It is thought there nay be a "supergiant" oilfield underneath Baghdad, which may hold 8.1 billion barrels of oil, and is one of ten oilfields and one gasfield that seems about to come onto the market. To place this into perspective, the entire North Sea reserves are around 4 billion barrels, or half of that; while on the world stage of oil demand it is enough for about three months. Nonetheless, at a current $80 a barrel, the find would be worth around $648 billion, and more as the price of oil will inevitably rise in perpetuity.
Three days ago, BP and its Chinese partner, CNPC, signed the first formal big oil deal since the U.S.-led invasion of 2003. BP has considerable experience of the geology of the region, dating back to its discovery of the Rumaila field in 1953, and between them the two partner companies could invest $15 billion.
Not surprisingly, there is strong interest from various companies, including Japan Petroleum Exploration Company (Japex), who have predicetd that it could produce a daily 400,000 barrels (10% of Japanese demand for oil) when fully exploited, and well above its current output of 17,000 bpd. However, other companies are very reluctant to invest there, so close to Baghdad, in view of the political instability that prevails in a city that has suffered greatly since the war began - for whatever reasons it did.
It is thought that if foreign investment can be garnered both here and for fields in the more stable north of the country, the output of Iraqi oil could be brought up from the present 2.5 million bpd to 7 million bpd within seven years, or encroaching on present output from Saudi Arabia of around 10 million bpd. It looks then that Iraq will become a key player in the future oil game and maybe that's what the war was really about rather than toppling a brutal dictator or intercepting the infamous weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), which were never found.
Related Reading. "Baghdad's vast oilfield presents dilemma to would-be bidders," by Robin Pagnamenta. http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_resources/article6901701.ece
This is the prognostication of Professor David MacKay, who is the U.K. government's chief scientific advisor (following Sir David King), who thinks that emphasis on nuclear power is the only way that Britain can keep pace with its inexorable demand for electricity but at the same time, holding rein on its carbon emissions. On his first day in this new role, Prof. MacKay delineated a plan for the nation could produce a three-fold increase in its electricity by a four-fold increase in nuclear power. I'm not entirely sure how the figures stack-up for this but this is what is written in the article cited below. At any rate, "nuclear" is our only hope.
I'm not immediately scared of nuclear power since for the most part nuclear power stations have run quite safely for years, there being only three really bad accidents that come to mind: Three Mile Island, Windscale and Chernobyl. Apart from the nuclear waste, it is a pretty clean technology too, especially in terms of carbon emissions, so I take his point. That said, we need to import uranium, which is enriched somewhere?, and there are issues over potential terrorism, so I am not convinced by the usual "security of supply" argument for nuclear.
It is reckoned too that there is around 40 years worth of uranium in known reserves and so if we are going to go for nuclear, we need to get hold of a lot more of the stuff. Obviously, if we all go four-fold in our adoption of fission-based reactors, that divides into 10 years worth and since it takes about 10 years to get a nuclear power plant up and running from scratch, we may have left it a bit too late.
I agree with Professor Mackay too that renewables are unlikely to provide more than a small fraction of our energy at least in the short term, and yet in the rounder and longer view they are all we have. At the risk of repetition, this reminds that we have to cut our energy use - transportation is an issue in its own right and will begin to decline in the wake of the most precious and vulnerable of fossil resources, namely oil - by a wholesale relocalisation of society. However, if this is not done in a structured way, and no government wants to point out the severity and proximity of the situation for fear of scaring the living daylights out of its electorate and augering-in anarchy, then it is exactly the latter that is likely to prevail upon us.
Related Reading. "Professor David Mackay: Britain 'must go nuclear' to control climate." By Jonathan Leake: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6860181.ece
I have read two entirely differing articles about the imminence and feasibility of growing algae and converting it into biofuel to stave-off the paucity of oil in the "post peak oil era" as that final descent has been dubbed in some quarters. We have on the one hand the valourous trumpet "Algae biofuel propels a brave new world" in fanfare that the status quo of plentiful liquid fuels can be sustained even in the absence of crude oil, and on the other is a rather more Job's comforting title: "Commercial fuel from green algae still years away." Well, of course it is, but it is a better bet than other alternative schemes particularly hydrogen which has gone rather quiet of late... or is that just my imagination, or perhaps I read the wrong papers these days?
Why do I say "of course it is"? For the simple and sustained reason that appends all efforts to find alternative energy, that it must be got up from scratch. In all cases, there is no commercial scale output from them, beit hydrogen or fuel from algae. Liquid fuels are remarkable and without them the modern world would not have arisen in the form it has. For transportation alone we need to find something like 60% of 30 billion barrels worth of crude oil each and every year, and to ramp up that supplication year on year if we are to believe that the market forces will continue to dictate further demand - i.e. that capitalism is sustainable both as a practice and a philosophy.
I doubt the preservation of either and the energy and resources curve is connecting its ends into a finite loop, set at an elastic limit bent only now in contraction. I have dismissed the hydrogen economy in the immediate term, and since that is defined by plentiful energy which will not be available in the later term, (even beyond a few decades), it isn't going to happen, at least not on the scale of the crude oil economy and there rests the crux of the problem. Algae at least can be grown, with sufficient engineering, on a large scale that does not require prime crop land in competition with growing food crops (as rules out conventional biofuel strategies beyond grants from governments and the European Union), and there is no demand for freshwater since saline water does even better to promote the growth of certain highly oil-yielding strains.
Algae can be fed from waste-streams of CO2 from fossil-fuel power stations as a carbon elimination strategy and can also decontaminate groundwater, so there is a potential mix of environmental solutions in aid of a common goal of fuel beyond oil. That said, it is going to take years, and the sooner we get going the better. I have argued before that the best use of algal technology is to sustain smaller settlements of perhaps a few thousand grown in a "village pond" and processed for local use. There is still no means to maintaining global transportation and globalisation in the absence of cheap oil, and the time limit for this gargantuan and conceptual change is perhaps a decade.
Related Reading. (1) "Algae fuel propels a brave new world,"By Dominic Rusche: http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_resources/article6823231.ece (2) "Commercial green fuel still years away," By Laura Isensee: http://www.reuters.com/article/GCA-GreenBusiness/idUSTRE5975OT20091008
It is claimed that there may be an extra half-trillion barrels of oil than was formerly reckoned, but even if there is, does it really matter? Dr Marcio Mello presented an analysis at the Denver ASPO conference that there may be 500 billion (half-trillion) barrels worth of oil in the sub-salt basins on the margins of the South Atlantic Ocean. The discovery of "diamondoid" structures in oil found at shallow depths in Brazil suggests that a mixing occurs of two types of petroleum, one of which had formed at great depths, below the salt layer that blankets the basin.
