Most of the resources above the Arctic circle lie on continental shelves, underwater, since some 40 billion barrels of oil and 1136 trillion cubic feet of natural gas along with 8 billion barrels worth of natural gas liquids have been developed onshore there. Most of this is in the Western Siberian basin and the North Slope of Alaska. Under the conditions prevailing, oil is not a runny liquid but a thick almost tar-like substance with problems of getting it moving, requiring inputs of energy in terms of steam to heat pipes and other components of the extractive system.

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) has undertaken a study in collaboration with geologists from Canada, Denmark, Greenland, Norway and Russia, whose report "Assessment of Undiscovered Oil and Gas in the Arctic", was published last week. Since much of the area in naturally unexplored, the group had to resort to some method of approximation to get a figure for this. They divided the region into 69 separate components with at least 3 km depth of sedimentary rock which is the kind often known as "oil source rock" which is where oil is most likely to be found.

Only resources of at least 50 million barrels of oil or 300 billion cubic feet of gas (which is energetically equivalent to 50 million barrels of oil) were included and so it can be deduced that there is at least 69 x 50 million barrels = 3.5 billion barrels equivalent (and probably quite a bit more than this, which is the lower limit). However, since it is known that fields containing 50 million barrels of oil or its equivalent of gas contain 95% of all known oil and gas resources by volume, it is clear that the amount that can be recovered from Arctic fields is fairly limited, and probably not more than a few months worth of the world's total consumption.

The report also gives its conclusions as being "without reference to costs of exploration and development." Hence while there may be some money to be had from Arctic oil, it does not get us out of the oil-hole.

Related Reading.
"How Much Oil is Under the Arctic?", by Chris Nelder. http://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-oil-is-in-the-arctic-2009-6

Khurais Oil Field Begins Production.

Reckoned at 1.25 million barrels a day, the Khurais oil field will increase Saudi oil production from 11.3 mbd to 12.5 mbd. Situated 160 km south of Riyadh, oil is now being pumped into tanks there in a project that will move more oil than the output of Qatar or Indonesia, at a cost of 37 billion Suadi riyals ($10 billion) . By 2013, another project reckoned to produce 0.9 mbd from an expansion of the Moneefa oil field, will extend Saudi output capacity above an additional 2 mbd.

The Khurais field in fact comprises of three fields, Kurais, Abu Jifan and Mazalij, which yield Arabian light crude, highly sought after since it is readily refined into petrol. The minister for petroleum and mineral resources has made clear that the Kingdom does not depend on this additional supply of oil, and current requirements for oil are not high enough to demand it.

The Kingdom claims it could produce 15 mbd should demand so dictate, and has outlined plans for how this might be done, although there are no immediate intentions to increase output further. I recall King Abdullah saying a while ago that oil "should be left in the ground for future generations", which will leave Saudi in a very powerful position as supplies of oil wane elsewhere throughout the world.

In addition to its oil otuput, the Khurais field will also produce 315 million cubic feet per day of sour gas and 70,000 bpd of natural gas liquids, which will be processed at the Shedgum and Yanbu gas refineries. A reserve of 27 billion barrels of oil is reckoned for Khurais. The global economic recession has slowed demand for oil and this has prompted the OPEC nations to cut oil production, including Saudi. It is expected that Khurais will be producing oil for the next 20 - 25 years.

Altogether, the project necessitates drilling 420 wells and constructing 4 new oil and two new gas processing plants. An expansion of seawater well-injection by 4.5 million barrels a day at the Qurayyah treatment plant is also necessary.


Related Reading.
"Saudi Aramoco Starts Production From Khurais Oil Field in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia," http://www.energy-business-review.com/news/saudi_aramco_starts_production_from_khurais_oil_field_in_riyadh_saudi_arabia_090611

New Light Crude Oil Found Off Brazil.

A new oil well has been discovered under 2,210 metres (6.850 feet) of water off the Brazilian coast. The new find was reported by BG Group Ltd - who are the U.K.'s third largest producer of natural gas - is 250 km from Rio de Janiro and 33 km to the northwest of the Tupi well. BG are based in my own town, Reading, and are in partnership with the Portugal based Petroleo Brasileiro SA and Galp Energia SGPS SA. Light crude has already been recovered from a drilling project that is underway already.

It is thought that Tupi is part of a larger pre-salt area which could contain 50 - 100 billion barrels of oil. It is quoted that this is enough to "supply all US needs for 7 to 13 years", but will the US get all of it and should they indeed? What about the rest of the world? Statements like this seem to me to underline the inevitable conflicts that will ensue over grabbing the world's remaining oil.

Light crude is especially precious since it is more readily refined into petrol (gasoline) than are heavier grades of oil and if this projected large quantity can be recovered it will prove a jewel, indeed. Spark ignition engines (which burn petrol) can be more easily fabricated than diesel engines which require heavier engineering and so production costs of vehicles are reduced.

Inevitably, heavier grades of oil will provide the majority of oil in the future since light crude peaked in around 2005, meaning that either new cracking technology must be implemented on a very large scale to convert heavy grades to lighter petrol fuels or future engines will be mostly of the high compression ratio, diesel, type which burn heavier hydrocarbon fractions. Since around 40% more tank-to-wheels miles are routinely extracted from diesel engines than from their spark-ignition counterpart, the latter would be the more energy efficient course of action.

Inevitably, we need to move toward energy efficiency, and not be comforted by red herrings that imply the car-profligate status quo can be maintained for much longer.


Related Reading.
"BG Finds Oil at Another Well in Brazil's Santos Basin (Update 2)," By Guy Collins and Eduard Gismatullin: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601086&sid=aa1cEmFPoCCg&refer=latin_america

Moscow Times.

I picked-up a copy of the Moscow Times during a recent visit to the city of that same name. The former USSR is a fascinating place, and where I have travelled extensively and have many friends there, extending from the edge of western Europe to the other side of Kazakhstan. For so many years we feared "The Russians", in the cause of the cold war and all other complexities that prevailed upon us in the aftermath of World War 2, summarised well by George Orwell (real name Eric Blair - no relation to Tony as far as I know?) in his satirical novel "1984" which rather than being a prognosis or prophetic anticipation of future events, was a parody of 1948, with its references to rationing and other such events that we might well anticipate again, especially in regards to fuel and indeed food if we don't begin to support our indigenous farming industry.

The Moscow Times tells that the strength of the Rouble is likely to create antagonism over trade. When I first visited Russia under communist times, the official exchange rate was one rouble for the pound, although I was taken aside by a pleasant young man who offered me ten times the official bank rate. He offered me other distractions too, but I have no persuasions in this direction, and am used to being offered money and sex in travelling throughout eastern Europe and Russia. It is a simple matter of trade, of course, but caveat emptor!

In the Sochi, Krasnodar Region, Russian Railways have endorsed a project for refurbishment of their transport system in collaboration with Austria, Slovakia and Ukraine at a cost of $4.3 billion with the formal intention of accelerating trade connections between Asia and Europe. What does strike me is the immense task that President Dmitry Medvedev (successor to President Putin) has in coordinating the vast region of distance and culture that is the former USSR. When I first visited Armenia, my host, Professor Hrant Yeritsyan from the Yerevan Physics Institute took me to the Sergey Parajanov museum (Parajanov was born in Georgia but adopted and became adopted by Armenia, and fell into a 5 year jail term on charges of homosexuality and subversion, which I do not know the veracity of, although it is widely commented that these were "trumped-up"). He was most famous as a film-director and deprived of artistic materials while serving his time, he made puppets from pieces of abandoned fabric. He died of lung-cancer aged just 65, but I often feel that like James Dean and Marilyn Munroe he probably lasted long enough to do what he was planned for on this earth.

I mention Parajanov in part because I admire his artistic skill and integrity but also that Professor Yeritsyan said to me at the Parajanov Museum, "Chris, sit here, because President Putin sat here", indeed along with other leaders of related nations including Georgia, which has since has a bust-up with Russia over reasons that I can't quite understand. My Russian friends tell me that it's all rather complicated, but politics usually is, isn't it?; anyway I can claim to fame that I sat at the same table and in the same chair as Vladimir Putin, who seems to be quite well respected among the former soviets of my affectionate acquaintance.

In a mirror of the West, there is also an article in the Moscow Times to the effect that of the 300 workers employed at a gear-cutting machine plant in the Saratov Region, only 17 are working exclusively on the jobs they were hired for... this reminds me very much of the situation in British Universities, where you end up doubling as secretary, porter, and all else while raising cash to pay the salaries of administrators... it is in large measure the reason why I left the university system formally anyway, and set up my own business. My novel University Shambles is a light-hearted glimpse of how bad things can get in any corporate organisation when things go badly awry, and that includes universities. That said, from what I gather, the Russian university system maintains its high standards, while ours in Britain anyway, has descended into the proverbial.

About time the government addressed the matter of professors with no published work etc. rather than continuing the pretence that we are a far better educated nation. We could take a lesson or two from the Russians, who actually care about these things whereas our political system, and its knock-on effects, is run by lawyers and people from public ("private" in US nomenclature) school with degrees in really useful subjects like "classics" from Oxbridge and having destroyed our industrial base we have to put the kids somewhere, and call it a "university" whether that accolade is justified or probably not.

Related Reading.
[1] The Moscow Times, May 29 - 31, 209 Weekend.
[2] http://universityshambles.com.

Armenian and Moscow Visas.

I returned last night from a round of trips, firstly in Bulgaria last week and then on to Yerevan in Armenia via. Moscow. I would advise that the security check in Moscow is rather draconian and I had my bottles of water, shaving foam and shampoo confiscated, as they were all greater in volume that the 100 ml allowed, beyond which one might apparently be considered liable to perpetrate an act of terrorism. I suspect there may be a roaring trade going on in the resale of such contraband but it is all bloody annoying anyway. As a piece of further advice, I met a man on the plane back to London from Moscow with a rather salutary tale.

He had returned from Ukraine, intending to fly back from Moscow having made his connection, to London. However, because he needed to traverse the route from terminal 1 ("domestic") at Moscow Sheremetyevo airport to terminal 2 ("international" flights), he found himself in limbo, because he didn't have a visa to enter Russia. Even though he was only going from one part of the airport to another, this apparently counted as entering Russian territory, and eventually he had to give an airport official his credit card and passport so he could buy him an Aeroflot ticket back to London, whereupon he could be granted a visa and hence get to terminal 2. Russian bureaucracy seems about what I remember it from 20 years ago, in soviet times, but please do be warned that they take their regulations to the letter.

In contrast to when I visited Armenia some 8 years ago - having returned to London on the morning of 9/11 to in my experience unprecedented levels of security - and needed to go to the Armenian embassy in London to get my visa (and relinquish my passport for those days while the deed was being done), now you can just get an e.visa from the e.consulate of the government of Armenia. At Heathrow they didn't seem to know of the scheme, which caused some consternation on the journey out, but once I arrived in Yerevan, they were well aware of this more recent innovation in allowing access to their wonderful country, and I would recommend anyone going there to avail themselves of its facility (link below). It costs $60. By the way, you also have to pay an exit-tax to get out of Armenia which you do at the Converse bank in Yerevan airport. That is about another $30.

20 years ago, Aeroflot was not the greatest of airlines mainly in that it used old aircraft, but now it is really a very decent airline, and cheap too in relation to British Airways for example and so I would certainly fly with them again, although here is a lot of bad-mouthing of Aeroflot on the internet. I can only speak from my good recent experience of friendly staff who can speak some English, that they use modern Airbus 320's, and flying with mainly Russians who are in general also in my experience a nice lot, as they were at a conference I attended on satellite technologies and gave the keynote lecture in Yerevan.

More about this kind of subject later, including Quantum Dots, but just to say that "I'm back", at least for a while until I go to the States later in the year, to give some lectures on the subject of "energy" and its relations.

http://www.armeniaforeignministry.com/eVisa/

Short on Gas.

Kurt Cobb has given a rather neat picture of a party that is about to be pooped [1]. He begins with discussion of balloons filled with helium which are a red-herring to the underlying connection of helium to natural gas, and that if helium is about to run short (so no more party-balloons), so is the world's provision of natural gas. Helium is a remarkable material, with some unique properties, especially in liquid form, as it is used as a coolant, for example to run superconducting magnets, e.g in MRI (magnetic resonance imaging; the safer alternative to x-ray body scanners) applications. It is also used as a blanket-gas to shield sensitive materials from atmospheric oxygen, and enable certain chemical reactions to be performed and indeed specialist welding operations in which the weld is stronger when the metal surface has not been exposed to reactive atmospheric gases. Helium finds further application in gas-cooled nuclear reactors, as a heat-transfer agent.

Most of the world's helium is found in the United States, and it is recovered by separating it from natural gas with which it is coincident. Helium arises from the decay of radioactive elements like thorium and uranium, whose atomic nuclei decay to form alpha-particles - helium nuclei - which form elemental helium by capturing a couple of electrons from their surrounding media. The majority of helium - since it is a material of low mass - simply rises into the atmosphere and escapes the Earth's gravitational pull to dissipate into outer-space, but some of it becomes trapped in the rocky formations of gas-wells, from which it may be recovered in concentrations of up to 7%.

As is the case for all fossil-materials, natural gas was laid-down in long times past and we will eventually use it up, especially against current rising demand for it. It is the same story for oil, ultimately coal, and indeed uranium, so most of our current energy production methods are living on borrowed time. Helium is also a fossil material, but it can be recycled, as I recall from working at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Switzerland, which uses huge amounts of liquid helium to cool the vast array of magnets used to steer beams of charged particles, particularly muons, toward particular experimental arrangements.

