Coal mining, the treatment of coal miners by mine-owners and by various governments, and their attendant social strife feature among the saddest and most shameful periods of British industrial history. The "Custer's Last Stand" made by Arthur Scargill, leader of the Miners' Union, in 1984, in opposition to the government's plans to close many mines on grounds of uncompetitiveness, seemed to seal the death knell of much of the coal industry and the power of the trade unions. Scargill's main problem was that most of the country's miners did not support the strike, and as a consequence a siege situation resulted, with the Yorkshire miners firmly entrenched since the country did not depend on the output of coal from there.
Led by Margaret Thatcher, her government were determined that the miners would not bring them down, as had happened to a previous Conservative leader, Edward Heath, and his government in the previous decade, which was fraught with industrial action, the most infamous being the "wildcat strikes", where a union would pull all its members from their jobs "in sympathy" with another completely unrelated trade union. Heath was forced to put the country on a "three day week" by the miners, since the provision of energy, based on coal, was insufficient to keep the factories etc. running over the full week, which then was about 40 working hours for most workers.
The whole sorry business came to a head in the so called "winter of discontent" when dead bodies went unburied and rubbish was piling-up in the streets. Having lost all faith in the "Labour Party", the electorate swept the Conservative Thatcher government to power in the 1979 election, which went on to smash the trade unions, devolving them of their power by destroying much of the UK's manufacturing industry, of which there is merely a vestige remaining. By the late '70's UK manufacturing had become very uncompetitive with the cost of imports from the Far East, with far high productivity and staggeringly cheaper labour costs.
In the public imagination, the British coal industry has been consigned to the realm of history, especially as much was made of the sealing-up of formerly working mines, which were closed anyway, despite Mr Scargill's efforts, with concrete, in an act sounding of spite as much as an iron hand closing the dark side of trade union history. Don't get me wrong, without the trade unions and their members and founders who put their own security - and that of their families - on the line (e.g. the Tolpuddle Martyrs" who were transported for life to Australia), our contemporary comfortable lifestyles in this country would not have come about. The 1910 Tonypandy marchers in South Wales (where I am from originally) are also significant in their struggle for fair conditions and pay from the mine-owners, as is the fact that during the general strike in 1926, Winston Churchill sent the army in against the miners, many of whom had fought for their country during "The Great War", in addition to digging out her coal for her! It is just that the cause was hijacked somewhere along the way, culminating in the absurd 1970's situation, almost it seems as a device to destroy the nation's economy.
Against this backdrop, however, the UK still produces around 20 million tonnes of coal annually. As of the last 18 months, the proportion of electricity generated using coal has risen from one third to one half of the total. We also import another 40 million tonnes of coal, mostly from Germany. The industry is experiencing something of a renaissance, and I wrote recently about the re-opening of the mine at Cwmgwrach (pronounced, "Coom-rack"... close, anyway!) which is thought will yield about one million tonnes of coal. True, this is a drop in the bucket, but the UK is thought to be sitting on 1.5 billion tonnes of coal, which are accessible within existing holdings (i.e. you could just keep digging to get at it), and around 190 billion tonnes altogether, but most of that would need a completely new network of mines dug to get at it; a considerable undertaking. Assuming an average seam depth of 2 metres, that amount of coal would lie under around one third of the entire UK land area. Quite a lot of it is actually under the North Sea, but the comparison lends some element of scale to the enterprise.
Coal production at the Hatfield Colliery (in Yorkshire) formally ceased in 1994 (ten years after the "Last" miners' strike, from which many miners and their families are still in debt); however, after 13 years it is one again producing coal. An investment of £100 million ($190 million US) has been made in the colliery and there are plans to build a "clean" coal-fired power plant at a cost of £1 billion (about typical for a new power plant, which are reckoned at about $1,500 per kilowatt of generating capacity, and are typically of 1 Gigawatt output). Much of the investment has been secured by the colliery owner, Sir Richard Budge (I hadn't realised that he had been awarded a knighthood, but that sometimes happens for captains of British Industry - if the government are particularly appreciative of their efforts - so congratulations to him!), from Russian investors into his company, which is called "Powerfuel". There are Russian investors in football clubs over here now, so why not in a colliery?
Locating the new coal has been difficult, and there were many doubters even among the miners at the coal-face themselves, who had to tunnel through yards of stone before striking coal. There are bad memories in Hatfield about the 1984 strike, and it is said that "police" were waving their pay-packets (there was plenty of overtime to be had during the darkest days of the strike) at the striking miners who they knew were very short of money. Hatfield was the only mine that was left open (not sealed with concrete), presumably in the insurance that we might need coal again one day, once gas prices had risen again. The perceived "uncompetitiveness" of coal was not only against the cost of cheap coal that could be imported from other countries but also against the cost of using cheap natural gas to fire power stations. This is also why the UK's CO2 emission figures look good around the first part of the 1980's, because less CO2 is produced per unit of energy from burning methane than coal. However, with rising gas prices, and the fall in the output from our own North Sea fields, coal is once more a viable option.
I have no doubt that we will see a rapid upsurge in the getting and use of coal during the next decade and beyond, as the impending shortfall in other fossil fuels, oil and gas hits. I suspect the latter forms will be manufactured to some extent from coal, which is a well tested technology although to do it on any significant scale will also need a brave new generation of power and coal gasification/liquefaction plants to be created.
Related Reading.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/topstories/tm_headline=black-gold Story: "Black Gold", by Lucy Thornton.
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Monday, April 09, 2007
Welsh Town Prepares for Peak-Oil.