I recall, in writing previously about the Tupi field in the Brazilian Santos Basin, that one of the problems attendant to extracting oil from there was the need to drill through the salt, which was over a mile thick, and hot enough that it had semi-plastic properties, which meant that there was a tendency for the hole to close should the bit be withdrawn for any reason. It is also necessary to drill in substantial depths of water and through rock layers too, that act as the "bread" in a salt sandwich, both of considerable thickness too.
The Tupi field is enclosed in a reservoir of limestone at depths of around 6 km, and beneath a salt layer of around 2 km in thickness. It would not normally be expected for oil to exist there as at such depths it would be too hot, but due to a geological effect of deep water and the high thermal conductivity of salt, the temperature is lower than it would otherwise be.
Dr Mello reckoned that overall there may be another 500 billion barrels of oil down there, although there are questions of EROEI and cost of a barrel of oil. Most likely these fields will eventually be developed but the cost of a barrel of oil so derived will be very high, and so this "find" is not the cheap oil the world needs to maintain its energy status quo, but is the stuff of specialist applications for a world which is by then sorely short of oil, given that it is not expected that the Santos Basin will yield significant oil before 2020.
Related Reading. "Half a trillion barrels more," By Euan Mearns. http://thepildrum.com/node/5867
The title is that of the headline in today's "getreading" local newspaper. The latter aptly refers not only to the assimilation of information by the process reading, but also to the town of Reading, across the River Thames from the village of Caversham where I live in south east England, where today one can read about Reading Council's efforts to run its local bus-fleet on biofuels. The article claims that council bosses are left with red faces because said buses were not, as proudly claimed, being run on bioethanol produced "from sugar beet from Norfolk", but rather from wood pulp imported from Sweden, which it must be admitted is rather further afield.
To compound the issue, the council has told the Reading Transport Board (who run Reading Buses) that the bioethanol fuelled buses will be switched to run on biodiesel in view of "the high price of the inefficient bio-ethanol fuel." The article continues to say that, "although bio-ethanol fuel is only 2.61% more expensive than bio-diesel, the bio-ethanol powered buses are a staggering 44.5% less fuel-efficient. This makes them twice as expensive to run than a bio-diesel bus."
"The bus fuel bill is expected to drop from £390,000 a year to £226,000 after the fuel conversion."
Transport spokesman and conservative councillor Richard Willis commented on his blog yesterday: "I suspect this won't exactly help Reading Transport's chances of winning an innovative award on 12 November for the introduction of bio-ethanol buses."
Which is a shame if they have simply been misinformed, "but by whom?", is the question being robustly asked by all political sides.
Related Reading. "The not-so sweet truth of sugar fuel," By Linda Fort, Chief Reporter: getreading.co.uk.
The European Union has a major drive to turn all kinds of waste into energy, particularly from biogas. There are two main incentives for this, the first being the geological feature that natural gas is in finite supply and world production of it is expected to peak within the next few decades, and secondly that burning fossil carbon contributes to the atmospheric concentration of CO2, which some believe will cause global warming and climate change. To address either issue, finding a renewable (non-fossil) source of methane is encouraged.
The claims over how important biogas could be to help secure Britain's energy future are certainly extravagant, and Mark Fairbairn from the National Grid thinks that it could provide for half the country's gas by 2050 in substitution for natural gas [1]. Given that the UK gas consumption is around 103 billion cubic metres [2] of natural gas annually (i.e. around 3.6 trillion cubic feet, tcf) 50-odd billion m^3 (1.8 tcf) of biogas would need to be produced per year to meet this projection. This, roughly (assuming that 6,000 cubic feet of natural gas has an energy equivalence of one barrel of oil) amounts to an equivalent of 300 million barrels or 41 million tonnes of oil. That does sound rather a tall order - to put it mildly.
In Germany biogas is already being fed into into the national gas grid and in Sweden and Spain, vehicles including buses are run on biogas, but they still use an awful lot of oil overall and most of the small number of gas-powered vehicles are run on petroleum-gas. In Yerevan, Armenia, where I was last May, I noticed buses and lorries resplendent with rusty-looking cylinders of gas as their fuel supply, which is more cheaply obtained than liquid fuels, but I emphasise that it is petroleum gas (mainly propane and butane) that is used there and not biogas.
Also in Germany, there are aerobic digesters which are fed by maize (corn) rather than waste and so the same argument would arise over growing crops for fuel or for food as applies to biodiesel production and must ring an eventual death-knell for both biodiesel and biogas, if the latter is made from food too. It is ridiculous to compromise indigenous food-production in any nation, since all nations will find it increasingly untenable to import food on the vast scale most currently do, in the absence of cheap oil or gas.
It is true that a small amount of biogas is produced from landfill and sewage and used for energy in the U.K., but it is anticipated that "new incentives" (i.e. forms of financial encouragement; tax-breaks maybe?) will mean that this kind of conversion of waste into fuel would find more extensive applications, including the use of compressed biogas for transport. It sounds great but I question the usual scale-up and engineering required to inaugurate a huge infrastructure based on biogas. In my opinion, like solar energy, the greatest opportunity for the technology is in providing energy for small communities rather than as some attempt to preserve the energy status quo, which is simply unsustainable without fossil fuels, including gas.
Related Reading. [1] "UK joins European drive to make energy from waste." By Gerard Wynn. http://www.reuters.com/article/GCA-GreenBusiness/idUSTRE5981HY20091009 [2] http://europe.theoildrum.com/story/2006/4/7/192346/7389
The UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC) has issued a report in which it is stated that there is a "significant risk" that world oil production will reach its peak and then fall into terminal decline - i.e. "peak oil". The report further urges, quite logically, that the price of oil and hence fuel will rise and become more volatile and so one might expect will the world economy, given its inextricable underpinning by the price of oil.
The UKERC states that oil provides one third of the total energy used in the world - in fact it is nearer two fifths, at 38% - and that major discoveries such as those by BP in the Gulf of Mexico and by Petrobras in Brazil would only delay the peak by a matter of days of weeks. Well, that's what I've been on about for the past 3 years, and so have many others, but it's nuce to think that the government is being told the story and one can hope that it might act upon this information.