At PSI, the helium is recovered and liquefied on site so it can be recycled, since is a comparatively pricey substance, and another recollection about it is that it diffuses through the steel walls of cylinders in which it is stored under high pressure. If you get a new helium cylinder and don't use it for say, 6 months, when you attach the pressure valve, about half of it has gone!

While the world would certainly not grind to a complete halt if all its particle physics institutes had to close-down in the absence of helium, modern medicine would be disadvantaged and need to return to using x-rays as a means to "photograph" the inside of human bodies as in the CT-scanner alternatives to MRI. If we run short of natural gas, however, the world won't run on with this fact largely unnoticed, and peak gas looks to hit at around 2025 [2]... a mere 15 years time, and more and more of it is used each year, along with all other sources to slake a dust-dry thirst for energy.

I have written before "Metals Shortages" [3] about how indium and gallium are likely to run out in 5 - 10 years with impacts on any and everything electronic, at least in the complex matrix of electrical devices. Hafnium is another metal whose days are numbered, which is an essential component of computer-chips and also employed as a thermal-neutron absorber in nuclear control-rods, and may literally run-out within 10 years. Peak oil we all know about, but peak gas, peak uranium and peak coal will follow. There is in fact a peak in the production of all materials that were laid down in the distant past, and we are using them up at an expanding rate.

Even if we manage to solve our energy problems, we won't have enough "stuff" to make things from.

Related Reading.
[1] "Let's party 'til the helium's gone", By Kurt Cobb. http://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2009/05/lets-party-til-heliums-gone.html
[2] "Natural Gas: how big is the problem?", By Louis de Sousa. http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/11/27/61031/618
[3] "Metals Shortages", by Chris Rhodes: Chemistry and Industry, 25th August 2008, p21; the article is also on http://www.scitizen.com/stories/Future-Energies/2008/09/METALS-SHORTAGES-/ and on this blog too: http://ergobalance.blogspot.com/2008/08/metals-shortages.html

Quantum Dots and Ultra-efficient Solar Cells?

I have been invited to give a lecture at the Yerevan Physics Institute in Armenia at the end of this month, on "Solar Energy and Space Applications", in which I plan to stress technology for keeping satellites going, and hence maintaining the global information function of the world, even if other aspects of its connectivity begin to fade. During the process, I came across "Quantum Dots" which strike me as rather interesting materials in this respect, particularly in terms of increasing the energy conversion efficiency of solar radiation to electricity (photovoltaic capacity), radiation resistance and lightweight payload for launching. Given that energy efficiency is probably the key feature to exploit in our riding-down Hubbert's peak, I thought I would share this with you.

The term “quantum dot” (QD) was coined by Mark Reed at Yale University. A QD is a semiconductor whose excitons are confined in all three spatial dimensions. Accordingly, they have properties that are between those of bulk semiconductors and those of discrete molecules. They were discovered by Louis E. Brus, who was then at Bell Labs. QDs are nanocrystalline materials (or materials that contain nanocrystals) in which the dimension of the crystal is smaller (in all directions) than the Bohr exciton radius of the exciton pair (M+ ... e-).

This causes the energy levels to become quantised (quantum confinement), as in individual molecules, rather than coalescing into the “band structure” of bulk semiconductors Traditional (bulk) semiconductors lack versatility, since their band-gap and hence optical and electronic properties cannot be easily changed, if at all. By tuning the size of the QD particle, the band-gap can be tailored for specific applications. The gap enlarges as the crystalline dimension decreases, so that the fluorescence wavelength shortens; and conversely, as the crystal becomes bigger, the wavelength increases, so the fluorescence shifts toward the red end of the visible spectrum.

QDs range in size from 2 - 10 nanometers (10 - 50 atoms) in diameter and contain as few as 100 to 100,000 atoms. Nearly 3 million quantum dots could be lined up end to end and fit within the width of a human thumb. There are several ways to confine excitons in semiconductors, resulting in different methods to produce quantum dots. In general, quantum wires, wells and dots are grown by advanced epitaxial techniques in nanocrystals produced by chemical methods or by ion implantation, or in nanodevices made by state-of-the-art lithographic techniques.

There are also colloidal methods to produce many different QD semiconductors, including cadmium selenide, cadmium sulfide, indium arsenide, and indium phosphide. Large quantities of quantum dots may be synthesized via colloidal synthesis., which can be done under benchtop conditions, i.e. you just mix chemicals in a flask, rather than complex molecular beam epitaxy techniques. QDs are less rapidly damaged by radiation because ejected electrons and positive holes can recombine harmlessly (i.e. without molecular structure changes, e.g. atomic displacements, bond breaking, cascade ionisation and creating further damage centres etc.)

There is a dimensional restriction on the normal reactivity of the bulk material, since the QD is smaller than the radiation spur (track) distance, which limits the extent of chemical reactions normally induced in the bulk semiconductor, and in the absence of alternative routes, the holes and electrons are more likely to simply recombine. Thin-films too are relatively radiation-resistant, and one can invoke a simple geometric argument, in that the total concentration of active material is comparatively small, hence kinetically the relative rate of damage is lower.

Quantum dots offer the potential to improve the efficiency of solar cells in two respects: (1) by extending the band gap of solar cells so they can harvest more of the solar spectrum, and (2) by generating more excitons from a single photon.

Extending the solar cell band gap into the IR region.

Almost half the intensity of sunlight ranges within the IR region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Thus Photovoltaic cells that respond to IR – ‘thermovoltaics’ - can even capture radiation from a fuel-fire emitter; and co-generation of electricity and heat are said to be quiet, reliable, clean and efficient. A 1 cm2 silicon cell in direct sunlight will generate about 0.01W, but an efficient infrared photovoltaic cell of equal size can produce theoretically 1W in a fuel-fired system.

It was discovered in the 1970s that chemical doping of conjugated organic polymers increased electronic conductivity by several orders of magnitude, leading to the application of electronically conducting materials as sensors, light-emitting diodes, and solar cells. Conjugated polymers provide ease of processing, low cost, physical flexibility and large area coverage. They now work reasonably well within the visible spectrum.

In order to make conjugated polymers work in the infrared range, researchers at the University of Toronto wrapped the polymers around lead sulphide quantum dots tuned (by size) to respond to infrared [5]. The polymer poly(2-methoxy-5-(2’-ethylhexyloxy-p-phenylenevinylene)] (MEH-PPV) absorbs between ~400 and ~600 nm. QDs of lead sulphide (PbS) have absorption peaks that can be tuned from ~800 to ~2000 nm.

By wrapping MEH-PPV around the QDs shifted the absorption spectrum of the polymer was shifted into the infrared. Commercial implementation is predicted to come about within 3-5 years.

Multiple excitons from one photon..

Researchers led by Arthur Nozik at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory Golden, Colorado in the United States showed recently that the absorption of a single photon by their QDs yielded - not one exciton as is usual for bulk semiconductors - but three excitons!

The formation of multiple excitons per absorbed photon requires that the energy of the photon absorbed is far greater than the semiconductor band gap. This phenomenon does not readily occur in bulk semiconductors where the excess energy simply dissipates away as heat before it can cause other electron-hole pairs to form. In QDs, the rate of energy dissipation is significantly reduced, and the charge carriers are confined within a minute volume, thereby increasing their interactions and enhancing the probability for multiple excitons to form.

A quantum yield of 300 percent was recently demonstrated for 2.9nm diameter PbSe (lead selenide) QDs when the energy of the photon absorbed is four times that of the band gap. However, multiple excitons start to form as soon as the photon energy reaches twice the band gap. Quantum dots made of lead sulphide (PbS) also showed this phenomenon.

“We have shown that solar cells based on quantum dots theoretically could convert more than 65 percent of the sun’s energy into electricity, approximately doubling the efficiency of solar cells”, said Nozik.

QDs do seem to offer remarkable potential in photovoltaic applications generally, but in space-applications particularly, in terms of radiation resistance, low payload weight, and light to electricity conversion efficiency.

Related Reading.

http://www.i-sis.org.uk/QDAUESC.php

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_dot

Microwaves for Industrial Scale Biochar Production.

Industrial scale microwave ovens could be used to produce biochar on a large scale. Professor Chris Turner from Exeter University, has built a 5 meter long prototype device that can lock-up a tonne of CO2 by pyrolysing wood into biochar, at a cost of $65. Each crop of trees absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere through photosysnthesis while they grow, and much of that carbon can be stored in a form of charcoal that is stable in soil for hundreds to thousands of years. In addition to storing carbon in this way, and remediating its presence in the atmosphere, the strategy could also produce synthetic terra preta soil, which is particularly fertile and less demanding in the amounts of water and nutrients that need to be added to it to grow plants in it.

Biochar has received regular mention for the past several months, and I have outlined its nature and advantages on various postings here. The wood or other biomass does need to be heated in some way, ideally such that liquid and gaseous decomposition products can be used as fuels to drive the process itself, making it self-supporting, and needing only biomass as a fuel and a reactant.

Frankly, I am sceptical as to how many microwaves can be built, and quickly at that, but the same question mark follows many proposed methods of environmental engineering. Allegedly, Turney's idea stems from a piece of serendipity that arose when he was a teenager. He microwaved a potato for 40 minutes by accident and found it had been converted into charcoal. He stresses that the kind of carbon capture and sequestration projects that are being promoted around the world only deal with emissions e.g. from power plants as they arise and do not address the carbon that is already in the atmosphere. If this can be pulled down through photosynthesis into biomass and the latter pyrolysed into biochar, in principle it is possible to decrease the atmospheric CO2 concentration.

As noted, however, building enough microwave ovens to produce biochar on a scale of the 8.5 billion tonnes of carbon per year released from fossil fuels will be no mean task, and probably impossible.

Related Reading.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/mar/13/charcoal-carbon

Russia Floats Arctic Nuclear.

In its efforts to find oil and natural gas in the Arctic, Russia is looking to build floating nuclear power stations that can be propelled to strategic points to provide power for drilling etc. Five plants are planned, each carrying two reactors with a combined generating capacity of 70 MW. Since they are self-propelling, these vessels would enable the exploration of some of the most far-flung oil and gas fields in the Barents and Kara seas. Their design is such that they would need refuelling only once every 12 - 14 years and they would carry their own nuclear waste, which would finally need to be put somewhere.

I recall a newspaper headline from some while ago about "floating Chernobyls" which is probably rather unfair, but there are not surprisingly concerns about the safety of these devices. The Scandinavian watchdog group, Bellona, has voiced its reservations, saying that any radioactive leakage and indeed the heat output from the plants could impact on the fragile Arctic environment. Further fears from environmentalists are that the nuclear waste will simply be dumped into the sea. This is a somewhat time-honoured policy and there is supposed to be all kinds of nuclear detritus on the floor of the Barents sea, including abandoned nuclear submarines. Probably no one knows just what is down there, and most likely no one wants to know.

It is known that there are at least 12 nuclear reactors dumped on the islands of Novaya Zemlya and on its northern coast, along with 5,000 or so containers of nuclear waste. As I recall, Novaya Zemlya is where the Russians used to do their nuclear testing - I believe the atmospheric testing was done over the northern island and the underground tests on the southern island. It is likely as radioactive as hell there anyway.

As I have noted before when some pretty extreme proposals have been advanced to try and grab the world's remaining hydrocarbon reserves, the scheme does smack of desperation. Nonetheless, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, perhaps 25% of the world's total oil and gas lie under the Arctic, and there are diplomatic issues as to rights of their ownership. Russia famously planted a flag underwater, to stake its claim to one potential field off the northern coast of Siberia, where incidentally, there are hotspots of methane emissions from permafrost that is melting at a surprising rate. I doubt there is any connection other than that there is a lot of methane there in the form of methane hydrate.

A prototype floating power station is being built in the SevMash shipyard in Severodinsk, and there is an agreement made to build four more of them between Rosatom, the Russian state nuclear corporation and the Republic of Yakutiya in northern Siberia.

Impetus to find more gas may be in part connected with a recent fall in Russian gas production which sharpened steeply in April. Does this mean that the country is running out of gas, or are there other aspects of production or politics? If Russia's provision of gas is indeed less than has been thought, the impact on both east and western Europe could be as severe as that of the fall in oil once the giant Ghawar field begins to give up the ghost, i.e. perhaps 20 countries beginning to run short of fuel. Russian oil production remains firm, however.

In contrast, Gazprom's output of gas fell by 7% from 1.24 billion cubic metres to 1.15 billion cubic metres in April, in fact a fall by 28% from April 2008. Gazprom accounts for 80% of all gas in Russia and provides 25% of all gas used in Europe. Britain is trying to avoid being overly dependent on Russia for its gas, at a time of the poorest diplomatic relations between the two countries since the cold war. Instead, we are importing somewhere near to one fifth of our gas in liquid form from Qatar and are engaged in earnest discussions with our Norwegian friends to get them to bring a new gas pipeline to Britain rather than to mainland Europe.

We live in interesting times, as the countries of the world try to grab what is left of its plenty of oil and gas, even in such inhospitable regions as the Arctic, and inevitably the day will come when there is not enough to go around for all of us.

Related Reading.
[1] "Russia to build floating nuclear power stations," By John Vidal, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/03/russia-arctic-nuclear-power-stations
[2] "Russian gas output collapse in April," By Simon Shuster, http://uk.biz.yahoo.com/02052009/323/russian-gas-output-collapse-deepens-april.html

Black Gold - Terra Pretta Soil.