I wrote an article entitled "Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT), and Sustainable Living in a Small Community," which I posted on 2-3-07, following a very pleasant trip to the beautiful coastal town of Aberstywyth, in west Wales, last month, set on a bay surrounded by hills. On looking down from a hill, over the town and the bay, I felt reminded of Under Milk Wood, by Dylan Thomas, and his description of the Welsh (of whom I am one!) indeed living in a small community. (The population of "Aber" is about 20,000, half of whom are students and staff from the university). The essence of CAT (which is located fairly nearby) is sustainable living, and progress made by pioneers - it is fair to call them that, in the spirit of a salute) -during the past three decades has resulted in a community that uses probably less than one tenth the energy that we normally do, and achieved through a combination of energy-efficiency, conservation and generating electricity from entirely renewable resources; albeit with a trade-system involving the national grid. Please take a look at that article for further details and my immediate impressions. However, the inspiration for the present posting is my reading that the Welsh town of Lampeter has begun its own transition to a life without oil.
There are no two ways about it. The age of cheap oil is coming to its own natural conclusion. We have used just over one trillion barrels of oil, since the first commercial oil-well was sunk in Pennsylvania in 1859, and we have just under one trillion barrels of oil left in known reserves. According to the famous analysis made in 1956 by M.King Hubbert, that point of "half-empty" (and we are very likely a little less than that) coincides with the peak of oil-production. It is probably only enhanced methods of oil recovery that have obscured this fact, and their consequence is that we have been able to continue draining the wells at a more rapid rate than without them. The upshot is that the remaining oil will be mostly not of the "sweet" (low sulphur) "light" (low viscosity) kind, but "heavy oil" and will be consequently harder to purify and refine. Indeed, it will be more effectively burned in Diesel engines, rather than spark-ignition engines which have been developed to use gasoline rather than fuel-oil.
In Lampeter was held the largest public meeting that anybody could recall, at an attendance over 450 from a total population of 4,500. The motivation for the meeting was to turn Lampeter into a Transition Town, one of a growing network of towns that have decided to prepare for the post-oil era before government intervention happens. Rob Hopkins, the coordinator of the Transition Town movement, describes himself as an "early topper", meaning that he thinks that peak oil will happen within the next five years. I am probably a "very early topper", believing that it has already happened really, but our technology has disguised the fact. Once the point of maximum production is reached, then oil supplies worldwide will plummet, over a period of 10 years say, but by then civilization will have collapsed, unless we decide and act now to maintain societal integrity. At the very least, a community of moderate size (Lampeter?) must be able to feed and fuel itself. I have suggested before that society might be best served by forming small "pods" which are supplied by local farms and other means that do not depend on long-distance transport. Complete isolation would be a very bad and retrograde consequence, and instead I envisage that such pods can cooperate through a national grid of communication and electric power provision - rather according to the CAT model. I am not suggesting for a moment that we can power ourselves down to their laudable level, but that might not be necessary. The main avoidable consumer of energy is transportation, which uses 33% of the UK's total energy, and all of that from oil. It is clear this will be cut inevitably, and perhaps by 80% in 10 - 15 years.
Hopkins said that he tended to believe those with no vested interest in believing that peak oil would not come for 20 - 30 years, as some "the late toppers" do, mostly in or working for the oil industry. I agree. To believe them means doing nothing, and that would be a disaster. Even if they are right, we will simply preserve our precious reserve of oil for longer by taking action now, and what is wrong with that? It would be by far the better option than assuming business as usual and suddenly running out of oil, with nothing else in its place. Mad Max! Anarchy!
As I have detailed here, none of the other "solutions" work out when you do the math. The Hydrogen Economy is a ridiculous idea on the scale required to meet current demand for oil. Running all the nations cars on hydrogen would need maybe 67 Sizewell B nuclear power stations or a wind farm covering south west England. Biofuels are a "no-no" too, since it would take many times more arable land than there is in the whole of the UK mainland to produce enough of any of them; meaning that even if we were to stop growing food altogether and turn the land over to biofuel crop production we are still well short of current demand. The UK farming system has evolved into a mechanism that "turns oil into food." It is reliant on the highly energy-demanding manufacture of artificial fertilizers, the use of plastics and other materials that owe their genesis to oil, and extensive transportation networks that carry food over long distances to supply supermarkets etc. I acknowledge there is a growth in "farmers markets" even in urban areas, but their scale remains small, and it is local farming that we will need finally, once the means to fuel an extensive food-distribution network has gone.
As I wrote recently, the one glimmer of hope regarding alternative oil-provision lies in making it from algae, but although optimistic, the technology has not been tested on the very large scale, and not over a long enough timescale to give confidence that we could rely on it in the future. If it proves we can, then that should be seen as a considerable bonus, but we still need to change how we use energy and how much of it we do use - that is, use less! I think there should be a national experiment run to produce one million tonnes of biodiesel from algae, to see if and how easily it can be done. This would require fabricating ponds to grow the algae in, covering an area of only about 10,000 hectares (100 square kilometers), and is far less than that required to grow crops (e.g. soya) for the same purpose, which would require around one million hectares (10,000 km^2). The further advantage of algae is that the ponds could be placed anywhere, not competing with food-crops for arable land.
George Monbiot (journalist and Guardian columnist) lives near Lampeter and also attended the meeting. He thinks that the end of oil is not nigh but "nigh-ish", and that we may have another 10 - 30 years. If we continue to extract our remaining trillion barrels of oil at current rates (and we won't be able to), it will all be used in 30 years, so I think the upper end of that range is rather too optimistic. Even if it is 10 years, we are still in trouble if we don't get a new act running and sharply at that. Mr Monbiot is more concerned about CO2 emissions and global warming, but I think that depletion of resources will get us before climate change does.