It is of course highly misleading to speak of oil and providing one third of total energy since it does this in a very specific and difficultly replacable fashion. Namely, that oil provides liquid fuels and thus powers practically all of the world's transportation. Without cheap oil, the global ecomony is doomed. Thus any practical action by the British or other governments must be that of inaugurating an infrastructure to feed and run nations as oil becomes a relentlessly rarer commodity.
Related Reading. "Oil will peak in 10 years, Government warned." By Robin Pagnamenta. http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_resources/article6865557.ece
An undersea power link is to be established between Britain and Norway at a cost of around £1 billion. Norway generates almost its entire electricity production using hydropower while the U.K. are planning more wind farms. Establishing a power cable between the two countries could help to smooth-out intermittencies that are an integral feature of producing electricity by renewable means such as wind-power, whereby Norway supplies electricity to Britain when necessary but gets it back again on windy days.
The state electricity company, Statkraft, said the cable would stretch 465 miles across the North Sea to Britain from southern Norway making it the longest undersea power cable in the world.
There is already a link with France from Britain and another currently under construction with the Netherlands. When river levels fell last year with the result that France closed 14 of its nuclear reactors, some of the consequent shortfall in French electricity was met by electricity from the U.K.
The British government is anticipating an increase of wind-energy to meet its target of making 15% of its electricity from renewables by 2020. That said, back-up systems are necessary to provide power when the wind is not so strong, mostly generated from fossil fuels and nuclear energy, but many of these power stations are due to be closed over the next few decades.
The exact details and timing of the project are a matter of negotiation but it does look like an extension of a European power grid concept which if large enough could absorb many of the hit-and-miss power output from renewable resources. There is a large installation called Desertec aimed at producing solar energy in north Africa and bringing that to southern Europe, which could provide it is thought up to 25% of Europe's electricity. Perhaps the future of continental electricity production will be made on a Europe-wide scale, but this still does not solve the problem of supplanting liquid fuels, to replace those currently derived from oil.
Related Reading. "National Grid plans world's longest underwater power cable between Britain and Norway," By Rowena Mason. http://www.newsonfeeds.com/article/10368323/National%20Grid%20plans%20world%27s%20longest%20underwater%20power%20cable%20between%20Britain%20and%20Norway
British Wheat Surplus Consumed to Make Bioethanol.
A bioethanol plant at Wilton (originally the home of the I.C.I. Advanced Materials Centre, and now a science park for a range of companies with similar interests) will consume one tenth of the U.K.'s home-grown wheat crop which is above the national surplus. 450 Million litres of bioethanol will be produced annually from 1.2 million tonnes of wheat. Since the U.K. wheat harvest ranges between 12 million and close to 14 million tonnes, the U.K.'s wheat surplus amounts to between half a million and three million tonnes, which goes for export. The demand by this Ensus plant and another refinery of similar size being built in Hull by B.P. means that our wheat exports will be nil.
Indeed it may be necessary to import wheat given that the combined demand from these plants will be around 2.3 million tonnes of it.
As the effect of peak oil becomes evident and fuel prices first rise in the face of imminent actual fuel shortages, surely it makes sense to grow as much of our food at home as proves possible, which amounts to only 60% at present, the rest being imported, rather than turning a food crop over to fuel production. And in regard to the latter, if the two plants produce say 900 million litres of ethanol per year, which is the energy equivalent of 630 million litres of hydrocarbon fuel, or 500,000 tonnes of it, this is less than 1% of the U.K.'s current fuel demand as is currently met from crude oil.
Related Reading. "Hunger for biofuels will gobble up wheat surplus," By Robin Pagnamenta. http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_resources/article6860936.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=1185799
It takes resources to get resources, especially those of water, one that is often overlooked in the various strategies of obtaining renewable energy. It is reckoned to take 2,500 gallons of water to grow sufficient corn to make one gallon of ethanol, against which the often quoted, but still sizeable, four gallons of water required to produce a gallon of ethanol from corn (or other source of sugar) is a mere drop in the ocean. Indeed, the intention to produce 36 billion gallons of ethanol per year by 2022, would use enough water to keep Chicago supplied for over 100 years. In Illinois, fields are adequately watered by rainfall whereas in more westerly and dryer regions it is necessary for farmers to actively irrigate their fields.
California has given a target of producing 1 million gallons of ethanol annually, but to grow enough corn to do so would need the entire volume of water that is currently diverted from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. Since this is the water that is used presently to irrigate 7 million acres of the Central Valley and provides water supplies for the cities of Southern California, it is debatable there is enough water to fulfil these purposes and that of wholesale ethanol production.
The problem of corn-ethanol, and its water demand, could be circumvented by making cellulosic ethanol instead but this technology is some years off from being one of large-scale production, and realistically, making ethanol in the quantities that are spoken of needs to get away from corn. In Brazil the sugar-cane ethanol industry is mature and is far less demanding in terms of water, since the crop is substantially supplied by rainwater.
I had not thought of there being a resource connection between solar-energy and water, but it seems there is. Photovoltaics are fairly independent of water, and generate clean (green) electricity with little demand once they are installed. The same is not true of solar power plants, for which a technology known as CST (Concentrating Solar Thermal) is more useful, in contrast to smaller, e.g. solar panels on the roof, type installations. CST employs an array of mirrors to focus sunlight onto a working fluid under pressure which is used to transfer heat to generate steam and then drive a steam-turbine to make electricity.
Solar thermal power plants (as do all power plants) produce waste heat, which is removed in cooling towers and released into the ambient atmosphere by the evaporation of water. In reality, beyond the initial stage that uses heat from the sun (and so is entirely renewable) the rest of the plant is that of any other kind of power plant and gets through huge quantities of water. Since it makes more sense to situate such CST installations is sunny spots (such as the desert Southwest), where there is year-round sunshine, there is an additional pressure therefore imposed on regions where securing adequate water supplies is already an issue, for example the Mojave Desert where it is planned to build 150 CST plants.
It is likely that heavy groundwater pumping would kill desert wildlife which depend on precious water from seeps and springs which would run dry. CST plants can be cooled by air but again the desert climate poses a problem, since higher outside temperatures decreases the efficiency of waste heat disposal, and wet-cooled plants are preferred because the heat-transfer is better, meaning they produce 5% more power and are 10% cheaper to build.
The problem is compounded by the effect of climate change which is blamed for a reduced flow in rivers out-west, and a consequent reduction in the amount of available hydroelectric power. The provision of water and energy are not independent agenda and need to be considered in a combined strategy.