In 2001 a paper was published about a farmer in Acutuba who had grown crops on terra preta soils for 40 years without needing to add any fertilizer. Astonishing as this seems, these "dark earth" soils possess a remarkable vitality and fertility, and it is speculated that along the Rio Negra the large populations described by Francisco de Orellana in the Chronicles of his 1542 quest to find the mythic city of El Dorado, were sustained by terra pretta de indio - Portuguese for "Indian black earth". The Amazonian soils are notoriously poor in quality, despite the lush forest that grows on them, and in contrast the terra preta is a legacy of the Amazonian civilizations that lived there in the past.

There has been much speculation as to the origins of terra preta soil, in particular whether it was deliberately created to improve the fertility of the region, or whether it was an accident of nature or serendipitous to the way of life among the Amazonian tribes. What seems clear is that the essential component of the soil is a kind of charcoal, which may have been formed either by a kind of composting process or by burning biomass which became added to the soil, either deliberately or by chance. Consensus of view now is that the soils were formed deliberately by local farmers, who knew well the causes of its quality.

A central figure in the investigation of terra pretta is the archaeologist, James Petersen, who was murdered by bandits in a bar on a jungle road near Iranduba in the Brazilian Amazon. Petersen called the soil a "gift from the past" and he believed that understanding its composition and origins might provide a means to improve soil fertility for small farmers today and to eliminate the carbon emissions that arise when slash-and-burn methods are used to clear forest to grow crops. Betty J. Meggers, who worked in the Amazon during the mid 1900s called the region a "counterfeit paradise" since its verdant glory existed only because the plants that grew there were able to suck every drop of water and nutrient from a soil that was fundamentally unsuitable to grow much on.

The slash and burn approach is in line with this view since forests are cut-down and the cover is burned in order to provide mineral and nitrogen rich ash to nourish the soil with. However, the soil is only productive for a few years until it reverts to its original barren state. However, evidence accumulated for an advanced civilization, rather than subsisting stone age savages, whose remains were embedded in vast swathes of black earth.

Johannes Lehmann of Cornell University is of the opinion that the black earth may offer the promise of creating sustainable agriculture, and possibly to averting global warming. The vital ingredient of terra preta is thought to be charcoal - "biochar" - which is able to bind the essential nutrients N, P and K, which impedes dramatically the rate at which they are washed-way by the continual rains. Minute pores are formed in the charcoal over time which can hold more nutrients on its larger surface area and act as "condominiums" for microorganisms to grow in and so increases their density in the soil. The idea is to create "terra preta nova", or artifical terra preta by deliberately adding charcoal to soil in the aim of recreating the properties of natural Amazonian terra preta.

He says, "With a handful of biochar, you can keep many more nutrients in the soil than in a handful of mulch or compost. It is like mopping-up nutrients with a magnet that looks like a sponge - that is, it has high surface area like a spomnge but can attract a thin layer of material like a magnet."

It is likely that to produce a soil with genuine terra preta characteristics will take a number of years of "fermentation" but it has been shown that soil treated with biochar and nutrients can have an immediate effect when added to very poor soils. Lehmann goes further and thinks that pro ducting biochar on a billions of tonnes per year scale could significantly reduce and even reverse carbon emissions and global warming, by burying that carbon in a stable form out of the biological carbon cycle. I think he is overoptimistic here especially if large-scale biochar factories are envisaged.

However, a human collective of small-scale productions could lock-up almost one billion tonnes annually, with positive impacts on soil health, and a reduced demand for freshwater and nutrient supplies, worldwide.

This should, however, be compared with potential complementary methods for regenerative agriculture which depend far less on added N,P and K through growing year-round cover crops, and forest gardens, which once established are largely self-sustaining. In terms of carbon-capture the latter are predicted to meet a capacity of 40% of all human carbon emissions, which would require the creation of a lot of biochar (3.5 billion tonnes per year) if they were to be absorbed in this way.

Related Reading.
"Black Gold of the Amazon," By Michael Tennesen, http://discovermagazine.com/2007/apr/black-gold-of-the-amazon

Nuclear Plant to Bulldoze Wind Farm, but Kurdistan has Oil!

A wind farm may be bulldozed to clear a site on which a new nuclear power station will be built. This seems to me a telling sign of the future, in that wind-farms are being marginalised in favour of the tried and tested, and it must be said, far more powerful. On average, a nuclear reactor produces around 1.2 GW of electricity, which allowing for a capacity factor of 30% is the equivalent of a farm with 1,500 "2 MW" wind turbines. The "capacity factor" for a coal, gas or nuclear power station is similar at around 36%, but when a figure of say 1 GW is quoted that is the actual output, from a thermal capacity of around 3.6 GW, which is less misleading than the figures listed for wind-turbines. Unlike the wind which does not always blow, uranium always burns, so long as there is enough of it in the reactor.

Indeed, to meet EU targets, it will be necessary to build a new wind-turbine every day for 12 years, which does not seem to me a particularly realistic objective [1]. The Haverigg wind farm, located between the hills of the Lake District and the waters of the Duddon Estuary on the coast of Cumbria, is the second commercial wind farm to be built in Britain, and has run for 17 years. However, six of its eight turbines (quite a lot less than 1,500) fall within the blueprint-boundaries of the proposed Kirksanton nuclear power plant where the German RWE plans to construct "at least three" new reactors.

There is naturally a huge environmental hoo-ha, but as RWE points out, the wind farm produces 3.5 megawatts of energy while the nuclear power station would generate 3,600 MW, or enough to power 5 million homes. There is also the equally unexpected NIMBY, in that people living in the nearby village of Kirksanton have formed an action group, because the plant is only 150 yards from the village boundary. I don't blame them, but nuclear power plants are actually pretty safe in their running; it is just the issue of long term storage of nuclear waste that remains to be sorted to everybody's satisfaction. Couldn't they shift the site a little bit though, and keep both sides happy, and keep the wind farm too?

Given the amount of energy we use, and that time is of the essence, I think they should build the nuclear plant, and several others too, if only to buy some more time while we rethink our "sustainable future". Running out of juice would be a more horrendous matter than global warming, nuclear waste and all other calamities, at least in the short term.

On the matter of juice, I note an interesting development in oil exploration: namely that drillers in northern Kurdistan have identified 3 to 4 billion barrels of oil there. Now this is only enough oil to quench the world's thirst for it for around a month or so, but it is probably going to be worth $300 to $400 billion, assuming that the price of oil rises to $100 a barrel again, which it almost certainly will, and probably much more than that. The company behind the project, Heritage Oil, is doing well on the stock market with shares going for 360p per unit and 30% growth, which speaks volumes, especially in the current financial climate when 150 British businesses are going to the wall every day, and doubtless many more across the world.


Related reading.
[1] http://ergobalance.blogspot.com/2008/06/new-wind-turbine-every-day-for-12-years.html
[2] "Wind farm may be torn down to make way for nuclear site," http://news.google.co.uk/news?hl=en&q=Wind+farm+may+be+torn+down+to+make+way+for+nuclear+site&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=oRj0SaLzFYqRjAf6vcTZDA&sa=X&oi=news_group&ct=title&resnum=1
[3] "Kurdistan discovery boosts Heritage," By Bryce Elder and Neil Hume, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7ba6ce02-2bb1-11de-b806-00144feabdc0.html

Governments Must Cooperate for "Power-Down" as Oil Runs Out.

It is anticipated that beyond the point of peak oil, production of the world's oil will contract by around 3% per year. Widely, this is perceived as an unquenchable and imminent disaster of planetary proportions, and the "End Times" movement, mostly Christian fundamentalists in the US, are rubbing their hands in anticipation of such "proof" that God really did tell us that the Tribulation would befall us, in preparation for the second coming of Jesus Christ, who would ultimately transform the Earth into paradise. A cynic might say that since these are mostly people who live in a nation that consumes vastly more energy, and has more cars than anywhere else on earth, such acceptance is really an act of inertia, and they would rather die than change their lifestyles to anything less energy consuming.

Being essentially an optimist by nature, I am trying to avoid falling by the wayside of apathy, although it is extremely difficult not to see things in a gloomy perspective, especially living in a country that has pledged itself to additional debts of around $1.2 trillion (£750 billion) over the next five years, and which will take so long to pay-off that the point when the balance sheet comes back into the black is really anybody's guess. If it takes 30 years, we can only speculate as to the kind of world and society that will prevail then, and having just turned 50, in all probability I won't be part of it.

There are many scary scenarios to be had, and which are gratuitously foretold, but mostly these involve wars over resources, mainly oil and also water. The two are connected inextricably in the matrix of energy and production that forms the web of globalisation, and oil-powered pumps move water around to bring desert into fecund crop-land and pasture: thus if oil fails, so does the land, and much of the food production especially in the mid-western United States, if it is no longer possible to extract water, much of which is of fossil origin, drawn up from underground aquifers, which are not refilled, but laid-down millions of years ago.

It is not worth elaborating such images of mayhem, including one where the governments are forced to bomb the inner cities to destroy the rapacious and desperate millions, before they become lawless and soulless roaming hoards, but to consider that there may be a solution, but only one, and that is for the governments of the world to unite in a voluntary and cooperative programme to reduce oil consumption by 3% per year, in line with the predicted fall in oil-output. Any other strategy will be tough, unpleasant and disastrous, and must inevitably abrade society into conflict and all-out wars between regions and between nations. In a nutshell, oil-producing nations must agree to reduce their production by 3% per year and oil-importing nations to reduce their imports by an exactly matching amount. Production will fall and must be planned to fall, while consumers take-up the slack in supply.

We need a clear strategy to gear-down our dependence on personalised transportation and on the carriage of essential goods such as food and water to the extent that should this mechanism fail, in Britain we have probably three days supply before the supermarket shelves begin to empty and the country begins to starve. To put it another way, a fall in oil provision by 3% per year means building more localised means that depend less on transport by that same figure, pro rata. Since the problem is a global one, the solution can only be found globally, and individual nations - under the leadership of their governments - must cooperate in creating an overall less fuel-dependent ideology and putting this into practice. Fuel rationing is key and a reconstruction of societies so that the means for shelter, work, food production, money and all else are not separated, but become part of the integrated hive of community.

Related Reading.
http://www.oildepletionprotocol.org/
http://www.oildepletionprotocol.org/about/people
http://www.richardheinberg.com/projects/theodp

Norway Gas and Oil Needs new Development.

Norway's production of oil and gas is thought to run into trouble by the mid 2020's if currently off-limit areas are not developed. These include Nordland VI and VII and Troms II, which oil companies are currently banned from exploring since there are important fishing grounds and areas of natural beauty there. Since it can take 18 years from the granting of a license to actual onstream production, time is of the essence, especially as it is thought that the more mature Norwegian oil fields will begin to decline in 2012-2013 when Norwegian gas production will outstrip that of oil.

Norwegian North Sea oil production peaked at 3 million barrels a day in 2000 (the same output as the British peak in 1999), and is now 2.1 million barrels a day (British production has fallen to around 1 million barrels a day). Apparently under the Lisbon Agreement the EU may be able to grab oil from the UK, which is Europe's main oil and gas producer, while Norway's production remains sensibly out of EU jurisdiction. It is thought that by 2030 Norwegian oil output will be 1.6 million mpd or around 60% of current levels.

Altogether it is estimated that the areas offshore from the Vesteraalen and Lofoten archipelagos may hold 3.4 billion barrels of oil. While this is less than 6 weeks worth of oil to run the entire world on, it is a significant contribution to Norway's reserve. To do a simple R/P ratio sum, if Norway has "9 years worth of oil left" as has been said recently, then a daily output of 2.1 mbd x 365 x 9 = 6.9 billion barrels in current mature fields, so accessing these northern regions would add another half. In reality there will of course be a steady decline in production, and if production is still at 1.6 mbd by 2030, around 13.5 billion barrels of oil will have been produced by then, suggesting the reserve is far greater. On the other hand the latter prediction may prove highly optimistic.

Now the world's fifth major oil producer, Norway will continue to be a main player in the provision of oil to Europe over the next decades. It is second only to Russia in its provision of natural gas to Europe and its reserves of gas are believed to be very large.

There is the expected difference of opinion among Norwegians as to whether the fields in the north should be opened-up or not: 40.7% say yes and 35.5% no, with 23.9% undecided. The World Wildlife Fund and Bellona stand firmly on the "no" side, on the grounds that indigenous fish and birds in would be harmed by drilling in the region. For sure it would be a shame to kill-off the fish since Lofoten is a major spawning ground for cod, producing 400,000 tonnes of them per year, while other areas around the world , e.g. Cape Cod have lost much of their cod.

There are economic issues too. Those who want the exploration to go ahead are looking toward investment and the Norwegian economy and yet it is the current global recession in part that has put on-hold many such projects in Norway and elsewhere, and even if the go-ahead were to be given, is there the financial incentive for companies to start new drilling projects? It depends on the price of oil: this is now back up to $50 from $30 a barrel from a few months ago, and it will almost certainly rise again to previous levels. At $100 a barrel the incentive is probably restored, but it all takes time, especially against the relentless backdrop of world oil depletion.

We have to face the truth that we can't rely on the current level of world oil production for much longer, and then what? All these schemes are part of a general denial to that fact.

Related Reading.
"Norway Oil Industry Seen At Risk If New Areas Not Opened," by Elizabeth Adams. http://www.rigzone.com/news/article_pf.asp?a_id=75180

George Monbiot: Prepare for Peak Oil not Smallpox!