In part, the agency for change in Lampeter has been driven by a group of local farmers, and both Patrick Holden (Director of the Soil Association) and Peter Segger, who first supplied the mass demand for organic foods through supermarkets, farm neighbouring land and have decided that the future rests in selling more of that produce locally rather than hauling it over long distances. Indeed, it doesn't look good for supermarkets, unless they too can be provided for by local farms. In a further step toward local sustainability, Holden has invested in sinking around a kilometer of pipes under a field to draw heat for his house. This is one technology I saw demonstrated at CAT.
I am reminded once more of the experience of Cuba, who's population were forced practically overnight to undergo a transition from an oil-based economy to a localised sustainable economy. This was a consequence of the collapse of communism and the USSR, which resulted in the sudden loss of regular "presents" of Russian oil, fertilizers etc. which they had received in return for being a particular communist sentinel, guarding its regime against the US. Cuba uses far less energy per person than the US, and much of its economy works at the "local" level. It's ailing leader, Fidel Castro, has been outspoken in his criticism of the US drive toward biofuels particularly corn-ethanol, which he does not perceive as being "sustainable". There are many who accord with his sentiments.
The run-down to the lower oil economy should be undertaken with care and deliberation. It should also be done with a sense of optimism; that a brave new world will be found at the end of the journey. Otherwise, there will be more wars and strife to garner what resources of oil there remain, and even after all that, we will simply be in the same position we would have been in anyway, but having wasted much energy and precious resource on the way. Planning, peace and cooperation are the only way forward, but I suspect that old conundrum "Human Nature" will provide its regular obstruction to the true path!
Related Reading.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329771279-110373,00.html
Article: "Pioneering Welsh town begins the transition to a life without oil," by Felicity Lawrence.
There are no two ways about it. The age of cheap oil is coming to its own natural conclusion. We have used just over one trillion barrels of oil, since the first commercial oil-well was sunk in Pennsylvania in 1859, and we have just under one trillion barrels of oil left in known reserves. According to the famous analysis made in 1956 by M.King Hubbert, that point of "half-empty" (and we are very likely a little less than that) coincides with the peak of oil-production. It is probably only enhanced methods of oil recovery that have obscured this fact, and their consequence is that we have been able to continue draining the wells at a more rapid rate than without them. The upshot is that the remaining oil will be mostly not of the "sweet" (low sulphur) "light" (low viscosity) kind, but "heavy oil" and will be consequently harder to purify and refine. Indeed, it will be more effectively burned in Diesel engines, rather than spark-ignition engines which have been developed to use gasoline rather than fuel-oil.
In Lampeter was held the largest public meeting that anybody could recall, at an attendance over 450 from a total population of 4,500. The motivation for the meeting was to turn Lampeter into a Transition Town, one of a growing network of towns that have decided to prepare for the post-oil era before government intervention happens. Rob Hopkins, the coordinator of the Transition Town movement, describes himself as an "early topper", meaning that he thinks that peak oil will happen within the next five years. I am probably a "very early topper", believing that it has already happened really, but our technology has disguised the fact. Once the point of maximum production is reached, then oil supplies worldwide will plummet, over a period of 10 years say, but by then civilization will have collapsed, unless we decide and act now to maintain societal integrity. At the very least, a community of moderate size (Lampeter?) must be able to feed and fuel itself. I have suggested before that society might be best served by forming small "pods" which are supplied by local farms and other means that do not depend on long-distance transport. Complete isolation would be a very bad and retrograde consequence, and instead I envisage that such pods can cooperate through a national grid of communication and electric power provision - rather according to the CAT model. I am not suggesting for a moment that we can power ourselves down to their laudable level, but that might not be necessary. The main avoidable consumer of energy is transportation, which uses 33% of the UK's total energy, and all of that from oil. It is clear this will be cut inevitably, and perhaps by 80% in 10 - 15 years.
Hopkins said that he tended to believe those with no vested interest in believing that peak oil would not come for 20 - 30 years, as some "the late toppers" do, mostly in or working for the oil industry. I agree. To believe them means doing nothing, and that would be a disaster. Even if they are right, we will simply preserve our precious reserve of oil for longer by taking action now, and what is wrong with that? It would be by far the better option than assuming business as usual and suddenly running out of oil, with nothing else in its place. Mad Max! Anarchy!
As I have detailed here, none of the other "solutions" work out when you do the math. The Hydrogen Economy is a ridiculous idea on the scale required to meet current demand for oil. Running all the nations cars on hydrogen would need maybe 67 Sizewell B nuclear power stations or a wind farm covering south west England. Biofuels are a "no-no" too, since it would take many times more arable land than there is in the whole of the UK mainland to produce enough of any of them; meaning that even if we were to stop growing food altogether and turn the land over to biofuel crop production we are still well short of current demand. The UK farming system has evolved into a mechanism that "turns oil into food." It is reliant on the highly energy-demanding manufacture of artificial fertilizers, the use of plastics and other materials that owe their genesis to oil, and extensive transportation networks that carry food over long distances to supply supermarkets etc. I acknowledge there is a growth in "farmers markets" even in urban areas, but their scale remains small, and it is local farming that we will need finally, once the means to fuel an extensive food-distribution network has gone.