Related Reading. "When Renewable Is Not Sustainable," By Robert Glennon. http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4756/when_renewable_is_not_sustainable/
Devices employing billions of heat collecting nanoantennas (“nantennas”) are under development, which may eventually provide a solar energy collector that is amenable to mass-production using flexible sheets, and will produce electricity at night. It is not presently possible to convert the energy collected to electricity but it is envisaged that once this hurdle is overcome, lightweight "skins" could be made to power all kinds of electrical devices from i-Pods to electric cars, at a higher efficiency than is possible with traditional PV cells. The nanoantennas also have the potential to cool buildings or electronics by collecting background infra-red (heat) energy which could be used to make electricity that could provide further cooling by powering air-conditioning units. Since they target mid-infrared rays, which the Earth continuously radiates as heat after absorbing energy from the sun during the day they could be used to produce electricity at night, in contrast with PV cells which are useless after dark. I.R.-driven PV cells are another route to providing night time solar electricity.
A nantenna is an electromagnetic collector designed to absorb specific wavelengths that are proportional to the size of the nantenna. Currently, Idaho National Laboratories has designed a nantenna to absorb wavelengths in the range of 3-15 μm. Since around 85% of the solar radiation spectrum contains light with shorter than infra-red wavelengths, in the range 0.4-1.6 μm it would be ideal to make nantennas of these dimensions to harvest more energy than is possible with PV. Nantennas work in practically the same way as rectifying antennas: namely that Incident light drags electrons in the antenna material back and forth at the same frequency as the incoming light, in consequence of the oscillating electric field component of the electromagnetic light wave. The refractive index of a material has a similar origin.
The oscillating electrons generate an alternating current (AC) in the antenna circuit, which must be rectified to convert it into DC power usually with a diode device of some kind, and the DC current can then be used to power an external load. Since the wavelengths in the solar spectrum lie in the approximate range 0.3-2.0 μm, a rectifying antenna needs to be on the order of hundreds of nm in size to provide an efficient energy collector. Since the oscillating (AC) frequency from the nantenna array is around 10 THz, converting it to the 50-60Hz power that the world uses poses a challenge in terms of using the technology to generate real usable power. The main problem with rectifying diodes is that they have a finite recovery time which limits their operating frequency. Commercially available ultrafast diodes presently have an upper limit of the order of several GHz, and so they need to be made to work faster. This seems to be the principal hurdle to the success of generating electricity using nantenna.
There have been many affirmations to the effect that the theoretical efficiency of nantennas is > 85%, which in comparison with the theoretical efficiency of single junction solar cells (30%) looks very impressive. There is some ambiguity over this, however, depending on exactly how the efficiencies are calculated for the two kinds of device.
The most obvious advantage of nantennas over semiconductor photovoltaics is that the nantenna arrays can be scaled to absorb any frequency of light. Since resonance frequency is in direct proportion to the size of the antenna, the array may be tuned by simply varying the size of the nantenna in the array to absorb specific light wavelengths. In the case of PV the frequency of absorbed light depends almost entirely on the band gap energy, and so the semiconductor material must be changed to vary the latter. Indeed, this aspect of dimensional engineering is in some ways reminiscent of nanotube and quantum dot devices. Although the latter work in quite different ways the point is made that it is not only the chemical composition of the material but the size of its assembly that provides a tuning to the absorption of light that is possible by a device.
Taking the potential of algae into another dimension of energy production, research workers at Uppsala University have produced a novel lightweight battery by taking cellulose fibres from algae and coating them with a 50nm thin layer of polypyrrole.
The batteries have demonstrated charging capacities of between 25 and 33 mAh g−1 or 38−50 mAh g−1 per weight of the active material, can be charged with currents as high as 600 mA cm−2, and lose a mere six percent of their charging capacity after 100 charge/drain cycles. To quote from the link below, "In layman’s terms, these batteries are extremely light and can be charged in “11.3 seconds at 320 mA”.
The algae batteries have yet to be incorporated into a robust packaging which is another challenge for the team who have now made a battery that can take 1000 charges.
The batteries are of interest particularly because they should be cheap and amenable to mass production. However, as a consequence of their “low storage capabilities” they are unlikely to find application in e.g. MP3 players or laptops and certainly not in electric cars.
Prof. Maria Strømme said:
With the technique fully developed, I believe that we may see applications that we cannot really dream of today. Try to imagine what you can create when a battery can be integrated into wall papers, clothes, the packages of your medicines, etc.
At any rate it is interesting, as a cyborg device which does not require metals to make its essential working component, and even the polypyrrole conductor could be produced from biomass. That noted, I don't honestly see this as a saviour technology to obviate the energy crunch, but nor is it promised to be. Probably the most impacting use of algae in this respect is to make synthetic fuels, to replace increasingly scarce and costly oil and natural gas.
Related Reading.
"Green rechargable batteries are made from algae." http://green.blorge.com/2009/09/green-rechargeable-batteries-are-made-from-algae/
Since the year 2000, Russian oil production has increased by practically 50%, but this growth appears to have now peaked. The supply on Non-OPEC oil peaked early in this decade and it was only Russia, returning to force from the prior financial crisis that could offset the fall in the remaining parts of this sector. Non-OPEC accounts for about 60% of world oil production, but within the sector it is Russia alone that has maintained the plateau, providing almost one quarter of its output. Without Non-OPEC it will not be possible to raise world oil supply, and without Russia it would have already fallen. Russia alone could not maintain growth in Non-OPEC, and the peak in Russian supply means that it and world oil volumes must begin to decline.
The unavoidable fall in world oil production has excited the potential for exploration in extremely inhospitable regions of the world, particularly the Arctic. As a kind of dry-run for exploration above the Arctic circle, the Nordic Explorer vessel has "sailed" for Cape Farewell on the southern tip of Greenland. I cannot avoid thinking that the term "Farewell" is an ironic coincidence for the future of a world powered by oil, and the desperation to grab whatever of it is left to be grabbed; wherever that may be. According to the US Geological Survey, there could be as much as 50 billion barrels worth of oil under Greenland, which is around eighteen months worth for the word as a whole and can be compared with the 38 billion barrels produced in the North Sea since development of the region began in the 1960s.
Exploration of Greenland is not new, but so far the few wells that have been drilled there proved to be dry. However, with an inevitable long-term rising price of increasingly scarce oil and rising demand for it, further exploration projects there begin to look viable, on the basis that sooner or later someone will strike lucky. Global warming may prove an ally in this intention, since hitherto ice-blocked waterways will become open, thus rendering greater access to whatever oil and other mineral wealth may lie there. In the past two years, seven companies including Exxon Mobil, Chevron and the UK-based Cairn Energy have bought exploration blocks of southern and western Greenland.