George Monbiot has written a cracking article which I am paying tribute to. I don't always like his take on things but this time he has it just right. He points-out that although smallpox was eradicated in the western world many years ago, the British government has produced a 122 page document of central plans to deal with an outbreak of it, and there are smallpox centres running across the country with listed staff to be drawn on in times of emergency, five Smallpox Management and Response Teams, and a Smallpox Diagnosis and Response Group in each of the nine regions of England. Naturally, all this costs millions even though other than the potential use of the disease in germ warfare, for which both the U.S. and Russia are well-provided, the odds of an outbreak are vanishingly long. However, in respect of probably the greatest single threat to humanity, there is no policy or obvious plans whatsoever, namely peak oil.

He also refers to the strange quirk of the government in its attitude to risk. For example Gordon Brown (actually "Dr" Brown as he has a Ph.D in political history from Edinburgh University) told the City of London bankers (I don't intend this as rhyming-slang) in his 2004 Mansion House speech that "in budget after budget I want us to do even more to encourage the risk-takers." We have seen in abundance the consequences of this, possibly a minor calamity in comparison with the impending oil debacle.

I am convinced that peak oil is not merely a theory. It is obvious that if western concepts about the origins of oil are true, there was only so much to go round in the first place and we have got through the first half, leaving the second installment far more difficult to wrestle from the earth. The Russian/Ukranian theory is that petroleum is formed within the earth as a mineral product, rather than by the decay of dead flora and fauna. In one respect it doesn't matter who is right, since it is the rate of recovery that is key: even if oil is produced continually, if we can't pull it out of the ground fast enough to match demand the world will descend into a supply-demand gap which I referred to recently as "gap oil". I suspect there are many different origins for petroleum, both abiotic (mineral) and biotic since hydrocarbons are energy minima and are to be expected as thermodynamically stable products of equilibrium.

The precise date when world oil production does peak is a matter of some debate, but I recently heard it was last year (2008). Other estimates are up to 2012 (an interesting coincidence with the end of the Mayan calender), and longer durations offered mainly by the oil industry. The critical information with which to anticipate the event is lacking, namely the closely-guarded figures for the OPEC nations' true reserves - a state-secret. Indeed, we will only know retrospectively when the oil did peak but all evidence is that it can be expected soon.

Thus why are there no clear plans offered by any governments, British or elsewhere, for how we are to run our societies without plentiful cheap oil, without which everything we regard as normal - our entire way of life - will collapse? Perhaps the blueprint will be forthcoming, or maybe there is no longer time to do much except let the "market forces" do their work, in this most significant of human affairs, as in all others. Perhaps, like the Emperor Nero, they are all fiddling while Rome burns?

Related Reading.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/14/george-monbiot-smallpox-oil-supply

Biomass Could Release More Carbon than Coal.

Biofuels are often spoken of as "carbon neutral", meaning that only the same amount of carbon absorbed during their growth through photosynthesis is released when biofuels derived from them are burned. This is not strictly true since the fuel used to run tractors and processing machinery is not costed into this attractive but naive energy balance sheet. Furthermore, the impact of growing fuel crops on the soil itself is ignored, and a new study by the Environment Agency (EA) concludes that if pasture is ploughed over to grow energy crops, it might release more CO2 by 2030 than burning fossil fuels.

However, it is widely thought that peak oil is with us now, meaning that we will never be able to produce more oil than at the height of 2008, and by 2030 biofuels may be in demand simply on the basis of need for any fuel. Only around 20% of the nation's fuel could be provided even if all our pasture land were turned over to crop production and the amount of fuel possible is in any case limited. The only potential source of non-CO2 releasing biomass on this scale is algae, but growing it on the large scale poses considerable challenges, along with hydrothermal plants to convert the algal mass into gas and liquid fuels rather than the palaver of extracting oil from it and converting that into biodiesel by transesterfication as is done from e.g. rapeseed oil. Dried algae can be burned directly in power stations, co-fired with conventional fuel e.g. coal.

According to the EA, waste-wood and medium-density fibreboard (MDF) produce the least CO2 while willow, poplar and oilseed rape the most. This is significant because wood-burning stoves, boilers and even power-stations are seen as vital components of the system by which Brtain's renewable energy targets are to be met. The actual quantity of CO2 released was found to be highly dependent on the particular circumstances, and in the most favourable case a mere 27 kg of CO2/kilowatt hour was produced - 98% less than from coal - which could curb emissions by two million tonnes of CO2 per year. However, in other cases, the overall emissions were higher than they would be from burning coal.

The worst offenders were energy crops planted on permanent grassland, according to the report. Nonetheless, biomass is going to be essential probably well before the target year of 2030 and the efficient use of its energy by combining heat and power production is underlined, as it is a limited resource.

Tony Grayling, who is head of climate change and sustainable development at the EA said: "By 2030, biomass fuels will need to be produced using good practice simply to keep up with the average carbon intensity of the electricity grid."

Related Reading.
"Biomass 'could be major emitter'." http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7997398.stm

Pulse-Grazing!

There is a great website (http://www.adoptafarmer.com.au/) about carbon farming in Australia. I have mentioned before Dr Christine Jones, who features on here, in her crusade to store carbon in soil by year-round cover-cropping and other regenerative methods. I like the term "pulse-grazing", since I always think of a pulse as a powerful burst of energy of short duration; maybe fraction of a second as in scientific measurements. In the present context, the pulse is over a couple of days and involves moving grazing animals like sheep somewhere, before moving them on to do the same job on another plot of land.

The term is due to Colin Seis, in Gulgong who farms 4000 head of sheep and cereal crops including oats, wheat and lupins on ‘Winona’, an 840-hectare (2075 acre) farm in the central tablelands of New South Wales. In 1933 they were one of the first in the area to
use superphosphate fertilizer, which initially doubled wheat yields. However, in became clear to the family by the 1970s that their farming methods could not be sustained, when falling wool prices and rising superphosphate costs meant that fertilising pastures was not a long-term option. The initial benefits of adding fertilizers were no longer being recouped and plants were responding less vigorously to fertilisers meaning that increasingly larger amounts had to be added to achieve the same good yields.

Progressive dryland salinity, soil acidity and annual weeds were encroaching on their land too and in 1979 the farm was destroyed by a major bushfire. Because they didn't have enough money to simply "rebuild", Colin looked for more traditional approaches in family history records where he discovered that the original landscape of the tablelands had been grassland and scattered trees. He reckoned that the native grasslands must have had the innate ability to control ground water and not accumulate salinity.

Colin decided to combine grazing and cropping rather than considering them as separate activities and to stop using superphosphate fertilizer. He also changed from set grazing practices to a cell grazing method, i.e. "pulse grazing", where a herd of up to 3000 sheep is moved around his 51 paddocks (average size 16 hectares), to spend 2-4 days in each one before moving them on. After 3 months to allow the native grasses to recover, the ground is grazed again. Colin also took the line that it made no sense to plough a pasture to plant a crop on the land:

"It takes 6 months to prepare a paddock to grow a crop for 2 or 3 months, and then it might be affected for 10 years afterwards, all for 2 or 3 months feed," said Colin. "It’s lunacy to do that. There had to be a better way. My father always disliked ploughing up pastures to plant crops, but in his time the technology just wasn’t there to do it differently." Colin and his neighbour Daryl Cluff believed it would be possible to sow winter cereal crops directly into summer-growing native perennial pastures that were dormant through winter. The pasture could be grazed right up to the point of sowing and stock could be put back on the pasture after harvest to graze stubble and green perennial grasses. They found it works.

Sheep are put into the pasture at a density of 70-80 per hectare for up to 6 days to reduce the bulk of grasses. This is repeated 30 days later. The sheep control weeds, open the grass canopy, mulch the grass and help feed soil microbes. One week after the sheep are removed, a low rate of knockdown herbicide is applied to control annual weeds and the area is almost immediately sown with zero till seeding equipment. A one pass operation places oat seed and fertiliser in 30 cm rows with very little disturbance to the surface ground cover. Conservation cropping protects the soil flora and fauna and promotes biodiversity, i.e. it restores the health of the soil.
Colin’s intention is 100% ground cover, 100% of the time, including under crops. The Department of Agriculture found that the pasture cropping method of farming can be more profitable than traditional methods, and that the width of the profit-margin would depend on the current level of grazing overheads (such as pasture seed, pasture maintenance and casual labour).

Winona’s soils are becoming healthier as a result of the grazing and cropping methods with lower inputs of fertiliser and some crops have been grown no chemicals at all. Colin thinks that nutrients are now cycling through the soil and releasing phosphorous naturally, since 20% of the pastures are still healthy sub-clover.

"Pasture cropping and pulse grazing have dramatically increased pasture biodiversity," said Colin. "The pulse grazing definitely improves biodiversity in perennial grasses, but I was surprised to find that the pasture cropping took it to a whole new level. We had huge increases in plant diversity and numbers after just one year of sowing a crop that way. It was a spin-off that we didn’t expect at all, that the crop would actually stimulate the pasture. Looking at grasslands and soils is the key to turning salinity problems around. If we can get groundcover on the saline parts of the property, then they can actually be very productive, especially in dry times. I believe our native pastures act like huge sponges, holding water in suspension. If we can get back to that, I think a lot of our salinity problems would disappear."

"Don’t spend a cent," is Colin’s advice. "Put your animals into large mobs and start moving them around the infrastructure you already have. Focus on native perennial pastures – they’ve evolved here and obviously they are the best plants for Australia. Throw away your disc plough – if you’re going to grow crops, use zero till. Only kill the weeds that are competing with the crop, leave everything else alive. "The hardest thing to change in all of this is to change your head (thinking). Once you’ve done that, the rest is easy," he said.

Related Reading.
http://www.adoptafarmer.com.au/

Germany First Fully Renewable Energy Economy... by 2050?

The Reichstag in Berlin will be fully powered by renewable energy, in the iconic intention that the rest of Germany will become the first fully renewably powered industrial nation. By projecting current momentum toward renewables, it is reckoned that by 2050, 100% of Germany's energy will be so provided. Immediately I wonder how they will get around the problem of replacing liquid fuels for transportation, or do they think they will be all-hydrogen or all-electric by then?

The total quantity of energy used in Germany is reckoned as the equivalent of 472 million tonnes of coal in 2007, which amounts to:

472 x 10^6 tonnes x 29.3 x 10^9 J/tonne (coal) = 1.38 x 10^19 J (13,842 PJ).

For some reason, in Britain we tend to cost our energy in terms of oil equivalents, rather than coal, which amounts to 226 million tonnes of crude oil, with an accepted energy content of 42 GJ/tonne:

226 x 10^6 tonnes x 42 x 10^9 J/tonne = 9.49 x 10^18 J (9,490 PJ).

Roughly the ratio of energy used in these two countries is that of their relative populations (82 million/61 million), but ca 8% more energy is used per capita in Germany, probably because of relatively more industry and colder winters.

It is planned to reduce the amount of energy used in Germany from 13,842 PJ (2007) to 12,000 PJ in 2020, and to 10,000 PJ in 2030 (a total reduction by 28%), by implementing energy efficiency strategies, which will save billions in terms of imported energy sources, the price of which is predicted to rise. Indeed it is debatable how much oil will be available let alone what it will cost by 2030, and by 2050 there may be precious little of it left, even at prices of $200 or more a barrel in today's money, as has been predicted.

In 2008, 7.3% of Germany's total primary energy came from renewables, and it is expected that this will rise to 33% by 2020, well in front of other European nations. By 2020, 30% of German electricity is forecast to be generated from renewable sources: wind energy is the principal player in the mix at 15%, with 8% bioenergy (biomass and biogas) and hydropower at 4%. It is anticipated that photovoltaics will be cheap enough by 2015 that a price parity will be achieved with other electricity sources.

Up to 10 GW is expected to be generated from wind turbines placed across the northern German coastlines and offshore wind-farms placed in the North Sea. The electricity is to be conducted from the north and east or south and west using high voltage direct current fed into a smart national grid and that by 2030 50% of German electricity generation will come from renewables, feeding into an entire European trans-continental grid.

Electric cars powered by batteries charged by electricity from renewable sources are planned to provide transport across the nation and so curb dependence on imported oil (around 40% of the total primary energy budget - about the same as in the U.K.) and its greenhouse emissions. Some of this electricity is expected to be made from biogas, derived from compost and waste, pumped into high temperature fuel cells that run at 850 degrees C. and converts the gas to electricity with an efficiency of 40 to 55%. These I presume are solid-oxide fuel cells. If the heat can be recovered too the combined thermal and electrical efficiency of the fuel cell amounts to nearer 85%.

It's a big job, but the Germans seem to be throwing all their technology at the critical issue of providing future energies which other nations, e.g. Britain are not. Good luck to the Germans - even if they only match half their energy requirements by renewables it will be a major achievement and secure stability for the country. I have my doubts about all those electric cars hurtling up and down the autobahns though, and whether enough of them will be made even by 2050, or if the supplies of liquid transportation fuel will fail long before then; before an equivalent scale of substitution can be made.

Related Reading.
"Germany: The World's First Major Renewable Economy," by Jane Burgermeister: http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2009/04/germany-the-worlds-first-major-renewable-energy-economy?src=rss

Regenerative Agriculture: The Transition.

It is an illusion to think we can continue to use as much energy as we do now. No one can entirely rule-out that some extravagant technology will be forthcoming, e.g. solar power or nuclear fusion on the full-scale of 500 EJ/year as we get through now, but the particular issue of matching liquid fuels derived currently almost entirely from petroleum appears insurmountable. The "solution" is probably the collective of individual solutions, and that means adopting a completely different paradigm of human philosophy and intention. The most pressing demand is how to feed the population of the world, and how to adapt industrialised conurbations, with cities provided for entirely from external regions for their food and electricity. If oil is the most vulnerable element in the energy-mix as the life-blood of transportation, then we must aim to live with less transportation, and this includes the means and distribution implicit to modern food production.