As I wrote recently, the one glimmer of hope regarding alternative oil-provision lies in making it from algae, but although optimistic, the technology has not been tested on the very large scale, and not over a long enough timescale to give confidence that we could rely on it in the future. If it proves we can, then that should be seen as a considerable bonus, but we still need to change how we use energy and how much of it we do use - that is, use less! I think there should be a national experiment run to produce one million tonnes of biodiesel from algae, to see if and how easily it can be done. This would require fabricating ponds to grow the algae in, covering an area of only about 10,000 hectares (100 square kilometers), and is far less than that required to grow crops (e.g. soya) for the same purpose, which would require around one million hectares (10,000 km^2). The further advantage of algae is that the ponds could be placed anywhere, not competing with food-crops for arable land.
George Monbiot (journalist and Guardian columnist) lives near Lampeter and also attended the meeting. He thinks that the end of oil is not nigh but "nigh-ish", and that we may have another 10 - 30 years. If we continue to extract our remaining trillion barrels of oil at current rates (and we won't be able to), it will all be used in 30 years, so I think the upper end of that range is rather too optimistic. Even if it is 10 years, we are still in trouble if we don't get a new act running and sharply at that. Mr Monbiot is more concerned about CO2 emissions and global warming, but I think that depletion of resources will get us before climate change does.
In part, the agency for change in Lampeter has been driven by a group of local farmers, and both Patrick Holden (Director of the Soil Association) and Peter Segger, who first supplied the mass demand for organic foods through supermarkets, farm neighbouring land and have decided that the future rests in selling more of that produce locally rather than hauling it over long distances. Indeed, it doesn't look good for supermarkets, unless they too can be provided for by local farms. In a further step toward local sustainability, Holden has invested in sinking around a kilometer of pipes under a field to draw heat for his house. This is one technology I saw demonstrated at CAT.
I am reminded once more of the experience of Cuba, who's population were forced practically overnight to undergo a transition from an oil-based economy to a localised sustainable economy. This was a consequence of the collapse of communism and the USSR, which resulted in the sudden loss of regular "presents" of Russian oil, fertilizers etc. which they had received in return for being a particular communist sentinel, guarding its regime against the US. Cuba uses far less energy per person than the US, and much of its economy works at the "local" level. It's ailing leader, Fidel Castro, has been outspoken in his criticism of the US drive toward biofuels particularly corn-ethanol, which he does not perceive as being "sustainable". There are many who accord with his sentiments.
The run-down to the lower oil economy should be undertaken with care and deliberation. It should also be done with a sense of optimism; that a brave new world will be found at the end of the journey. Otherwise, there will be more wars and strife to garner what resources of oil there remain, and even after all that, we will simply be in the same position we would have been in anyway, but having wasted much energy and precious resource on the way. Planning, peace and cooperation are the only way forward, but I suspect that old conundrum "Human Nature" will provide its regular obstruction to the true path!
Related Reading.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329771279-110373,00.html
Article: "Pioneering Welsh town begins the transition to a life without oil," by Felicity Lawrence.
Friday, April 06, 2007
Global Warming not Real - According to Martians.
There are some who remain skeptical about global warming. As I reported in a recent posting, "The Great Global warming Swindle", which was the title and subject of a documentary run on the British television station Channel 4, there are those who are of the opinion that climate change is not "all our fault", and that the warming of the globe is driven by other forces than the greenhouse effect, enhanced by rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. One theory is that the power output of the Sun varies over time, and has been offered in some quarters as an explanation for the geologic record, that temperatures and CO2 concentrations rise in spikes during the interglacial periods, with a time interval of around 100,000 years, before the Earth runs-into the next ice-age. It seems clear enough that the current "concentration" of 390 parts per million (which should strictly be defined as a mixing ratio rather than a concentration) is unprecedented, certainly for some millions of years, although there is credible debate about the Medieval Warm Period, and why that should have happened during a time when there was comparatively little CO2 being pumped into the air by humans and their activities.
The Channel 4 documentary has come under severe attack - not surprisingly, given that its message is practically heresy! - but it now transpires, and the makers of the programme have acknowledged, that some of the graphs shown were out of date, and that there had been an element of selectivity in what data were shown. Nonetheless, it is not absolutely certain that the sole underlying cause of global warming is human-induced (anthropogenic) greenhouse gas (mainly CO2) emissions, and there is clearly an underlying cycle of warming and cooling, which our actions may exacerbate.
My own fear is that the full influence of the rising CO2, which is exceeding the capacity of the planet to absorb it by about 2 - 3 ppm per year, is yet to kick-in, and the Earth might in subsequent decades become very hot indeed, resulting either in a runaway greenhouse effect, or by melting the arctic ice and diluting the dense, saline waters from the tropics switch-off the Atlantic conveyor (which includes the Gulf Stream), resulting in a North European ice-age. If the geologic record holds true in the future, we must be due another ice-age at some relatively near point, as the "width" of the present warm interglacial period is about as wide as interglacial periods have been in the past, before the climate plunges into the next 100,000 year cold-snap! My own feeling is that running out of oil and gas will hit us before global warming does, and then our CO2 emissions will inevitably be cut, once we have far less of these carbon fuels available to burn. While that might sound good to some ears, it also raises the disquieting possibility that civilization will collapse, once there is insufficient energy to maintain its integrity.