In consequence of the long-term production of North Sea oil, the reserves there are notably depleted and it will require considerable investment and new technologies to get out what remains. The low price of a barrel of oil in consequence of last year's economic crash has discouraged many putative exploration projects, and now the US based Noble Energy has put its North Sea business on the market for $350 million. The firm thus joins an exodus of UK based oil-companies from the region in a move where long-established fields are sold-off in order to fund exploration in new regions, including deepwater projects and indeed the Arctic.
Related Reading. [1] "Oil Supply: As Russian Production Tops Out, World Supply Will Continue to Slip," By Gregor Macdonald. http://seekingalpha.com/article/161119-oil-supply-as-russian-production-tops-out-world-supply-will-continue-to-slip [2] "Oil giants zero in on untapped Greenland." http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_resources/article6832247.ece [3] "American oil group Noble Energy joins UK exodus from North Sea," By Danny Fortson. http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_resources/article6832263.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=1185799
This is a nifty idea: an oil field which employs solar energy to generate steam for enhanced extraction technologies. This particular innovation is due to Brightsource Energy who are using a 29 MW solar thermal power plant at a Chevron oil field based in Coalinga, California. The method of CTSP (Concentrated Thermal Solar Power), sometimes abbreviated further to CSP, uses an array of mirrors to focus sunlight onto a central boiler and so generates steam which can be employed to drive a steam turbine and generate electricity in the usual manner. This is a more efficient process currently than photovoltaic technology, but in the present example, rather than the steam being fed into a turbine, it is to be pumped down the oil-wells to help fluidise the oil.
The oil is thick and sticky at normal temperatures but when heated it flows more easily and can be pumped-out more readily. Oil companies often use steam for this purpose of so called enhanced extraction, but normally it is produced using fossil fuels such as gas, for example in the Fresno and Kern counties of California where the oil is particularly "heavy and gooey" to quote from the article cited below. Since this region also collects some of the most intense sunlight in the state, a happy marriage is to use some of it to get the oil out. Indeed, there are a number of other CSPs planned to be built in this region.
Brightsource has investments from Chevron, BP and the Norwegian Statoil Hydro (from a merger of Statoil and Norsk Hydro) and it has signed contracts to provide some 2,610 MW of electricity generating capacity from the CSPs. The solar-powered oil scheme is more important in view of the fact that a significant part of the costs of oil extraction relies on the cost of the natural gas. Presently, gas prices are around $3 per million Btus (British Thermal Units) and it is thought that once the price reaches $8.5 per Btu the solar steam system will prove competitive with the gas-fired units. Gas prices will rise as indeed will the price of oil and so in the longer run this could be a lucrative investment. I suppose there is less carbon emissions too, although since oil is being produced which will be burned overall it is not so environmentally friendly.
The rider is that the solar steam plants only work when the sun is shining and hence back-up units will be needed, which still use gas; the perennial problem of most renewable energy sources - that the power supply is not constant, be it solar, wind or wave.
Related Reading.
"A Solar-Powered Oil Field?" By Todd Woody. The New York Times, Green Inc. Energy, the Environment and the BottomLine. http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/a-solar-powered-oil-field/?hp
The giant Cantarell oil field, the world's eighth largest will be dead by the end of next year. Output peaked in 2004/2005 at around 2.2 million barrels a day (mbd) but will be well below the 0.5 mpd predicted by the end of 2009 - and extrapolating its apparently linear decline, it will be around zero by the end of 2010. Cantarell was a late field, since it was discovered in 1976, by which time there was a host of new technology available to make sure it kept pumping out oil, and by pressurizing the field, oil was pumped out at around 2 mbd for several years, when without this help a field would normally be expected to fall into decline.
However, a well only has so much oil to begin with and the faster this is recovered the quicker it becomes exhausted. It is likely therefore that the depletion side of Hubbert's peak will be a far steeper decline than the incline that rose to it, for many fields around the world, and it is debatable just how much recoverable oil there is all told. It has been suggested that the use of enhanced recovery techniques - i.e. pumping millions of barrels of seawater per day into e.g. the Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia has damaged the geological structure, meaning that less of its oil will ultimately be recovered.
Added to that it is debatable how much oil there was in Ghawar or in that region in general since the figures have been described as a "state secret". I have talked before [1] [2] on the subject of oil reserves and there may well be more than is typically accounted for. However, the limiting factor in avoiding an oil gap is how much can be recovered of a required quality (heavy or light; sour or sweet) in competition with the prevailing demand for it. The recession has put on hold many new oil recovery projects and the consequences of this will be brought forth as the world economy begins to smile once more. It will be a short-lived expression, however, as without enough oil there is no economic growth possible, but rathermore a terminal decline of all of the economy that is underpinned by oil, and that includes pretty much everything, even producing food.
The world's biggest, the Ghawar field is estimated [3] as having 66 - 100 billion barrels [Gb = Giga barrels] left which is around 2 - 3 years worth for the entire world. I doubt it will be evenly distributed though in the final analysis nor will any of the world's remaining oil for that matter, and even the putative 2250 Gb [3] world total is highly misleading since there is a tendency to simply divide it by 30 billion barrels a year or some projection of up to 40 billion barrels a year based on economic growth models and say, "we have decades worth of oil left so don't worry." We do have decades worth of oil left but we won't be able to pull it out fast enough to match such colossal demands and the oil peak is just that "a peak" beyond which decline in oil on the world markets is a matter of simple definition.
Even in its heyday of 2.2 mbd or 800 million barrels a year the Cantarell complex amounted to under 3% of present world oil consumption. Put thus it doesn't seem a big deal, except to the poor Mexican economy which depends considerably on its oil revenue from Cantarell. The Mexican people will undoubtedly suffer, as will we all since the decline of Cantarell is just what is happening elsewhere, and almost all of the giant fields which together account for 65% of the world's remaining oil have already encountered their production peak. In effect, world oil production has peaked or is so close to doing so that it is a matter of mere semantics to talk otherwise.
Meanwhile I am researching Forest Gardens and Permaculture, since without oil and such alternative means to grow food, especially in a country like Britain which imports 40% its food as carried-in by oil-based transport - and relies on oil to farm the rest of it, we are going to starve.