I have spoken about regenerative agriculture and permaculture, in which most of the energy involved in running them is provided quite naturally by native soil fauna fed ultimately by photosynthesis, since the fuel for good soil derives from plants as the factories that supply carbon-rich nutrients and in a wonderful symbiosis, the living soil microbes, especially fungi can draw other nutrients and water from the soil to nourish the plants. The individual elements of life feed one another in a mutually dependent and beneficial manner.

While the two scenarios can be defined and envisaged rather clearly, the intermediate means for transition from industrial to regenerative agriculture is rather more nebulous, since it has not been done before, or at least not in the degree that necessity now demands. So how might we perform this revolution in the least painful way?

For a start, a decolinising and restructuring of present industrialised agriculture is necessary along with an appreciation and magnification of native and traditional food systems. Overall, a change in thinking and concept is required from conflict and limit to cooperation and abundance.

The scale of the transition may be compared with other milestone transitions throughout human history, such as the hunter-gatherers becoming farmers, and then modern industrial societies. It is the latter that are under threat and unsustainable, and a compromise devolution to a more localised collective of small communities (pods) is required, supplied by local farms and infrastructure with rail links between them for essential movement of goods and people. The maintenance of the Internet and electronic communications would seem desirable since ideas and knowledge can be transmitted from pod to pod and between countries and continents.

In the 1970s, there were studies done that evaluated the massive inefficiency in energy requirements for food production. It was concluded that 10 Calories of energy are expended to bring 1 calorie of food onto the dinner plate. It has been stressed that essential agricultural production is to yield food and fibre - i.e. the essential elements of biomass. One might also add-in fuel as a product, if the consideration also includes fermentation of sugars form starch into ethanol, or hydrothermal production of liquid and gaseous fuels from biomass by heating it under pressure in the presence of water.

The impending stress of "climate change" is well acknowledged, e.g. sea-level rise and the spreading desertification of formerly green lands, but its impact on agriculture is rarely mentioned by climate-modellers. However, as a for-instance, it is speculated that the Colorado River basin could dry up. It's mighty dams would then look something like the pyramids of Egypt, maybe leaving future generations to speculate as to what their purpose was, and upon the nature of the civilization that created them. As climate zones shift, it is the variability of the weather that will have greater impact than ramping "mean temperatures" on the enormous investment made by humans in agriculture. The capital outlays required for new dams, irrigation supplies and the retraining of farmers will need to be contrasted with that for flood-defences in vulnerable locations (e.g. New Orleans and the east coast of England). Most likely both cannot be supported and it may prove expedient to simply let some regions "go to the sea".

Biodiversity is a natural means for evening-out the gains and losses of of living system. It is cooperative in the sense that pests are not encouraged as they are by growing single strains of crop, and that suitably matched plants help each other to grow - the holistic whole being more robust than the simple measure of its components. The term "global village" tends to signify an interconnected unity of trade or electronic communication, while aspects of cultural diversity and biodiversity seldom enter the line of thinking. However, it is a necessity to preserve and expand the traditional food and fibre production systems that are tried and tested and whose regenerative capabilities have been demonstrated over millennia. We may adapt to or readopt cultures that have been lost, as industrial civilization has supplanted them, and it is the latter that we must seek to break away from to arrive at a sustainable future, if we are to survive as a human species that is.

If "global village" means "global supermarket", the term lends acceptance to the concomitant rule of multinational corporations. If we restructure societies to become self-sustaining, rather than dependent on inputs and indeed outputs, as they are now, we also must abandon "limited liability" and the legal designation of "corporations" as "persons" with the same rights as individual citizens. Traditional food systems are storehouses both of biodiversity and cultural diversity. It is a pity that the seedbanks around the world contain no information about the culture, economy, details of cultivation methods, flavour or other human aspects of the crops and the food they produce. Including my own musings on the topic, most commentators on the post peak oil world refer to the need to localise food systems, such that small populations are provided for locally by means of community farms. However, establishing regenerative systems to grow food and fibre must include cities too, the design of which must be analysed in terms of the natural mechanisms that interweave them.

It is mostly not realised that the rural development or redevelopment urged by the industrialised nations for the developing world are precisely those they need to adopt themselves. E.F.Schumacher's "Buddhist Economics" which he describes in the bestselling "Small is Beautiful - A Study of Economics as if People mattered", applies equally to the industrialised world as it must of needs de-industrialise, and take lessons from simpler societies which consume far less per head of population. The example of Cuba may be taken as a benchmark for progress, as it has survived and indeed thrived through implementing a system of community gardens, in the abrupt absence of cheap and plentiful oil and fertilizers gifted from the Soviet Union when its regime collapsed in 1989.

We can mention too the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock, which has acted as an iconic beacon to the environmental movement, drawing-in a range of people dissatisfied with the industrial and materialistic way of life, and who seek alternative, more natural and or spiritually rewarding lifestyles, and with less detriment to the planet and life upon it. "Gaia" is holistic in nature and is based on ecology. Rather than an indstrialised "global village" it implies a "globe of villages". Food and fibre production is one of the most important features of the transition to a post-fossil fuel era, to which the establishment of regenerative food systems is essential.

Related Reading.
K.A.Dahlberg, "A Transition From Agriculture to Regenerative Food Systems," Futures, (1994), 26(2), 170-179.

No Water for Biofuels.

The noisy debate over fuel-vs-food is rising in volume, but there is less spoken about the water required to irrigate the land on which the crops are to be grown. It is well-recognised that China is the new industrial nation, in an unparalleled phase of its economic and social development. This might be expected to continue for as long as the West can afford to buy its cheap goods, but in the current recession, that duration is debatable. Underpinning Chinese industrial growth, as for all industrial growth, is energy, and in the recognition of peak oil, emphasis is on biofuel (and all other kinds of energy resource in China, including coal-to-liquids) as products need to be transported for sale. It is aimed that by 2020, 12 million metric tons of biofuel will be produced in China. To put this into context, this is around one fifth of the fuel used in the United Kingdom, per annum.

The fuel is to be ethanol, fermented from corn (maize) which is a relatively water-efficient starch crop. According to a recent analysis (1) to irrigate sufficient corn to produce 12 million tonnes of bioethanol a quantity of water equivalent of the annual discharge of the Yellow River would be required. 64% of China's arable (crop-growing) land is in the northern part of the country, and is already under pressure since the existing use of water exceeds its reserves and water-tables are falling (2).

We have neither sufficient land nor water to maintain the illusion that we can continue as we are, certainly not in terms of liquid transportation fuel and thus transport itself, merely by substituting declining oil and natural gas by biofuels.

Massive water demand should be anticipated in consequence of from expanding biofuel production in other countries too. For example, in India and in the western United States, water tables are also falling. In the latter case, the agriculture is maintained by draining "fossil water" - the Ogallala aquifer which underlies 8 U.S. states. It is voiced too that climate change and the shifting of the temperate regions north may impact further on the American West. In Australia too, another major producer of starch crops, water supplies are also under stress.

It has been reckoned (3) that some 5,000 - 6000 cubic kilometers (km^3) of water would be needed to water enough maize to supplant the world's petroleum based fuel by ethanol generated from corn, in comparison with the entire supply of fresh water available on Earth of 13,500 km^3 - i.e about half of it.

Other potential fuel crops, e.g. wheat, soybeans and rapeseed are even thirstier in their demand for water than corn is.

This is a salient warning and another nail in the coffin of crop-based biofuels. For instance if all the U.K.s crop-land were turned over to make biofuels and no food grown we could still match a mere 10% of our annual fuel budget. I hold out hope for hydrothermal methods, processing waste biomass and algae into liquid transportation fuels and gases, but on a far reduced scale of transportation than we are used to.

We have neither sufficient land nor water to maintain the illusion that we can continue as we are, merely substituting declining oil and natural gas by biofuels.

Related Reading.
(1) H. Yang, Y. Zhou, J. Liu. Land and water requirements of biofuel and implications for food supply and the environment in China. Energy Policy (in press)
(2) S. Khan, M.A. Hanjra, J. Mu Water management and crop production for food security in China: a review. Agricultural Water Management 2009; 96: 349-360.
(3) L.Reijnders, http://scitizen.com/stories/future-energies/2009/04/Biofuels-and-water/

Permaculture... Revisited.

Permaculture is described as a low impact method which uses perennial cultivation methods to produce food crops in harmony with nature. This might sound a bit "new age", but since much of the energy used in mechanised agriculture is to drive processes that restrain the land from returning to its natural wilderness, if productive agriculture can be had at a minimum of this energy input it is a much more efficient and "natural" way forward. Certainly in developed nations, food is not grown locally but must be brought in from surrounding regions, or much of it imported globally. The monoculture system that is typical of modern farms drains nutrients from the land, which is fed with artificial fertilizers, and many of the natural flora and fauna no longer exist.

Such single crops are vulnerable to pests and diseases: for example, the Irish potato famine was a result of Blight disease which rapidly devastated the single species of potato which was being grown at the time and was the staple food for the poor. Previous generations grew cereal crops but since the potato was more robust to changes in the weather and produced about four times as much food per hectare, it became the crop of choice. Production of 'biofuels' is diverting more land to the growth of monoculture crops, and along with the eradication of vast swathes of rainforest, is far less 'green' as a fossil-fuel alternative than is frequently claimed. The necessary competition between growing crops to feed humans and animals or cars has also driven-up the price of staple foods like wheat and corn.

The permaculture approach resonates philosophically with the Gaia hypothesis, first voiced by James Lovelock in the 1960s. Lovelock has himself appeared less green of late, for example in his conviction that building more nuclear power stations in a must to curb fossil carbon emissions and so to ameliorate global warming. Through "Gaia" the whole earth is viewed as a single large organism with many interdependent systems that cooperate through feedback mechanisms to maintain a viable equilibrium. Human disturbance of this balance of nature is believed to have resulted in a loss of biodiversity and raised the spectra of climate change as an agent of the apocalypse.

Although it would undoubtedly mean a complete revamping of the modern lifestyle, especially in the West, it is thought possible that a population density of 6 to 10 people per acre might be supported through permaculture, and in excess of the number that our current cereal-based food economy can sustain. The word permaculture is a portmanteau that contains elements of permanent agriculture, as well as permanent culture, (and permanent "oil dearth" agriculture) as indeed does its underlying philosophy. The Australians, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren coined the concept in the 1970s via a series of publications, in which they addressed the matter of sustainable (low-input) farming (and living) by means of careful design, to create "living spaces" that are entirely in-flow with their surroundings, including perennial agricultural systems which capture water and the growth of a diversity of species as an overall food source.

This is an entirely reasonable strategy in the sense that much of our labour and energy inputs to sustain modern lifestyles (especially in the industrialised nations) is expended to hold-back nature, and to support a bubble whose longevity is limited by the availability of cheap resources such as oil and natural gas, coal and uranium for nuclear power.Within the natural living space, all materials for living quarters and fuel are provided fully from sustainable, locally sourced materials, i.e. what can be grown within the community.

Two strands of the notion have been identified:

Original Permaculture which aims to create a Forest Garden in which plants and animals (including humans) live in harmony.

Design Permaculture which is a kind of compromise, and uses natural processes to create a sustainable living space ecosystem following ecological principles in a more structured way.

The latter is a significant and necessary adaptation of the "pure" notion, since it is unlikely that some god or God will recreate from scratch a garden of Eden (perhaps the first self-maintaining forest garden, or the idea of it) but it can be used in the less adaptive and more proscriptive integrity of a city.

Original permaculture attempts to closely replicate nature by developing food layers which closely resemble their wilderness equivalents. While the end result of Design permaculture may lack the "natural" appearance of a forest garden, the design rests on similar ecological principles. The strategy chosen is derived from observation and imitation of the natural world. Obviously, this appeals to the "back to nature" movement and its philosophy to reject the industrialised world, which it perceives as the source of all evil. In reality, it is the means for industrialisation that is rejecting us, since our immense use of energy is but a brief fling in the context of human existence. To create a permaculture (forest) garden a layer system is followed where farming is organic and the source of irrigation is rain water. The level of cultivation, including tilling is minimised, according to a minimalist use of energy, including human and animal labour.

Perennials (year round plants) provide leaves, roots (which regenerate the health of the soil) and fruit. The upper storey of tree-cover can provide a staple food e.g. fruit or nuts, while its foliage can be fed to animals or eaten by humans; within the symbiosis of flora and fauna, bees naturally pollinate flowers and provide honey in the process. If there is sufficient living space, pigs and chickens can be kept too, since this is not a necessarily vegan lifestyle. Indeed, in nature, animals and plants have a mutually beneficial relationship. By maintaining a high density of desirable plants, unwanted plants, weeds etc. are out-competed and kept down in volume. By means of a diversity of plant types, pests are reduced further by competition rather than being encouraged as they are in monoculture farming.

As two distinct examples of the success of this approach on the scale of nations, we may note Ethiopia and Cuba. The Ethiopian soil is poor and there is little rain, thus three mutual kinds (levels) of plant growth are employed, all of which provide food. The upper canopy creates a microclimate that tends to retain moisture, and the plant-roots grow at different depths, so they do not compete directly for the water in the same soil space. Cuba is a nation which was forced to adapt when the communist regime collapsed in 1989, and they could no longer rely on gifts of artificial fertilizers, pesticides and fuel for intensive farming as a reward for providing the Russians with a missile and observation base conveniently close to the United States. The fuel-shortages curtailed the transport of crops grown in the rural areas to the cities. Hence a more localised approach has been adopted using permaculture techniques, known as urban farming, in which many small land spaces and even rooftops have been turned into growing areas. Cuba is the more salient example in terms of a necessary adaptation of an industrialised society to a low-input arrangement, as is the challenge now facing the West as it must confront the depletion of reserves of cheap oil and energy per se.