Interestingly, another piece of evidence has been gleaned which will rally the anti-global warming camp. I should really call them the "it's all our fault" skeptics. This is the news that the planet Mars is warming-up too! The evidence is from research done by planetary scientists in the US, who believe that the Red Planet has warmed by around 0.65 degrees C during the past three decades (1970's to the 1990's), and is in similar amount to the Earth's temperature rise of 0.6 degrees C during this same period. In a recent paper published in Nature, describing the research, it is suggested that the warming of the Earth could be down to natural climate variability. This view has been opposed however by Neville Nicholls, a climate scientist at Monash University in Melbourne, who said: "The paper is interesting, but it hasn't got anything to do with the question of human impact on global warming on Earth. It is not an excuse to argue that humans are not causing global warming on Earth."
The research itself was carried out by a group led by Lori Fenton of the NASA Ames Research Centre in California. They used a computer model, similar to those devised to simulate global warming on Earth, into which were added particular Martian features such as a cold "airless" (significant - no atmosphere!) surface and a southward-moving polar ice-cap, but with the contribution from the Earth's atmosphere and its oceans removed. The study also "found" (it is a simulation) that annual variation in the amount of the Sun's radiation reflected from the Martian surface contributed to the temperature rise of the planet by increasing the amount of dust blowing in the atmosphere. Apparently, over the past 30 years the dust scourged large areas of the planet's surface making it less reflective (lower albedo) , and hence more warming occurred. The outcome of this was a positive feedback loop between dust, wind, albedo and temperature. At the University of New South Wales, climate scientist Andy Pitman commented, "It's a nice piece of work, but there are no implications for Earth."
The paper in Nature is published on the eve of the second report from the fourth IPCC review, due to be released tonight. It is also noted that computer models include the effects of changes in albedo, but might there be another explanation - for example, a change in the output of the Sun, which is not included in the models? In general, computer simulations, if they do not include a particular dominant parameter in the model, will "absorb" an effect (like rising temperature) into other parameters that are included. If there is a variation in solar output, that might result in false weightings of the importance of other effects, like wind and dust? The comparable warming of Earth and Mars may be a complete coincidence, especially given the completely different characters of their atmospheres; however, the possibility that it is not is fascinating and may point to an external cause - like the Sun.
Related Reading.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/
The Channel 4 documentary has come under severe attack - not surprisingly, given that its message is practically heresy! - but it now transpires, and the makers of the programme have acknowledged, that some of the graphs shown were out of date, and that there had been an element of selectivity in what data were shown. Nonetheless, it is not absolutely certain that the sole underlying cause of global warming is human-induced (anthropogenic) greenhouse gas (mainly CO2) emissions, and there is clearly an underlying cycle of warming and cooling, which our actions may exacerbate.
My own fear is that the full influence of the rising CO2, which is exceeding the capacity of the planet to absorb it by about 2 - 3 ppm per year, is yet to kick-in, and the Earth might in subsequent decades become very hot indeed, resulting either in a runaway greenhouse effect, or by melting the arctic ice and diluting the dense, saline waters from the tropics switch-off the Atlantic conveyor (which includes the Gulf Stream), resulting in a North European ice-age. If the geologic record holds true in the future, we must be due another ice-age at some relatively near point, as the "width" of the present warm interglacial period is about as wide as interglacial periods have been in the past, before the climate plunges into the next 100,000 year cold-snap! My own feeling is that running out of oil and gas will hit us before global warming does, and then our CO2 emissions will inevitably be cut, once we have far less of these carbon fuels available to burn. While that might sound good to some ears, it also raises the disquieting possibility that civilization will collapse, once there is insufficient energy to maintain its integrity.
Interestingly, another piece of evidence has been gleaned which will rally the anti-global warming camp. I should really call them the "it's all our fault" skeptics. This is the news that the planet Mars is warming-up too! The evidence is from research done by planetary scientists in the US, who believe that the Red Planet has warmed by around 0.65 degrees C during the past three decades (1970's to the 1990's), and is in similar amount to the Earth's temperature rise of 0.6 degrees C during this same period. In a recent paper published in Nature, describing the research, it is suggested that the warming of the Earth could be down to natural climate variability. This view has been opposed however by Neville Nicholls, a climate scientist at Monash University in Melbourne, who said: "The paper is interesting, but it hasn't got anything to do with the question of human impact on global warming on Earth. It is not an excuse to argue that humans are not causing global warming on Earth."
The research itself was carried out by a group led by Lori Fenton of the NASA Ames Research Centre in California. They used a computer model, similar to those devised to simulate global warming on Earth, into which were added particular Martian features such as a cold "airless" (significant - no atmosphere!) surface and a southward-moving polar ice-cap, but with the contribution from the Earth's atmosphere and its oceans removed. The study also "found" (it is a simulation) that annual variation in the amount of the Sun's radiation reflected from the Martian surface contributed to the temperature rise of the planet by increasing the amount of dust blowing in the atmosphere. Apparently, over the past 30 years the dust scourged large areas of the planet's surface making it less reflective (lower albedo) , and hence more warming occurred. The outcome of this was a positive feedback loop between dust, wind, albedo and temperature. At the University of New South Wales, climate scientist Andy Pitman commented, "It's a nice piece of work, but there are no implications for Earth."
The paper in Nature is published on the eve of the second report from the fourth IPCC review, due to be released tonight. It is also noted that computer models include the effects of changes in albedo, but might there be another explanation - for example, a change in the output of the Sun, which is not included in the models? In general, computer simulations, if they do not include a particular dominant parameter in the model, will "absorb" an effect (like rising temperature) into other parameters that are included. If there is a variation in solar output, that might result in false weightings of the importance of other effects, like wind and dust? The comparable warming of Earth and Mars may be a complete coincidence, especially given the completely different characters of their atmospheres; however, the possibility that it is not is fascinating and may point to an external cause - like the Sun.