Related reading. [1] http://ergobalance.blogspot.com/2008/12/oil-reserves.html [2] http://ergobalance.blogspot.com/2008/12/peak-oil-postponed-dr-richard-pike.html [3] http://seekingalpha.com/article/157824-mexico-s-declining-oil-production-clarion-call-for-cantarell
For the fifth year running, BBC World News and Newsweek magazine have joined Shell in a programme to support groups that provide benefit and support for local communities. "World Challenge 09" is a global competition which seeks to reward projects and businesses which bring economic, social and environmental benefits to local communities through grassroots solutions. The winner will get $20,000 and be announced at an awards ceremony in The Hague in December 2009, while the two runners-up will each get $10,000.
To quote E.F.Schumacher, "think global act local" which was the basis of his 1973 bestselling collection of essays, "Small is Beautiful - a study of economics as if people mattered." Indeed, this will become a paradigm for the entire world, not only developing nations, since industrialised societies will be forced to re-localise and rely on local production of food and energy as much as possible, as cheap resources of energy, especially oil, and other materials, notably metals begin to peak in their production, and the shelves of global "supermarket" begin to run empty.
The finalists are (listed alphabetically by country):
• Afghanistan: ‘Patterns of Change’ – Afghan Hands – assisting and educating women who have been widowed or are unable to provide for themselves as a result of conflict, economic desolation and erosion of serviceable infrastructure.
• Kenya: ‘Fuel Cell’ – Kenya Biogas – promoting an environmentally friendly way of tapping biogas as a clean source of energy.
• Haiti: ‘Love n’ Haiti’ – South-South Co-operation – a multi-dimensional effort to reduce violence and gang clashes in the Carrefour Feuilles district in Haiti, stimulating local economic activity and improving living conditions in the neighbourhood.
• India: ‘Solar Sisters’ – Barefoot Women Solar Engineers of Africa – improving the lives of people living in rural parts of Africa by training them to make clean, renewable and low cost sources of energy.
• Indonesia: ‘Nothing Wasted’ – Danamon Go Green, Danamon Peduli Foundation – converting traditional market waste into organic compost to be distributed amongst local farmers.
• Israel: ‘Off Grid Aid’ – Comet ME – providing basic energy services to off-grid communities in occupied Palestinian territories, in a way that is environmentally and socially sustainable.
• Namibia: ‘No Beating About The Bush’ – The Cheetah Conservation Fund Bush Project – harvesting thornbushes to restore farmlands, using environmentally and socially appropriate means and providing much-needed jobs to locals.
• Sri Lanka: ‘A Bright Idea’ – Safe Bottle Lamps – producing a simple, safe lamp that can be easily mass produced at low cost, using recycled glass. It is an effective, inexpensive and quick solution to serious burn problems encountered in many developing countries.
• Thailand: ‘Old School Thai’ – Andaman Discoveries – began as a tsunami relief effort and is now a leader in sustainable travel and development. It allows visitors and volunteers to directly support community education, village-led conservation, and cultural empowerment.
• UK: ‘Emission Control’ – Mootal – reducing methane emissions by up to 94% with the use of a simple garlic extract, while also improving the efficiency of livestock production.
• UK: ‘Jiko Rescue’ – Stoves for Survival – reducing reliance on local natural resources through the production and distribution of fuel-efficient ‚ ‘Jiko’ stoves, which reduce the consumption of firewood and charcoal by at least 55%.
• USA: ‘Fungi Town’ – BTTR Ventures – turning one of the largest waste streams in America and the vast quantities of coffee ground waste generated daily, into a high-demand, nutritious, and valuable food product for local consumers.
BBC World News will broadcast six 30-minute programmes profiling each of the World Challenge 09 finalists, showing how their projects and businesses are changing lives and local communities. In addition, Newsweek will detail the projects in six advertorials. The audience and readers are then invited to vote online www.theworldchallenge.co.uk - for their favourite project or business from 28 September.
For further information: BBC World News Press Office Tel: +44 208 433 2419 E-mail: bbcworldnewspressoffice@bbc.com
Soil-Bugs Provide Eco-Solution to Plastic Pollution.
Despite the ubiquitous uses of plastics, from an environmental perspective they are a menace. Rebecca Hosking's "plastic bag" campaign is well known, when driven by the horror of her first-hand experience as a wildlife photographer seeing birds and sea-creatures tangled-up in plastic that had crossed the world's oceans, she persuaded her home town of Modbury in Devon to ban plastic bags in the shops there. Most plastics are extremely resistant to biological degradation and are expected hang around for centuries, causing much environmental calamity. They are also a significant component of landfill. What then, if a simple, cheap and eco-friendly process could be devised with which to not only decompose plastic waste, but to turn it into useful products? There may indeed be such a solution according to the promise of preliminary results from labs around the world, in the form of pseudomonas putida - a bacterium found in soil, known for its ability to destroy naphthalene as a soil-contaminant.
A modified version of the pseudomonas bacterium has been shown able to decompose styrene, which is recovered by pyrolysis (thermal decomposition in the absence of oxygen) of styrofoam (polystyrene), and to convert it into polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA), which are themselves useful plastics, e.g. in medical procedures including skin-grafts, but are biodegradable. Dr Kevin O'Connor at University College Dublin thinks that the bacteria can save the world from being suffocated by toxic plastic waste. The bacteria seem to show an affinity for aromatic molecules, and so feed on polystyrene, polyethyeneterephthalate (PET), which in low-grade form is used to make plastic drinks bottles. Thus, rather than all of this ending up in landfill, it can be used as a feedstock for production of PHA in digesters in which pseudomonas putida grow, using the waste plastic as an energy source.
Around 126 million pounds (sixty million tonnes or so) of styrene waste is released into the environment in the United States each year, contaminating ground, water and air. Styrene is itself carcinogenic (causes cancer). O'Connor believes that within five years, each pound of styrene will be convertible by pseudomonas into half a pound of useful PHA. To place this in context, 126 million pounds of styrene waste could yield 63 million pounds of PHA which is about the same amount that Americans buy each year in terms of plastic goods. When exposed in soil, air or water for several weeks, the plastic simply degrades like a banana-peel. It may be possible to genetically modify the bacteria so that it eats other kinds of toxic waste and converts that to different kinds of useful, biodegradable plastic.
The new, useful plastic can be recovered from the bacterial cells simply by treating the mixture with a mild detergent, which breaks down the cell walls and releases the PHA as tiny granules - nonetheless, separating the plastic from dead cell debris does pose a challenge. The pound to half a pound conversion figure, while being an optimistic projection in five years time, is quite a leap from the mere pound to a tenth of a pound that is obtained using the current technology. If the process can be made cheaper and the price of the PHA pound for pound reduced to a similar order as that for conventional oil-based plastics, then business is likely to be more interested, and that is likely key to the success of this technology. I am enthused by this, as a good example of working with nature to find a solution to an environmental problem, which does not add a greater burden, e.g. using detergents to break-up oil slicks, but that a living organism can be grown to do the job rather than placing a further reliance on oil-based chemicals, which have both caused the problem in the first place and are likely to soon run into short supply.