It is no coincidence that modern permaculture found a voice in the 1970s, since this is the time of the first (politically driven) oil crises. It became clear that in order for people to be fed they must flee from industrialised agriculture which without large and constant inputs of cheap liquid fuels and natural gas, will collapse. Without these inputs it could not have risen to its behemoth proportions and its products of monoculture. Permaculture emphasises the exact opposite, on low-input and creating crop-diversity; a protection against putting all one's eggs in one basket... and producing only eggs.

David Holmgren is a major innovator in permaculture design, optimised to achieve the productivity of natural ecosystems, and to use renewable (nature's own) energy sources (wind, gravity, solar power, fires, wave, and so on), to satisfy human needs for food and shelter. Holmgren's zone analysis will be discussed elsewhere. Here is a useful summary of some principles of structure and design.

Layers (The Forest Garden).

In permaculture and forest gardening, seven layers are identified:

(1) The canopy.

(2) Low tree layer (dwarf fruit trees).

(3) Shrubs.

(4) Herbaceous.

(5) Rhizosphere (root crops).

(6) Soil Surface (cover crops).

(7)Vertical layer (climbers, vines).

An eighth layer, Mycosphere (fungi), is often included.

In a mature ecosystem manifold and complex interactions are established over a long time. For example in an ancient woodland there are mutual relationships between e.g. trees, understory, ground cover, soil, fungi insects and other animals and birds. Plants grow at different heights and set their roots to according different depths into the soil. This is biodiversity in action, namely that a diverse and interactive community flourishes in a relatively limited space. Also, plants come into leaf and fruit at different times of year - "Come into season" it was called before everything was available throughout the year by energy-intensive growing methods and global imports. However, I think we have lost yet more of our connection with the flow of nature. We are less aware of the changing seasons of growth throughout the course of the year, and the rich and unique bounty that each one brings.

Holmgren's 12 design principles.

These are restatements of the principles of permaculture from David Holmgren's Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability; Also see permacultureprinciples.com:

(1) Observe and interact - By taking the time to engage with nature we can design solutions that suit our particular situation.

(2) Catch and store energy - By developing systems that collect resources when they are abundant, we can use them in times of need.

(3) Obtain a yield - Ensure that you are getting truly useful rewards as part of the work that you are doing.

(4) Apply self-regulation and accept feedback - We need to discourage inappropriate activity to ensure that systems can continue to function well.

(5) Use and value renewable resources and services - Make the best use of nature's abundance to reduce our consumptive behaviour and dependence on non-renewable resources.

(6) Produce no waste - By valuing and making use of all the resources that are available to us, nothing goes to waste.

(7) Design from patterns to details - By stepping back, we can observe patterns in nature and society. These can form the backbone of our designs, with the details filled in as we go.

(8) Integrate rather than segregate - By putting the right things in the right place, relationships develop between those things and they work together to support each other.

(9) Use small and slow solutions - Small and slow systems are easier to maintain than big ones, making better use of local resources and producing more sustainable outcomes.

(10) Use and value diversity - Diversity reduces vulnerability to a variety of threats and takes advantage of the unique nature of the environment in which it resides.

(11) Use edges and value the marginal - The interface between things is where the most interesting events take place. These are often the most valuable, diverse and productive elements in the system.

(12) Creatively use and respond to change - We can have a positive impact on inevitable change by carefully observing, and then intervening at the right time.

Related Reading.

[1] http://www.scitizen.com/stories/Future-Energies/2008/02/-Permaculture---Permanent-Oil-Dearth-Culture/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture

Glomalin, Biochar and the Secret of Terra Preta Soils.

I have given periodic mention to the unfolding aspect of adding "biochar" charcoal to soils, in an effort to recover some of the benefits of Terra Preta - highly rich and fertile dark soils found in South America, in which carbon (char) has been stored for hundreds of years. In addition to locking-up carbon over a long term, as noted, the soil is more fertile than the surrounding (lighter coloured) soils and has better properties in retaining water and nutrients.

Creating charcoal and assembling a kind of synthetic "terra preta nova" has the added advantage that while the charcoal is being formed by pyrolysing biomass, BioOil and BioGas are simultaneously produced. Ideally, the gas can be used as the fuel for the pyrolysis and the oil can be mixed to an extent of 25% with conventional liquid fuel, in the intention that by 2025, 25% of the U.S. oil requirements will be met by means of it: hence the name of the "25x25" club, a political group with this outcome as its primary agendum. It's a tall order and some of the estimates of how much biochar can be made are staggering, up to 9.5 billion tonnes/year, which I don't think is realistic either in terms of land use (growing enough biomass) or building bio-mass pyrolysis capacity on this immense scale. This is an estimate by Professor Johannes Lehmann form Cornell University, whose expert opinion I respect, but I don't see it personally since it amounts to producing about one tonne of biochar/hectare on two-thirds of the entire land surface of the Earth (95 million out of 150 million km^2).

The International Biochar Initiative (IBI) are working to a more modest 1 billion tonnes/year by 2050, and I reckoned recently that almost this amount could be produced in total throughout a collection of world-wide small communities in which each person made 100 kg of biochar per year - or it was collectively made for them within the activities of their community. The latter strategy cuts-down the prohibitively massive centralised plant-engineering required, if it were done this way, to more manageable chunks.

Now, there is the proposition of a connection between biochar and microbial life in terra preta soils, in which mycorrhiza fungi thrive and produce glomalin. I have noted that there is strong evidence that this glue-like glycoprotein is significantly responsible for the storage of organic matter in soil and for soil health. There is speculation that glomalin is the secret of terra preta soils/biochar as a consequence of the elevated fungal population (thought to thrive in the carbon micropores). Glomalin is produced by hair like hyphae filament structures of fungal bodies.

Overall carbon capture and humification in soil is probably the long-term process by which terra preta soils are produced and I wonder how long it would take for a soil, simply amended by charcoal, to become a fully-fledged terra preta with the properties noted. I envisage it is not likely to be an immediate event, and probably the Amazonian indians created these soils over many years, to their fully self-generating glory. The native people described the soil as physically "growing", which may suggest an accretion process involving fungi and other microbiota.

There is an interesting discussion of some of these topics at the link address below. I would be grateful for any input from those who know more than me about these things.

Related Reading.
http://bioenergylists.org/newsgroup-archive/terrapreta_bioenergylists.org/2007-February/000042.html

Peak Oil... Demand for it, that is.

Peak Oil is the global term used to describe an eventuality when world oil production reaches a maximum, and then relentlessly falls. Such "peak" models are based on an inexorable rise in demand for oil, against an infrastructural lack by which to meet that demand (i.e. you can't pump out more). Supply-demand gaps are to be expected en route but once the peak is reached, the shortfall in supply is catastrophic. As a rider to this, it should be noted that while "global peak oil" is a numerical reality - i.e. the maximum sum of barrels of oil ever produced in the world in total, in a given year - the processes of it are rather more subtle, since different fields, under the control of various regimes will peak at different times, thus shifting the emphasis of economic and political control across the globe. Those without oil will become weak and those with plenty of it will become strong - or targets for other nations who want to grab their oil.

Now, the assumption of relentless demand has been called into question in a new report entitled "The Beginning and End of Oil" by Peter Hughes, who is a director of Arthur D. Little's global energy and utilities practice. The main issues surrounding oil, climate change, security of supply, and an amplitude of market volatility that could bring economic ruin to nations and then the world, are lucidly clear. Rather than simply waiting in a spirit of foregone conclusion for these calamities to unfold, it is likely that governments will be forced to act preemptively to anticipate and provide alternatives, which will curb demand for oil.

It is a global energy-mix that is to be contrived, rather than a single solution, which there is not. The recent hike to $150 and then a crash to $30 for a barrel of oil hand in hand with the credit crunch, makes it clear to most governments that deliberately reducing our demand on oil is a policy imperative. Of all the energy-resources, oil is especially vulnerable since more than half of the world's 30 billion barrel annual count goes to fuel transportation. The absence of alternatives to oil-based fuels has cemented the outstanding stature of oil as literally empowering the engines of progress.

However, a chain of policy initiatives spanning the globe is encouraging more energy-efficient technologies throughout the transportation sector - whether on the road or in the air. High efficiency diesel engines and hybrid and regenerative breaking systems can extract more than twice the tank to wheels miles that conventional spark-ignition/petrol engines can. Meanwhile there are aircraft fuselage designs that promise savings of 30% on fuel costs, and high-temperature aircraft engines that recover energy more efficiently from fuel, so long as sufficient quantities of metals such as hafnium can be recovered to bring them to a proficient reality.

Peter Hughes, a director of Arthur D. Little's global energy and utilities practice, said:
"As the number of new policy measures implemented to reduce reliance on hydrocarbons for transportation reaches critical mass over the next 10 years, the world could see downward pressure on demand for oil and oil-products materialize much sooner than the [oil] industry would currently concede. Depending upon how quickly the transportation sector begins its migration away from oil, we could find ourselves at a tipping point in which demand for oil peaks much earlier than the industry currently anticipates, before going into long-term decline."

In the wavering scales of the energy-balance, (the report says that) oil and gas companies should reconsider the sustainability of their business models and accelerate their moves to spread into other sectors of the "energy value chain" (not a phrase I would use but is "management speak"). A greatly increased contribution from coal, natural gas, nuclear power and "other alternatives to hydrocarbons" (whatever they may prove to be) is to be expected.

The report concludes that electricity is likely to be the main supply vector for delivering energy to customers which will "create demand for multiple sources of clean power as well as the infrastructure to deliver it."

All in all, it is better to close the stable door before the horse bolts, rather than after. We will need to make the kind of changes outlined eventually, so let's begin making them now, while we still have enough conventional energy in hand to establish new paths. Probably we are involved in a game of "tag" between reducing demand and falling supply. Whichever comes first will win-out.

Related Reading.
http://www.epmag.com/WebOnly2009/item33676.php

Glomalin - Long Term Carbon Glue.

The name Glomalin derives from Glomalis, an order of common root dwelling fungi such as Mycorrhizae that colonise the root systems of plants, and was discovered only as recently as 1996. Glomalin itself is a glue-like protein which builds a carbon-rich sheath around the hyphae (thread-like tendrils) that grow out from the fungus to form a secondary root system. Glomalin contains 30 - 40% of its weight of carbon, and it is thought might account for up to one quarter of all the carbon that is contained in fertile soils. Glomalin is also a highly resistant material, and can survive being decomposed in soils for anywhere between 7 and 42 years, thus making it potentially significant in carbon storage by soils. Glomalin also helps to glue-together soil aggregates of other organic (humus) and mineral components, and it is believed to help in the formation of humus - a complex process called humification.

Glomalin gives the soil "tilth", which is a discrete texture that allows experienced farmers and gardeners to "know" good soil just by feeling its smooth granules as they run past their fingers. It is thought that glomalin may also make the hyphae sufficiently rigid they can span the air-spaces between particles of soil. It is believed that hyphae have a lifespan of days to weeks, but the much greater longevity of glomalin suggests that the current technique of weighing hyphae samples to estimate fungal carbon storage may undervalue grossly the amount of carbon stored in the soil. Sara Wright, the discoverer of glomalin, and her colleagues discovered that glomalin makes a far greater contribution of nitrogen and carbon to the soil than is made by hyphae or other soil microbes.

Dr Christine Jones, who is an independent scientist based in Australia, proposes that changes in farming methods to those of "regenerative agriculture" are necessary for the full carbon-capture potential of soil to be realised, particularly for Australian soils. She is promoting "liquid carbon pathways", in which plants pump stable carbon-rich compounds into the soil, as part of a symbiosis with root-fungi, which in return syphon nutrients and water from the soil back to the plant via their extensive hyphae systems.

The relationship between the glomalin and the humus is also symbiotic, since the glomalin contributes to the humification and the humus increases the overall fertility of the soil. Humus is an important material in the retention of water in soil. Dr Jones thinks that the assistance of the humification process by glomalin is a reason for a found much higher accumulation of carbon in some Australian soil than had been thought possible. However, she stresses, farmers may need to rethink how they farm to derive full benefits from the process. She is of the opinion that the answer lies in establishing low-input "year-long green farming" methods which maintain green, growing plants throughout much of the year.

At the University of Aberdeen, Dr David Johnson who is a specialist on mycorrhizal fungi, said:
"Many conventionally grown crops have little or no dependency on mycorrhizal fungi because they receive lots of inorganic fertilizers that don't warrant the carbon 'cost' of forming the relationship with the fungi, for want of a better expression. So, moving to low-input farming systems is likely to encourage plants to form mycorrhizas and therefore increase carbon allocation to this group of organisms." It is also known that long fallow periods, heavy tilling of soil, and a number of agricultural chemicals (including nitrogen fertilizers) can damage the fungi and other forms of soil life.

Now, there is corollary line of thinking from the United States, which proposes that it is soil-depth that is critical to whether or not no-till methods actually result in carbon storage. In essence, no-till involves leaving crop residue on the surface of the soil rather than ploughing it underneath. This saves on labour, wear and tear on machinery, soil-erosion, fossil fuels and artificial (oil and gas derived) fertilizers and pesticides, makes the soil more productive (brings it "back to life"), improves habitats for wildlife and overall biodiversity and conserves water in the soil. If the carbon input (storage) exceeds the carbon output (lost), then the method can be considered successful, or the converse if more is lost than gained.