Related Reading.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
Australian Coal: Harbouring Resources.
It is easy to make predictions as to the likely lifetime of resources, e.g. oil, gas, coal and uranium. However, looking at the situation in the round, obscures the fact that the World's energy resources are unequally distributed. This much is obvious really: we are well aware that the Middle East is amply provided for by oil, while Russia has most of the natural gas reserves. The UK is in a far less abundant position that it was, and a few years ago it became a net energy importer, having got through much of the cornucopia of North Sea oil and gas. There is still a lot of oil and gas under the North Sea, but we can no longer produce their resources in sufficient amount to match our current energy demand, and hence we are and will forever be dependent on securing and maintaining good trade relations with those countries that can provide them to us, increasingly from politically unstable regions of the world.
Among the non-renewable resources is coal, and whereas oil and gas will be in very short supply within the coming few decades, there is thought to be enough coal to last for hundreds of years. The UK reached its peak of coal production in 1913, and while it is estimated that there are 1.5 billion tonnes remaining and accessible within current mining infrastructure, far more is thought to exist under these islands, and under the North Sea, possibly to the tune of 190 billion tonnes, albeit that a highly extensive and completely new infrastructure of mines would need to be dug in order to access it.
Meanwhile, the UK imports most of its coal, getting through somewhere over 60 million tonnes per year - 40 million tonnes imported, mostly from Germany - and 10 million tonnes each from near-surface and deep mines in the UK. There are some alarm-bells sounding that the world may have less of the hard, anthracitic (>90% carbon) coal that is cleaner to burn in terms of SO2 pollution etc., and which can most readily be converted into synthetic "oil" by coal-liquefaction methods, than was once estimated at 10 trillion tonnes, but it is still thought that 4 trillion tonnes or so are available which is enough to go round for a while yet, albeit acknowledging that the resource is not evenly distributed.
Australia has lots of coal, and is the world's leading coal exporter; however, only 4% of the world's total of coal in fact passes through Australian ports, for the simple reason that a relatively minor proportion of coal is traded - most coal is used practically at source; China being a very good example, which produces 80% of its total energy from coal, most of that mined on Chinese territory. However, in the interests of averting climate change, Australia is being urged to end coal exports. It is of interest to know what proportion of global CO2 emission can in fact be blamed on coal exported from Australia: the answer is a frugal 1.3%! Other countries import Australian coal either because they have little domestic reserves, or because their own supplies are brown-coal which is unsuitable for steel-making. Indeed, over half of exported Australian coal is used for making steel rather than firing power stations.
Japan, Korea and Taiwan are the biggest consumers of Australian coal, and the industry generates $24 billion in export income annually, which is more than the nation's wool, wheat, copper, dairy, beef, wine, and gold exports altogether. The industry employs 130,000 people, who's livelihoods would be compromised if it were to be curtailed. It is true too, that other countries, notably South Africa, Indonesia and Russia would certainly provide the resource of coal that Australia had denied them, so it would make very little difference to overall world CO2 emissions.
There are possibilities, not only for Australia, for CO2 capture technologies, but these are estimated to consume anywhere up to half the power-output of a conventional power station, meaning that an extra power station would need to be built for every new one installed, to cope with the CO2 emissions of both. There are cleaner combined cycle plants, which can produce synthetic oil as well as electricity, and recover almost 60% of the thermal energy from the coal, rather than around 35% - and hence, throwing two-thirds of it away - as conventional coal-fired power plants do.
To my mind, the whole matter of curbing exports of energy resources raises a frightening scenario. If those countries that are rich in their resources, especially oil and gas, decide to hold onto them for their own use, or to flex political muscles against other countries whose resources are limited, then the latter will be in an extremely disadvantaged situation - industrial powers held under siege and starved of the energy to run their societies. Since supplies of oil and gas are highly limited, with conventional oil expected to begin to run-out as from any time now, and gas within a couple of decades of that (or less, if it used to extract oil from tar-sands, or liquefied in gas-to-liquids processes for that same purpose of supplanting failing oil supplies), the seats of world power can be expected to shift significantly over the coming 10 - 20 years. I would predict that Russia will become very powerful on the world stage, weighing-in against the giant mass of its resources, while the US which now has to import two-thirds of its oil (mostly from Canada, but also from the Middle East) will turn to make its own provisions from the massive reserves of coal that lie under its extensive land area - thought to amount to more carbon than the total oil reserves of the Middle East.
The resources of European countries are varied and it is to be hoped that all nations will be provided for in a "common market" of resources, but an ever increasing amount of gas and all the uranium for nuclear power actually comes from Russia/Kazakhstan. In any event, consolidation of energy resources will prove to be the fulcrum of changing world-order, even if more wars will be fought to that end.
Related Reading.
www.australiancoal.com.au/
ergobalance.blogspot.com/2006/11/shall-coal-be-crowned-king_10.html
Among the non-renewable resources is coal, and whereas oil and gas will be in very short supply within the coming few decades, there is thought to be enough coal to last for hundreds of years. The UK reached its peak of coal production in 1913, and while it is estimated that there are 1.5 billion tonnes remaining and accessible within current mining infrastructure, far more is thought to exist under these islands, and under the North Sea, possibly to the tune of 190 billion tonnes, albeit that a highly extensive and completely new infrastructure of mines would need to be dug in order to access it.