Related Reading. http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2005/tc2005033_0514_tc119.htm
A glacial lake has formed above the town of Grindelwald in the Swiss canton, Bern. Since the lake has no overground drainage, it poses a risk of bursting through the weakest point and flooding the valley below. The formation of the lake is attributed to global warming over the Alps and melting of the lower Grindelwald glacier (Unterer Grindelwaldgletscher, in German) leaving a huge basin filled with meltwater. I have noted before that I am convinced by the recession of this glacier, that I have witnessed personally over the past 25 years that there is a redistribution of heat over the earth, and the Alps are indeed warming, whether the planet as a whole is or not. In 1984, my wife and I actually sat on the edge of the glacier, so close was it to the alpine path; now it has receded tens of metres back.
I became aware of this glacial lake only last week, while visiting the Bernese Oberland, and finding the Glacial gorge (Gletscherschluct) was closed beyond the first 150 meters. The reason for this is that a serious engineering project is now underway to help the lake to drain. A tunnel is to be dug by drilling and blasting some 2 km diagonally in the flank of the Maettenberg mountain to the glacial lake, allowing a giant "plug-hole" through which the lakewaters can drain into the gorge. It is proposed that the working 700 metre "hole" will be ready by september (the lower 1.3 km being only to provide an access channel), and allowing that 3 metres of rock are advanced by each blast, this must amount to say three blasts per day (over 60 or so days), removing around 11,000 tonnes of rock altogether, in 15 tonne segments, the detritis from which will be cleared out by a large scooping-machine that can traverse the incipient tunnel, and dumped into the gorge. Interestingly, enormous quantities of rock are discharged into the gorge and Luetchine river system there naturally, and further downstream there is a cement factory, which uses this bestowal of rock (converted to a pulverised form) as a useful raw material, so nothing goes to waste. A good example of Swiss pragmatism.
The lake is 700 metres long, 300 metres wide and 35 metres deep and is estimated to hold currently 1.7 million cubic metres (tonnes) of water. It is feared that an avalanche or heavy rainfall could trigger severe flooding of the areas below, even as far as Interlaken. Since this is a central region for tourism in Switzerland, if it did flood it would be very bad for business.
It is planned that the drain will be in full operation by spring 2010.
Related Reading. http://www.swisster.ch/en/news/science_tech/glacier-lake-threatens-grindelwald-valley-again_118-1744828 http://www.gletschersee.ch/jmuffin/upload/Flyer_Gletschersee_e.pdf
A mycelium (plural mycelia) is the vegetative part of a fungus and consists of a mass of branching, thread-like tendrils called hyphae [1]. Fungal colonies composed of mycelia are found in soil and on or in many other substrates. Usually, a single spore germinates into a monokaryotic mycelium which cannot reproduce sexually; however, when two compatible monokaryotic mycelia join and form a dikaryotic mycelium, that mycelium may form fruiting bodies such as mushrooms. A mycelium may be minute, forming a colony that is too small to see, or it may be extensive, as in the following quote:
Is this the largest organism in the world? This 2,400-acre (9.7 km2) site in eastern Oregon had a contiguous growth of mycelium before logging roads cut through it. Estimated at 1,665 football fields in size and 2,200 years old, this one fungus has killed the forest above it several times over, and in so doing has built deeper soil layers that allow the growth of ever-larger stands of trees. Mushroom-forming forest fungi are unique in that their mycelial mats can achieve such massive proportions.
—Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running [2]
It is through the mycelium that a fungus can absorb nutrients from its environment, which it does via a two stage process. Firstly the hyphae secrete enzymes onto a food source, which break down polymers into monomer units, which are then absorbed into the mycelium by processes of active transport and facilitated diffusion. In both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, mycelium plays a vital role in the decay of plant matter, and it contributes to the organic component of soil releasing CO2 back into the atmosphere as it grows. The mycelium of mycorrhizal fungi acts in symbiosis with a plant whose roots it has colonised, and acts as a conduit for water and nutrients such a phosphorus to the plant, receiving in return sugars from the plant which it produces through photosynthesis [3]. Some resistance is conferred also against plant pathogens by mycelium, and which also provides a food-source for many soil invertebrates - beetles and worms, etc.
Since one of the primary roles of fungi in an ecosystem is to decompose organic compounds, it is proposed that fungi have the potential to clean-up pollutants such as petroleum (oil) and pesticides from the environment as part of a bioremediation strategy. Indeed, Paul Stamets has proposed that there are "6 Ways Mushrooms Can Save the World", in a recent lecture [4], from which I have summarised the following:
He proposes that the Earth has now entered the sixth major extinction cycle (6X) on the planet and it is debatable whether humans will survive or not. Mycelium infuses all landscapes, is extremely tenacious and can bind together 30,000 times its own mass of soil. They give rise to the humus soils across the continents of the earth. Amazingly there is a multi-directional transfer of nutrients between plants, mitigated by mycelium - thus the mycelium is the "mother" that gives nourishment from alder and birch trees to hemlocks, cedars and Douglas firs.
Humans are related closely to the mycelia, and we both inhale oxygen and exhale CO2. Indeed, we are closer to fungi than we are to any other kingdom of life. A group of 20 biologists researching into eukarotic microbes published a paper two years ago in which was proposed "opisthokonta": a super-kingdom that connects animalia and fungi. Indeed, humans and fungi share the same pathogens. Since fungi resist the action of bacteria through natural antibiotics, our best antibiotic drugs come from fungi. It is only having spored (sporulation) that fungi rot, and the sequence of microbes that grow on rotting mushrooms are vital for the overall health of the forest. The microbes give rise to the trees and create the debris fields that feed the mycelium, which spreads underground. In a single cubic inch of soil there can be more than eight miles of cells.
Fungi were the first organisms to come onto land some 1.3 billion years ago, followed by plants several hundred million years afterwards. The two realms are connected mechanistically: namely that the mycelium produces oxalic acid (two CO2 molecules joined together) and many other kinds of acid and enzymes. The acids produced react with rock and form calcium oxalate and other salts, which causes the rock to crumble and is the first step in the generation of soil. Hence fungi and mycelium sequester CO2 in the form of calcium oxalate.