Results from no-till studies are found to vary from region to region, and for example 40% of Ohio's cropland is good for carbon-storage. Where no-till (practised on a mere 6% of the world's cropland overall, and most of that in the U.S and Canada, Australia and South America - Brazil, Argentina and Chile) does not prove effective, other carbon-capture methods can be applied instead; e.g. mulching, cover crops, complex crop rotations, mixed farming systems, agroforestry and biochar . A survey has been carried out of no-till land in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, West Virginia and Maryland by Rattan Lal and his colleagues at the Ohio State's Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Centre, where he is director of the Carbon Capture Management and Sequestration Centre. Lal says:

"Basically, those soils that are well-drained, are silt/silt-loam in texture, warm quickly and have some sloping characteristics prone to erosion are excellent candidates for no-till. Clay soils or other heavy soils that drain poorly are prone to compaction and are in areas where the ground stays cooler may not always encourage carbon storage through no-till."Lal concludes that soil depth is the crucial factor in carbon storage. He says that if you go down just 8 inches, in general, no-till fields will store carbon better than ploughed fields. However, at depths of 12 inches and more, the situation may be reversed.

"You have to go deeper," he said. "We recommend going down to as much as one metre below the soil surface... [to establish a soil ratings guide for applying different conservation tillage systems at regional and national scales].

Put another way, you have to know your soil, as farmers traditionally do. "Soil" is part of a complex interactive system, and there is not a simple "one size fits all" solution. The means must be tailored to get the best results wherever we are. The real solution is likely to be found in the sum of many smaller "solutions".

Related Reading.
[1] http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/AR/archive/sep02/soil0902.htm
[2] http://www.farmanddairy.com/news/no-till-works-but-is-not-always-applicable-for-storing-carbon/11525.html
[3] http://sl.farmonline.com.au/news/nationalrural/agribusiness-and-general/general/soil-carbon-doubts-unfounded/1465172.aspx

George Monbiot: Cats, Pigeons, James Lovelock and Biochar.

In an article entitled "Woodchips with Everything" (Published in the Guardian, 24th March 2009) [1] George Monbiot has put the cat among the proverbial pigeons now fluttering above the biochar camp, probably singing around a fire whose wood is turned partially into a form of charcoal often called biochar to emphasise its biological merits, in particular to lock-up carbon taken from the atmosphere via photosynthesis, and in the process to produce useful fuels in the form of gases and liquids (bio-oil). It is reckoned, in analogy with the original terra preta - a highly fertile black soil (hence the name) - found in Amazonia, that adding biochar to soil encourages the growth of microbes (including fungi like mycorrhiza), which further increases the gravity of carbon in the soil and makes for better soil health. The soil also retains nutrients and water better, thus relieving the impetus of demand on these increasingly restricted resources.

In his inimitable way, Monbiot opens the batting: "It’s a low-carbon regime for the planet which makes the Atkins Diet look healthy: woodchips with everything. Biomass is suddenly the universal answer to our climate and energy problems. Its advocates claim that it will become the primary source of the world’s heating fuel, electricity, road transport fuel (cellulosic ethanol) and aviation fuel (bio-kerosene). Few people stop to wonder how the planet can accommodate these demands and still produce food and preserve wild places. Now an even crazier use of woodchips is being promoted everywhere (including in the Guardian). The great green miracle works like this: we turn the planet’s surface into charcoal." Monbiot makes the point that huge areas of land would need to be turned-over to the production of biomass and biochar, and its likely negative environmental impacts:

"Carbonscape, a company which hopes to be among the first to commercialise the technique, talks of planting 930 million hectares. The energy lecturer Peter Read proposes new biomass plantations of trees and sugar covering 1.4 billion ha. The arable area of the United Kingdom is 5.7m hectares, or one 245th of Read’s figure. China has 104 m ha of cropland. The US has 174m. The global total is 1.36 billion. Were we to follow Read’s plan, we would either have to replace all the world’s crops with biomass plantations, causing instant global famine, or we would have to double the cropped area of the planet, trashing most of its remaining natural habitats."

The Article is also at monbiot.com [2]. Monbiot does make a fair point about scale, as I have contributed on this blog and my monthly column at scitizen.com [3,4] about biochar (and indeed other schemes of "geo-engineering"). The sums are enormous indeed, and I finally concluded that biochar has its best chance if it is produced within localised communities as I gave to the Guardian in a letter which they probably won't print. The Independent newspaper have published a good few of my letters but they seem more interested in detail than the Guardian, anyway you can read it here:

"Sir:
In his article (March 24th), "Woodchips with everything", George Monbiot points out correctly that growing and converting biomass to biochar and other products, on the grand scale is no mean feat. I have done the sums, and they are staggering: http://ergobalance.blogspot.com/2008/09/biochar-atmospheric-co2-mitigation.html:

The truth is that, as fossil energy wanes, we will need to live in less transport-intensive small communities - thus de-globalising the world - within which local production of biochar (including growing algae as biomass for it) is feasible. Such small scale efforts would amount to significant proportions when multiplied by the multitude of humans there is on planet Earth.

Yours sincerely,

Professor Chris Rhodes."

Now, in today's (March 26th) Guardian [5], there is a rebuttal of Monbiot's article by James Lovelock (of Gaia fame), entitled: "James Lovelock on Biochar: let the Earth remove CO2 for us," which contends that Monbiot is right that it would be a false economy to have plantations devoted to the production of biochar, but if other biomass sources - that are simply waste otherwise - could be used, then burying carbon in the ground is a good move toward addressing the problem of climate change.

Lovelock is sceptical about carbon capture and storage (CCS) strategies, e.g. from power stations and industry, but he notes:

"What we have to do is turn a portion of all the waste of agriculture into charcoal and bury it. Consider grain like wheat or rice; most of the plant mass is in the stems, stalks and roots and we only eat the seeds. So instead of just ploughing in the stalks or turning them into cardboard, make it into charcoal and bury it or sink it in the ocean. We don't need plantations or crops planted for biochar, what we need is a charcoal maker on every farm so the farmer can turn his waste into carbon. Charcoal making might even work instead of landfill for waste paper and plastic.Incidentally, in making charcoal this way, there is a by-product of biofuel that the farmer can sell. If we are to make this idea work it is vital that it pays for itself and requires no subsidy. Subsidies almost always breed scams and this is true of most forms of renewable energy now proposed and used. No one would invest in plantations to make charcoal without a subsidy, but if we can show the farmers they can turn their waste to profit they will do it freely and help us and Gaia too."

Now I like this, because it's pretty much what I was saying about small-scale biochar production in "Thinking Positive - Carbon Capture" on scitizen.com [4]. I'm pleased to be thinking along the same lines as the guru of Gaia.

The International Biochar Initiative (IBI), who are effectively the "industry body" for the biochar movement, have also issued a response to Monbiot, in a press release today [6] which makes the point that it is not fair to simply dismiss biochar out of hand because it is maybe one of a hundred different "solutions" to the environmental problems that are posed to human ingenuity on the planet. Here we are really coming back to the matter of "scale" and that making maybe 12 billion tonnes of biochar each year for the next 50 years is probably not a credible prospect. But one billion tonnes per year as the sum total of many local productions, along with several other "biological" carbon capture schemes, as I allude in my "Thinking Positive - Carbon Capture" article [4] could create a viable mix of activity.

There is no single solution to our problems either in terms of environmental pollution by carbon, climate change or the limited store of fossil fuels, most pressingly oil and natural gas, but in the combination and symbiosis of different approaches we can find a new way.

Related Reading.
[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/mar/24/george-monbiot-climate-change-biochar
[2] http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/03/24/woodchips-with-everything/
[3] http://www.scitizen.com/stories/Future-Energies/2008/10/Biochar-----a-Miracle-to-Save-the-Planet/
[4] http://www.scitizen.com/stories/Future-Energies/2009/02/Thinking-Positive---Carbon-Capture-/
[5] http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/mar/24/biochar-earth-c02
[6] I can't find a link to this yet, but I received the IBI press release this morning by e.mail:

Press Release: IBI Response to Recent Guardian Article on Biochar March 25, 2009: For Immediate Release:

IBI has taken note of an article by George Monbiot in the UK Guardian on March 24, 2009 that questioned the validity of biochar as a climate mitigation tool and the scientists and others who support the development of biochar.

The Guardian has published responses from several of those biochar supporters mentioned by Mr. Monbiot, including James Hansen, Chris Goodall, and James Lovelock.

IBI sent The Guardian the response below written by IBI staff members Stephen Brick and Debbie Reed. For more information, contact: Stephen Brick, IBI Executive Director, sbrick5714@sbcglobal.net Debbie Reed, IBI Policy Director, dcdebbiereed@yahoo.com Thayer Tomlinson, IBI Communications Director, info@biochar-international.org


George Monbiot is right on the mark about our seemingly irresistible tendency for embracing miracle cures. And it is refreshing to have the press remind us that the laws of thermodynamics will continue to apply in our quest to reduce global carbon emissions. But his diatribe against biochar-like most such screeds-would have us throw the baby out with the bathwater.
This has been said often, but it needs to be said again: there is no magical pathway for cutting global carbon emissions. There is only a collection of steps-complex, costly, and, politically challenging. Put another way, there is no single remedy for the whole problem; but there are, very likely, one hundred different actions that can each bear one percent of the burden. Serious people have understood this for some time, and this would include, we believe, a large fraction of the general public that Mr. Monbiot presumably wishes to warn.

Biochar, produced and used appropriately, should be considered amongst the hundred. Done right, biochar produces four value streams: waste reduction, energy production, soil fertilization and carbon sequestration. Biochar can be made from animal manures and food processing wastes. These residuals are costly to those who produce them, and create greenhouse gas emissions if left untreated. Bio-gas and oil can be used for heating, generating electricity and transportation. Biochar can reduce the need for conventional, fossil-fuel based fertilizers. Finally, biochar can lock up carbon in the soils for extended time periods.

We don't have all the answers on biochar production and utilization; indeed, the mission of the International Biochar Initiative is to seek these answers, objectively and quickly. We know that there are bad ways to make biochar, that crop monoculture for producing feedstock is not a good idea, and that biochar does not affect all soils equally. None of this should rule biochar out of court, however, as we also are assembling a body of knowledge on how to produce and use biochars that are beneficial. In this way, biochar resembles many other carbon-cutting technologies that face uncertainties. In our case, all we seek is an opportunity to be heard fairly as we move towards Copenhagen. We have no doubt that exaggerating the benefits of biochar is not helpful. On the other hand, the potential of biochar deserves serious consideration. Mr Monbiot's glib dismissal of this potential is unwarranted.

Stephen Brick is the Executive Director of the International Biochar Initiative
Debbie Reed is the Policy Director of the International Biochar Initiative

Plant Nutrition.

Plants require essential raw materials to keep them going, to provide both energy and building blocks for growth. This is true of all living organisms, including humans. Carbon dioxide is absorbed from the air along with water from various sources, mainly the soil, and together the elements carbon (C), hydrogen (H) and oxygen (O) are provided. In addition to these basic units, some thirteen essential nutrients are also required for a crop to thrive: three major nutrients, three secondary nutrients and seven micronutrients.

During the past half century, there has been a depletion of the amount of micronutrients present in plants and thus available to those creatures including humans, who eat them. There is a sanguine quote from Prince Charles, who is a keen organic gardener, and runs an organic farm on his Highgrove Estate in Gloucestershire:

"The New Scientist recently reported alarming research results from a study of the long term effects of the so-called 'Green Revolution' in South Asia. New plant varieties fed with high levels of artificial fertiliser have dramatically increased food production, to no-one's surprise. But it now becomes clear that those intensively grown crops are nutritionally deficient. They lack vital trace elements and minerals, particularly iron and zinc. This deficiency has been passed on through the food to such an extent that an IQ loss of 10 points has been observed in a whole generation of children who have a diet based largely on crops grown in this way."

Actually, years ago as a child, I lived on the Elmstree Estate which is next door to Highgrove, and whose elm tree population was devastated by Dutch Elm Disease, a scourge of the British countryside in the late 1960s/early 1970s. We lived there in a rented part of the main farmhouse (which was the original manor house), since my family are hardly gentry, having fled South Wales where I was born, in the aftermath of my father's bankruptcy. Not such a big deal now but it certainly was then.

As plants grow they remove these essential elements to a varying degree and rainwater leaches out more, so from time to time they need to be replenished and so in conventional farming/gardening this is usually done by adding artificial fertilizers. In permaculture systems, plants die and rot-down and the nutrients are returned to the soil as part of the natural recycling process. The availability of nutrients and their uptake by plants is assisted by mycorrizal fungi which are found in the rootballs of most plants.

The three Major Nutrients are Nitrogen (N), Phosphorus (P) and Potassium (K). Nitrogen (N) is required for healthy stems and leaves. It is an essential component of the amino acids which form the proteins and of the chlorophyll molecules that harvest light to drive photosynthesis. It is normally taken up into plants in the form of Nitrate (NO3-) and to a lesser degree as Ammonium ions (NH4+). Nitrates are easily leached from soil by rainfall during the winter, but when spring comes and the soil warms, nitrogen is extracted from the air and converted to nitrate by nitrogen-fixing bacteria.

When the soil is waterlogged, denitrification occurs by anaerobic bacteria. This is why plants grow better in well drained soil where air can percolate through it. Earthworms play a vital role too, in burrowing through and processing soil, thus increasing the availability of its nutrients and creating drainage channels and spaces for root-systems to grow into.