Meanwhile, the UK imports most of its coal, getting through somewhere over 60 million tonnes per year - 40 million tonnes imported, mostly from Germany - and 10 million tonnes each from near-surface and deep mines in the UK. There are some alarm-bells sounding that the world may have less of the hard, anthracitic (>90% carbon) coal that is cleaner to burn in terms of SO2 pollution etc., and which can most readily be converted into synthetic "oil" by coal-liquefaction methods, than was once estimated at 10 trillion tonnes, but it is still thought that 4 trillion tonnes or so are available which is enough to go round for a while yet, albeit acknowledging that the resource is not evenly distributed.
Australia has lots of coal, and is the world's leading coal exporter; however, only 4% of the world's total of coal in fact passes through Australian ports, for the simple reason that a relatively minor proportion of coal is traded - most coal is used practically at source; China being a very good example, which produces 80% of its total energy from coal, most of that mined on Chinese territory. However, in the interests of averting climate change, Australia is being urged to end coal exports. It is of interest to know what proportion of global CO2 emission can in fact be blamed on coal exported from Australia: the answer is a frugal 1.3%! Other countries import Australian coal either because they have little domestic reserves, or because their own supplies are brown-coal which is unsuitable for steel-making. Indeed, over half of exported Australian coal is used for making steel rather than firing power stations.
Japan, Korea and Taiwan are the biggest consumers of Australian coal, and the industry generates $24 billion in export income annually, which is more than the nation's wool, wheat, copper, dairy, beef, wine, and gold exports altogether. The industry employs 130,000 people, who's livelihoods would be compromised if it were to be curtailed. It is true too, that other countries, notably South Africa, Indonesia and Russia would certainly provide the resource of coal that Australia had denied them, so it would make very little difference to overall world CO2 emissions.
There are possibilities, not only for Australia, for CO2 capture technologies, but these are estimated to consume anywhere up to half the power-output of a conventional power station, meaning that an extra power station would need to be built for every new one installed, to cope with the CO2 emissions of both. There are cleaner combined cycle plants, which can produce synthetic oil as well as electricity, and recover almost 60% of the thermal energy from the coal, rather than around 35% - and hence, throwing two-thirds of it away - as conventional coal-fired power plants do.
To my mind, the whole matter of curbing exports of energy resources raises a frightening scenario. If those countries that are rich in their resources, especially oil and gas, decide to hold onto them for their own use, or to flex political muscles against other countries whose resources are limited, then the latter will be in an extremely disadvantaged situation - industrial powers held under siege and starved of the energy to run their societies. Since supplies of oil and gas are highly limited, with conventional oil expected to begin to run-out as from any time now, and gas within a couple of decades of that (or less, if it used to extract oil from tar-sands, or liquefied in gas-to-liquids processes for that same purpose of supplanting failing oil supplies), the seats of world power can be expected to shift significantly over the coming 10 - 20 years. I would predict that Russia will become very powerful on the world stage, weighing-in against the giant mass of its resources, while the US which now has to import two-thirds of its oil (mostly from Canada, but also from the Middle East) will turn to make its own provisions from the massive reserves of coal that lie under its extensive land area - thought to amount to more carbon than the total oil reserves of the Middle East.
The resources of European countries are varied and it is to be hoped that all nations will be provided for in a "common market" of resources, but an ever increasing amount of gas and all the uranium for nuclear power actually comes from Russia/Kazakhstan. In any event, consolidation of energy resources will prove to be the fulcrum of changing world-order, even if more wars will be fought to that end.
Related Reading.
www.australiancoal.com.au/
ergobalance.blogspot.com/2006/
Monday, April 02, 2007
Nuclear Powered Oil-Sands!
The subject of EROEI has raised its head in various of these postings - Energy Returned On Energy Invested. I have also referred to the oil-sands (tar-sands) of Alberta in Canada, which contain bitumen as is cracked into oil on a massive scale. I have referred too to the fact that it takes resources to extract resources, and that the production of oil from the "oil-sands" consumes enormous quantities of gas and water. It might be debated as to when "Peak gas" may arrive, an event which is projected to come within a decade or so after "Peak Oil", which is most likely already upon us. In consequence, another source of heat will be required if Canada is to continue producing oil from its massive reserves of oil sands, albeit at an EROEI of around just 3. For comparison, when the EROEI reaches 1, it takes as much energy to extract a resource as can be recovered in burning it. The EROEI for oil production from petroleum-wells stands currently at around 8 - a far cry from the EROEI of 100 that pertained in the early days of oil-exploration, when the famous "gushers" were struck in the US fields of "black gold".
To this end, it has been proposed to install nuclear reactors in Alberta, for the purpose of generating energy to produce oil from the tar-sands that are in abundance there and cover an area about the size of Florida. Canada produces 3.1 million barrels of oil a day, mostly from conventional sources, but over 1 million barrels worth come from the tar-sands - a figure which is set to triple within ten years. Canada is the world's seventh greatest oil producer and is the number one supplier to the United States. Not surprisingly, when the word "nuclear" is mentioned, hackles rise in some quarters, and the proposal has met with controversy from environmentalists. However, extracting oil from tar-sands is an extremely dirty process, and as noted, uses up large amounts of water and gas. Hence, the "nuclear option" is being promoted as the most environmentally friendly one.
Enhancing the status quo method of production means that demand for natural gas will increase by 1.1% a year through until the year 2030, by which time world gas supplies will probably have begun to wane. If Canada's oil-sands are costed among the oil reserves of the world, the nation would surpass Saudi in terms of the total amount of oil there. Venezuela also has enormous deposits of tar-sands, which might prove to be a major source of oil in the future. Canada is particularly fortunate in that it also has large reserves of uranium, and so a fertile collaboration between the nuclear and oil industries might be possible. It is true that generating nuclear power produces far less CO2 (probably around 20%) over the operational lifetime of the plant as compared with a coal or gas-fired power station, including the contributions from constructing the plant itself, mining, milling and processing its nuclear fuel and finally decommissioning the plant at the end of its life (as we will need to do in the UK with the current generation of 31 nuclear power stations by 2025).