Specifically, the six solutions are:
(1) To decompose diesel and other petroleum waste - e.g. as in an oil spill. Notably, the mushrooms grow happily and decompose even toxic polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAH). The ecosystem is restored too, since the fungi act as vanguard species that provide a way in for other biological communities.
(2) As biological filters called "bunker spawn" to remove E.coli or other biological undesirables, from downstream water from farms or factories. Mycelium can also be used to filter silt from runoff from logging roads.
(3) Mycelium and its metabolites are active against smallpox viruses and both flu A viruses - H1N1, H3N2 - and flu B viruses. In a blend combination, a selectivity index of greater than 1,000 was found against H5N1.
(4) Extracts of mycelium are powerful insecticides, and are active against carpenter ants, termites and fire ants, which has huge implications to prevent insects from eating wood-framed houses.
(5) Paul Stamets has invented the Life Box, which is a means for producing various seeds, fungi, crops, beans or corn, or even an old growth forest, in which is initially supplied shoes, say, but unlike the standard lifeless "cardboard box" which may simply be recycled as cardboard, the corrugated structure of the life box having been priorly seeded, it thus generates new plant life if simply put outside and watered.
(6) In the latter example, the mycelium converts cellulose into fungal sugars, and so offers the potential for ethanol production from the sugars. The "fuel" is called Econol. Growing mycelium in soils helps to regenerate the soil and acts as a carbon storage system.
There is much to be recommended here and I feel that mycelia could be a useful member of the biological arsenal with which to restore soil health and capture unwanted atmospheric carbon, along with other methods of regenerative agriculture, and also to produce useful chemicals without the need for oil as the raw feedstock.
"University Shambles" is the title of my recent novel (http://universityshambles.com) which is a black comedy but it does satire some of the worst developments in the vastly expanded and rejigged university system, as noted by a recent reviewer:
“A highly amusing insight into the university sector as it has recently expanded relentlessly under government edict. It presents a devastating picture of the extent to which the notion of scholarship has been betrayed by a culture of managerialism, where the mediocre is airbrushed into ‘excellence’, and achievement in research is subordinated to the spurious concept of‘ ‘academic leadership’ to engineer bogus professorships for the unworthy. One’s heart bleeds for the unfortunate hero lured by an unscrupulous vice-chancellor to throw in his lot with an institution where academic subjects are forced into an endless cycle of mergers with business-orientated units and his research belittled by envious superiors. One wishes only that we are given here a parody of life in some institutions – no such luck. A thoroughly good read, but best taken with a large scotch at hand to dull the pain as Charles’ life unravels.”
I couldn’t have put it better myself, and it’s all really rather sad. In principle, the idea of expanding access to higher education seems like a move of great social progress, but when thousands of graduates leave somewhere now called a university with a degree that does not fit them for the “world of work” (WoW), and having inherited a massive debt to boot, it is dubious that the opportunities of the young have been enhanced at all, and probably the reverse is the case. One vice chancellor is noted recently as saying that the university system is “no longer fit for purpose” and his university has now introduced a WoW course which teaches fledgling graduates among other things the importance of setting an alarm clock to get out of bed on time in the morning. Good for him in tackling the situation, but it does rather make an indictment of what the system has become.
Prior to 1992, there were polytechnics and universities and the two brands of institution had not been forged for a single purpose. The polys were excellent at their job and more practically based than the universities, and tended, having arisen from agglomerations of local colleges of technology, teacher training, agriculture and maybe business and the arts, to train their students to work in industry, and indeed had good connexions with local industry. The universities were autonomous institutions, with a strong commitment to academic freedom, but sadly in recent years more than one professor has been evicted by one means or another for voicing their opinion not only on what has happened to higher education but other matters too, which had been taken as a breach of confidence especially if the “university” they worked for had some vested interests in them.
The title “professor” is an issue in its own right, and indeed the right of entitlement to it. In the vastly expanded university system, there are professors with little or no credibly published work and yet they are supposed to be professor of a material subject such as “chemical education”, "evolutionary biology" or the like. This sounds good until someone looks into the credentials of such people and if an investigative journalist were to do that it would look highly embarrassing both for the individual and the university. However, many former polytechnics, in their attempt to become universities as they were urged to do in 1992, seem to have handed out the title and also the second in line to it - Reader - to members of staff for academic leadership (i.e. being head of department) or other more vague reasons, so that the accepted meaning of these titles is becoming devalued or lost entirely in some cases.
On inspection of the “criteria for promotion to reader and professor” at some universities, indeed research as measured by publications in internationally renowned journals is subordinated to perhaps fourth on the list below administration, academic leadership, course-design and so on. All are an essential part of a professor’s job but prior to 1992, without serious scholarship in evidence such an elevation would have been unthinkable; now it is commonplace. There are subjects too, such as Pharmacy Practice, where in order to attract someone from the profession - i.e. who has practised as a pharmacist - the only way that this kind of salary can be matched is to award them a professorship, even though they may have very weak scholastic accomplishments indeed. This sadly is the case even in some of the older and more established universities, not just ex-polys. The latter must appear particularly galling to members of staff in other subjects like physics and chemistry who despite excellent publication records and other internationally recognised measures of academic worth, are held-back on the reader scale for years and denied a professorship.
There has never been a time when Britain needs its higher education more than now. We are in the gravest economic peril, and probably the world is now at the end of capitalism with relentless growth no longer possible. As both oil and gas become rapidly more expensive and more scarce, revamping our farms to run on sustainable agriculture rather than oil-based fuels and fertilizers made from natural gas, providing as much energy as is possible from renewables, and most importantly developing the means for living which use far less energy are key to the survival of the nation. Bringing all of this about will take a great volume of such practical skills as were dispensed excellently by the polytechnics and their forerunner colleges, and we need a return to down to earth establishments like this, rather than “new universities” who are awarding degrees in media, psychology, football studies and so on, due to the government’s bums on seats funding policies.
The polytechnics should be fully reinstated with pride, and funded accordingly: we need good polys, not bad universities.
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. However, it is clear that the elevation in CO2 levels during the past half-century correlates closely with the mass of fossil carbon, burned in the form of coal, oil and natural gas during this same period, of which natural carbon sinks absorb around 40%. That the excess carbon originates from fossil sources is further supported by a decreasing ratio of atmospheric 13C/12C carbon isotopes.
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 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.
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
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 YomKippur (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
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
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
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 deJaniro 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 PetroleoBrasileiro SA and GalpEnergiaSGPS 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
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.
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.
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 10years. 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
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.