Phosphorus (P) is taken up as phosphate ions (PO4(3-)), and is a critical component of the nucleic acids, DNA and RNA. The ATP-ADP energy transfer process within plant cells requires phosphorus. It is moved around within the plant, being recycled from older parts to points of new growth. The Carbon Dioxide released during respiration reacts with water to produce carbonic acid and this assists the uptake of PO4(3-) by plant roots. The secondary root-system provided by micorrizal fungi greatly extends the reach of the primary roots and more effectively remove the phosphate ions from the insoluble soil salts.

Potassium (K) is not an essential building block of plants but plays a central role in protein synthesis and in maintaining the balance of water. It also makes plants winter hardy and improves their resistance to disease. Taken up as K+ ions, the ratio of N to K has an important effect on plant growth, the ideal being N:K = 1 for most crops and 2:3 for root crops and legumes. Magnesium (Mg2+) ions compete with K+ for uptake, but so long as the K:Mg ratio is about 3:1 or 4:1 there is no problem.

The three Secondary Nutrients are:- Magnesium, as Mg2+ ions, is the key metal element in chlorophyll, where it forms the centre of the molecule and its light-absorbing process. It is involved in the production of the cellular energy-transfer molecule ATP.
Calcium in the form of Ca2+ ions is required for the healthy growth of new stems as it is used to give cell walls their strength. Sulphur (S) is taken up as sulphate ions (SO4(2-)), and is an essential constituent of all proteins, including enzymes. Legumes have higher requirements for S than most other plants do.

As the name implies, smaller amounts of the seven micronutrients are required but they nonetheless cannot be ignored for healthy plant growth, and are usually present sufficiently in most soils. These are boron (B) as H2BO3- ions, chlorine (Cl) as Cl- ions, copper (Cu) as Cu2+ ions, iron (Fe) as Fe2+ ions, manganese (Mn) in the form of Mn2+ ions, molybdenum (Mo) as molybdate (MoO4(2-)) ions and zinc (Zn) as Zn2+ ions.


Artificial fertilizers are manufactured using fossil fuels and have been responsible for massive increases in the yield of crops achieved in the last century - "The Green Revolution". There are estimates that the yield could fall by about 75% if we stopped using them. Accordingly, it is argued in some quarters that feeding the world's population without modern farming methods and its inputs of energy and fertilizers would require much more land than is available. Others, however, including many aficionados of permaculture dispute this, and argue that if the soil is brought back to its natural state there will be plenty of food for all, albeit not the cereal-based diet we are now used to.

Interestingly, there was a news report (B.B.C. March 5th) to the effect that most of us in the U.K. are deficient in selenium because for the past 30 years we have eaten bread made from European wheat rather than from wheat imported from Canada and the U.S. The problem is the different soil, which this side of the pond is low in selenium but rich in the element in North America and Canada. Apparently selenium levels can be restored to soil by adding selenium-enriched fertilizer, but this is part of the energy intensive process that we are seeking to avoid in preparation for declining oil and gas supplies. On a personal basis, eating a daily handful of Brazil nuts maintains healthy selenium levels but these are grown and imported of course by means of gas and oil, so this is not a long term solution.

If we convert to permaculture and regenerative agriculture in general, we will need to get by without much cereal and provide more of our diet from nuts, fruits and vegetables, and from animals whose grazing helps to till and nourish the land naturally on open-plains. Another good source of selenium is garlic, however, so long as it is not cooked for too long which denatures the compounds that contain it.

Related Reading.
http://www.dgsgardening.btinternet.co.uk/
http://www.permaculture.org.uk/mm.asp?mmfile=whatispermaculture
http://www.permaculture.org.uk/mm.asp?mmfile=whatproblem
http://www.foodnavigator.com/Science-Nutrition/New-trading-patterns-blamed-for-selenium-intake-decline

Magic Fungi: Mycorrhiza.

Mycorrhizae are highly specialised organisms classified among the order Glomales, and are found closely associated with the root systems of around 95% of all plants. The term mycorrhiza derives from the Greek for fungus roots. The fungus may colonize the roots of a host plant either intracellularly or extracellularly and is an essential part of living soil. The relationship is a symbiotic one, in which both organisms derive benefit. Because the fungus cannot perform photosynthesis, to fix its own carbon, it receives some of the carbohydrates (sugars such as glucose and sucrose) which the plant passes down to its roots. In return, the plant receives essential mineral nutrients and water too, from the fungus via its very extensive mycelium which reaches out much more extensively further than the plant roots, and effectively forms a secondary root system.

e.g. On their own, plant roots may be ineffective at imbibing immobile phosphate anions, for example if they are present in alkaline soils (pH above 7). On the other hand, the mycorrhizal fungus can however access these phosphorus sources via its mycelium, and pas them on to the plants they have colonised. Mycorrhizal mycelia have far narrower diameters than even the smallest root, and can hence penetrate more of the soil, so allowing absorption over a greater surface area.

Mycorrhizal plants are often more resistant to diseases caused by microbial soil-borne pathogens, and more readily survive under drought conditions because they can access water more easily. Tilling soil damages the mycelium and so they work best with no-till methods such as permaculture, where they are very useful in transporting nutrients and water throughout the growth medium.

The two principal forms of mycorrhizae are Ectomycorrhizae and Endomycorrhizae. The Ectomycorrhizal Fungi have a thick network of cells which form a sheath around the root hairs of the associated plant and do not penetrate into the cells of the plant, hence the prefix 'ecto' meaning outside (in contrast 'endo' means inside). The Endomycorrhizal Fungi are a more primitive form and have hyphae which do penetrate the root cell walls and on into the cell membrane. They do not, however, enter the protoplasm. Inside the root cells the fungal structure may be tree-like, with fine hair-like hyphae that can access plant nutrients and water through an extensive secondary root system.

One well-known Ectomycorrhizal fungus is the truffle, readily sniffed-out by a pig on a lead. There are several species of truffle, the best known being the Black Truffle T. melanosporum which grows exclusively with oak trees. It is found that when they are grown in a sterile medium plants often do not thrive without a beneficial fungal comrade. To allow new plants to become established more quickly or to get a better growth of existing plants, fungal spores can be added to the soil.

Mycorrhizal symbiosis was discovered around 100 years ago, and since then there has been much speculation as to its role in nitrogen fixation by plants. While there are numerous reports of the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen by mycorrhizal fungi in the earlier literature, it is now thought that only procaryotic organisms can fix atmospheric nitrogen and that both ecto- and endomycorrhizal fungi lack this capacity. It is important to note that many vascular plants possess both mycorrhizae and nitrogen-fixing symbiotic organs, e.g. legumes with rhizobial nodules and non-legumes with actinorrhizal nodules, with mycorrhizae that are either ectotrophic or endotrophic, or both. Nitrogen fixation in forests and other natural ecosystems has recently been attributed mainly to associative-symbiotic bacteria, i.e. bacteria living in the rhizosphere or close proximity of plant roots. Since the roots, in fact, are usually also infected by mycorrhizal fungi, a new concept of mycorrhizosphere has been introduced.

The exact nature of the relationships between mycorrhizal fungi and nitrogen-fixing bacteria within the mycorrhizosphere are as yet not well understood. Nitrogen-fixing bacteria have been found even inside the fungal mantle of ectomycorrhizae, and so the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming that an interplay occurs between the two organisms, presumably to their mutual benefit. Permaculture systems are thought of as nature acting on a series of overlapping layers, where nutrients that are captured at one level are passed down to another, or may form part of the symbiotic mechanism of an individual layer. The forest garden principle which is a series of clearings cut into forest is the supreme example of this action of biodiversity, where each layer and each organism feeds another, throughout forming a balanced ecosystem.


Related Reading.

[1] P.U. Mikola, Relationship between nitrogen fixation and mycorrhiza, World Journal of Microbiology, 1986, 175-282.
[2] http://www.dgsgardening.btinternet.co.uk/
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhiza

Satellite Distances and Speeds.

In order for a satellite to orbit the Earth continually, a stable stationary orbit must exist. We can express (according Newton's Law):

F(gravity) = GMm/r^2,

where G is the gravitational constant, M is the Earth's mass and m is the mass of the satellite, with r being the distance between the centres of the two bodies. We can further express for a simple circular orbit, the centrifugal force (which acts in opposition to the gravitational force):

F(centrifugal) = mv^2/r,

where v is the angular velocity of the satellite. For a stable stationary orbit to exist, the two forces must be equal and opposite, and so we can write that F(gravity = F(centrifugal), and hence:

GMm/r^2 = mv^2/r. By cancelling the terms, m, and rearranging, we get:

GM = v^2 r.

Assuming a circular orbit, the mean angular velocity, v is the circumference of the orbit divided by the time (t) taken for the satellite to make that orbit, i.e. v = 2 pi r/t, and so if we substitute for v, we find:

t^2 = 4 pi^2 r^3/GM.

A special case is the geostationary orbit, with a unique property which is very useful for communications and weather satellites. This is a geosynchronous orbit directly above the Earth's equator (latitude 0°), with a period equal to the Earth's rotational period and an orbital eccentricity of approximately zero. Due to the constant 0° latitude and circular nature of geostationary orbits, satellites in them differ in location only by longitude. In essence, from the point of view of an observer on the Earth's surface the orbiting satellite stands still in the sky, because it moves through its orbital cycle at the same rate as the equatorial surface point below it moves round with the Earth's rotation. Clearly the satellite must sweep through a greater distance than the equatorial surface point below it does in the same time interval and hence it moves at a greater speed, as we shall see.

To compute the size of the orbital radius (r), taken from the centre of mass (i.e. the centre of the Earth), we can rearrange the above to solve for r:

r = (t^2GM/4 x pi^2)^1/3 =

[(24 hr x 3600 s/hr) x 6.6726 x 10^-11 m^3 kg^-1 s^-1 x 6.0 x 10^24 kg/ 4 x pi^2]^1/3

= (7.57 x 10^22)^1/3 = 4.23 x 10^7 m = 42,300 km.

If we subtract the mean earth radius of 6.4 x 10^6 m, we obtain an altitude of 3.59 x 10^7 m (35,900 km).

To obtain an orbital speed, we note that the circumference of the orbit is 2 x pi x r =

2 x pi x 4.23 x 10^7 m = 2.66 x 10^8 m.

The speed is thus: 2.66 x 10^8 m/(24 hr x 3600 s/hr) = 3,079 m/s = 3.08 km/s;
x 3600 s/hr = 11,088 km/hr = 6,930 miles per hour.

[For comparison, an equatorial point at the earth's surface rotates at (2 x pi 6 x 10^6)/(24 x 3600) = 465 m/s = 0.465 km/s; x 3600 s/hr = 1,676 km/hr = 1,047 mph].


Most satellites are launched at much lower orbits, e.g. 500 km in altitude, for use in navigation, telecommunications and other purposes, e.g., the Hubble Space Telescope has an orbital altitude of 559 km.

In this case, t^2 = 4 x pi^2 x [(6.4 + 0.5) x 10^6]^3/(6.6726 x 10^-11 x 6 x 10^24) = 3.24 x 10^7 s.
Therefore the orbital period, t = (3.24 x 10^7 s)^1/2 = 5692 s = 94.9 minutes.

Its orbital speed is 2 x pi x (6.9 x 10^6)/5692 = 7.62 km/s = 27,420 km/hr = 17,137 miles/hr.

The International Space Station has an orbital altitude of 350 km, and so its speed is nearly the same (27,725 km/hr; 17,328 mph), according to an orbital period of 91.8 mins.


Escape Speed for the Earth.
This is usually incorrectly called the "escape velocity" but is just a speed i.e. distance/time since there is no direction specified.

To get this quantity, which is the kinetic energy (1/2) mv^2, required to cancel the gravitational "pull" of the earth, we can write:

(1/2) mv^2 = GMm/r

where r is the earth's radius, and M its mass, and by cancelling the terms m from both sides (which tells us that the mass of the satellite is unimportant and only that of the earth matters), we get:

v = (2GM/r)^1/2

= (2 x 6.6726 x 10^-11 x 6 x 10^24/6.4 x 10^6)^1/2 = 11,185 m/s (11.19 km/s)

= 40,267 km/hr = 25,167 mph. Thus this is about half as fast again as the speed required to maintain a 500 km orbit above the Earth. Satellites will never therefore simply fly-off into space and with the virtual absence of air-resistance above ca. 100 km, there is no mechanism for efficient energy-loss so they cannot simply tumble back to earth either.

However, since there is no atmosphere, satellites are not shielded from radiation from space which tends to concentrate in the van Allen belts around the earth and causes damage to the materials they are made from, and solar cells, integrated circuits and sensors can be damaged by radiation. The inner Van Allen Belt extends from an altitude of 700–10,000 km (0.1 to 1.5 Earth radii) above the Earth's surface, and contains high concentrations of energetic protons with energies exceeding 100 MeV and electrons in the range of hundreds of kiloelectronvolts, trapped by the strong (relative to the outer belts) magnetic fields in the region. The large outer radiation belt extends from an altitude of about three to ten Earth radii (R_E) above the Earth's surface, and its greatest intensity is usually at an altitude of around 3–4 R_E.

It is generally understood that the inner and outer Van Allen belts result from different processes. The inner belt, consisting mainly of energetic protons, is the product of the decay of albedo neutrons which are themselves the result of cosmic ray collisions in the upper atmosphere. The outer belt consists mainly of electrons. I am involved in a project with the Yerevan Physics Institute in Armenia, to simulate the effects of energetic electrons on satellite components in space and under other extreme conditions. At an altitude of 5.6 (R_E) a satellite in the geostationary orbit, though away from the region of maximum intensity, will nonetheless be subject to significant radiation in the outer Van Allen belt.