The World Nuclear Association estimates that providing natural gas amounts to 60% of the operating costs for an oil-sands facility. However, the price of gas has jumped 6% in only the past week, and it seems almost certain that the cost of gas will increase over time, as its sources become more scarce. One major obstacle to the nuclear option is that the province of Alberta has never had any nuclear power, and to so install the technology would require the overall approval of the community there. The Canadian House of Commons' Committee on Natural Resources has issued a report entitled: "The Oil Sands: Toward Sustainable Development", which has put the project on hold, "until the repercussions of the process are fully known and understood". The report also expresses concerns about nuclear waste and whether "nuclear" can provide the necessary steam for the processing operations. The committee was also dissatisfied over the lack of information regarding exactly how many nuclear reactors would be needed - i.e. one or many large reactors, or perhaps a greater number of smaller installations.
There are two main processes involved in extracting oil from tar-sands. Firstly, the more shallow deposits are strip-mined, where earth is scraped back and giant shovels and trucks remove the desired material. This is then subjected to super-heated steam which loosens-up the tar-like bitumen, which is described as being like "molasses". Deep extraction methods have also been developed: Cyclic Steam Stimulation pipes high-pressure steam down to the heavy bitumen which is thus brought up to the surface. Another method which is becoming more popular is Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage, in which two parallel pipes are enplaced vertically and then project at an angle of 90 degrees. The top pipe is used to inject steam and the bottom one collects the bitumen and draws it to the surface. Both surface and deep extraction methods produce bitumen that requires subsequent intensive processing ("cracking") to recover oil from it. About half a barrel of oil is produced per tonne of tar-sands.
Several nuclear companies, led by Energy Alberta, are planning to bring two new nuclear reactors into operation to power the tar-sands operations by 2017.
Related reading.
www.upi.com/Energy/analysis_nuclearpowered_
To this end, it has been proposed to install nuclear reactors in Alberta, for the purpose of generating energy to produce oil from the tar-sands that are in abundance there and cover an area about the size of Florida. Canada produces 3.1 million barrels of oil a day, mostly from conventional sources, but over 1 million barrels worth come from the tar-sands - a figure which is set to triple within ten years. Canada is the world's seventh greatest oil producer and is the number one supplier to the United States. Not surprisingly, when the word "nuclear" is mentioned, hackles rise in some quarters, and the proposal has met with controversy from environmentalists. However, extracting oil from tar-sands is an extremely dirty process, and as noted, uses up large amounts of water and gas. Hence, the "nuclear option" is being promoted as the most environmentally friendly one.
Enhancing the status quo method of production means that demand for natural gas will increase by 1.1% a year through until the year 2030, by which time world gas supplies will probably have begun to wane. If Canada's oil-sands are costed among the oil reserves of the world, the nation would surpass Saudi in terms of the total amount of oil there. Venezuela also has enormous deposits of tar-sands, which might prove to be a major source of oil in the future. Canada is particularly fortunate in that it also has large reserves of uranium, and so a fertile collaboration between the nuclear and oil industries might be possible. It is true that generating nuclear power produces far less CO2 (probably around 20%) over the operational lifetime of the plant as compared with a coal or gas-fired power station, including the contributions from constructing the plant itself, mining, milling and processing its nuclear fuel and finally decommissioning the plant at the end of its life (as we will need to do in the UK with the current generation of 31 nuclear power stations by 2025).
The World Nuclear Association estimates that providing natural gas amounts to 60% of the operating costs for an oil-sands facility. However, the price of gas has jumped 6% in only the past week, and it seems almost certain that the cost of gas will increase over time, as its sources become more scarce. One major obstacle to the nuclear option is that the province of Alberta has never had any nuclear power, and to so install the technology would require the overall approval of the community there. The Canadian House of Commons' Committee on Natural Resources has issued a report entitled: "The Oil Sands: Toward Sustainable Development", which has put the project on hold, "until the repercussions of the process are fully known and understood". The report also expresses concerns about nuclear waste and whether "nuclear" can provide the necessary steam for the processing operations. The committee was also dissatisfied over the lack of information regarding exactly how many nuclear reactors would be needed - i.e. one or many large reactors, or perhaps a greater number of smaller installations.
There are two main processes involved in extracting oil from tar-sands. Firstly, the more shallow deposits are strip-mined, where earth is scraped back and giant shovels and trucks remove the desired material. This is then subjected to super-heated steam which loosens-up the tar-like bitumen, which is described as being like "molasses". Deep extraction methods have also been developed: Cyclic Steam Stimulation pipes high-pressure steam down to the heavy bitumen which is thus brought up to the surface. Another method which is becoming more popular is Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage, in which two parallel pipes are enplaced vertically and then project at an angle of 90 degrees. The top pipe is used to inject steam and the bottom one collects the bitumen and draws it to the surface. Both surface and deep extraction methods produce bitumen that requires subsequent intensive processing ("cracking") to recover oil from it. About half a barrel of oil is produced per tonne of tar-sands.
Several nuclear companies, led by Energy Alberta, are planning to bring two new nuclear reactors into operation to power the tar-sands operations by 2017.
Related reading.
www.upi.com/Energy/analysis_nuclearpowered_
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