Slovakia: a Sustainable Country?

The Icelandic volcano which prevented my travelling to Slovakia as planned last April, appears to have fallen sufficiently silent to at least provide a window through which I could pass, on my cheap Ryan Air flight to Bratislava from London Stansted at a cost of about "fifty quid" ("around "eighty bucks", I believe). Thus I was able to deliver two lectures on the World Energy conundrum, one at the Slovak Technical University in Bratislava and the other at the "University of Constantine the Philosopher" in Nitra. Constantine is better known as Saint Cyril, who along with his brother Methodius, devised the Cyrillic script which I believe was the first successful effort to inscribe as a written and unified language the many spoken tongues of that gargantuan region that for many years in the West we knew simply as "Russia".

It is of course far more than that, as is "Europe", as an admixture of cultures, philosophies, pains, joys and endurances that forge the individual character of each and all nations, but unifies us all in the spirit of the Human Family, when we realise by our communications with one another from across the world that our fundamental qualities, both good and bad are much cut from the same block of collective DNA.

Slovakia, unlike its sister, the Czech Republic, from whom it was estranged in 1993 in the carving-up of what was Czechoslovakia, converted to the Euro within the last two years. They may regret this now, as such a conversion came at a large fiscal outlay, and the value of their cash-holdings is falling as the Euro descends. The British Pound seems to be rising against the Euro but the truth is that both are in free-fall, and the Euro has fallen more rapidly of late, with an uncertain landing for either.

Given the uncertain aspect of world finance, there is little I can speculate on with the authority needed. That said, even my financial adviser is somewhat at a loss as to where it is all going but agrees that the joker in the pack in likely to be the availability and price of oil. The major oil companies appear to have come out of denial about the reality of peak oil, and would not do so had not their business interests been threatened otherwise, so the whole concept can be taken seriously and as real, whatever the outcome of it will be.

In my lectures, I stressed much of the ideas aired in this blog, which has been a challenge and recasting of perspectives that I had when I began writing it about five years ago, and I have periodically changed my mind, finally believing that optimism over the energy problem is at best patchy, and cheerier views of it are no more than occasional light-relief from despair while one contemplates an entirely different way of living, in the effort to use less energy rather than making relentlesly more or even propping-up the status quo with renewables and so on.

Peak oil in a nutshell impacts on three things: (1) a globalised world run on oil, (2) the whole of manufactured goods, (3) industrialised farming. To cut through and integrate the attendancies of this it seems that a nation like the UK, which is heavily industrialised and dependent on imports for one third of its food, is in a more vulnerable condition than Slovakia which is practically self-sufficient although it strains to industrialise, and is urgently building infrastructure, especially new roads, to join the global club. Slovakia has its own renewable energy projects too, for example at the STU in Bratislava, but if, as I believe we will none of us be able to match our colossal fossil and nuclear energy bill by renewables, to be in a condition of "less advancement" and hence lower dependency on provision of essentials such as food (not the latest I-pod etc.) brought-in by oil-based transport and farming methods, might prove to be a considerable advantage.

I am beginning to think that the enlargement nations of the EU, i.e. Eastern Europe may have much to offer over their western counterparts. As a Slovak colleague commented on the struggle for the British government as it slashes the bills here and there to get the national debt down, "well, we have always been poor in Slovakia". In the UK, we will be poor too, but that downward transition will be tough to bear, tumbling down from the "progress" we have been given as read. In a sense, Eastern Europe is the future image of Western Europe. It is at least a sustainable picture.

A Fuel Cell that Runs on Air and Water.

It seems too good to be true that water can be used as a fuel, but in a recent paper, a fuel-cell has been described which runs on water and air, in which you don't actually "burn" water but a concentration gradient of water is established between the two electrodes allowing entropy rather than enthalpy to drive the energy output from the cell. The power output is small, orders of magnitude lower than from hydrogen or methanol fuel cells, but the supply and handling of these flammable fuels is avoided. It is proposed that the cell might be used in applications which require relatively low power consumption, for example sensors of various kinds or emergency signalling units, and that the devices might be used best in desert or warm coastal regions where the water is readily evaporated from the cell, thus maintaining its concentration gradient.

On one side of the cell (anode), the reaction 2H2O ---> O2 + 4H+ + 4e- occurs;

while on the other (cathode), the reverse process occurs: O2 + 4H+ + 4e- ---> 2H2O.

The two electrodes, cathode and anode, are separated by a polymer electrolyte membrane which permits protons to cross to reach the cathode while the electrons are made to flow as part of a circuit to carry an electrical current.

The authors note that such a concentration cell avoids the logistic difficulties of using hydrogen gas; nonetheless for an application such as transportation the far greater power output of a hydrogen cell is necessary, and the provision of "green" hydrogen in quantity. All types of fuel cell also require platinum in quantity, the demand for which already exceeds world production of "new" platinum.

Thus the "prediction" by Jules Verne in his novel "Mysterious Island", published in 1874, as espoused by the fictional engineer, Cyrus Smith, "I believe that water will one day be used as a fuel, that the hydrogen and oxygen of which it is constituted will be used, simultaneously or in isolation, to furnish an inexhaustible source of heat and light, more powerful than coal can ever be. Water is the coal of the future.", remains some way off.

A very interesting piece of science, however.

Related Reading.
"A fuel cell that runs on air and water," A. M. Dreizler and E. Roduner, Energy and Environmental Science, 2010, 3, 761
DOI: 10.1039/c001381a

Blame Big Bad B.P. For Now, but Where Is the Next Oil to Come From?

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill is thought to be pouring anywhere between 5,000 and 100,000 barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico each day, according to different estimates. The blame is being laid squarely on the shoulders of B.P., under whose auspices the deep-sea drilling operation is being conducted. An oil-well blowout occurred on April 20th, resulting in a catastrophic explosion that wrecked the oil-rig, killing 11 men. 17 others were injured, while another 98 passed relatively unscathed, at least physically. It has been speculated that the explosion was triggered by inadvertent drilling into methane hydrate, although it is debatable that the temperature of the rock being drilled would be low enough for the material to exist there. Methane hydrate can, however, exist close to the seabed in the near-mile depths of water, a fact that scuppered an initial attempt to place a 120 tonne dome over the oil to collect the oil, since methane hydrate crystals blocked the steel canopy at the top of the dome.

B.P. made an unsuccessful attempt to stem the flow of oil from the well using a "top-kill" technique. A mixture of heavy drilling fluid ("mud"), and detritus including bits of rope, shredded tyres, metal pieces, golf balls and so on ("junk-shot"), was pumped under a pressure of 6,800 psi into the well in the hope that this would hold-back the oil long enough that the outflow could be sealed with cement, but the ensuing pressure of oil and gas from the well exceeded even this, and the oil is still pouring out. As usual, there are considerable environmental burdens which B.P. has promised to fully cover the costs of, which are estimated at $8 billion. They may indeed prove far higher and there is speculation from Russian analysts that the overall unfolding calamity might bankrupt the company.

While other attempts are planned to block the hole, it is probable that oil will continue to pour from it for another couple of months, until relief wells are drilled to intersect and reduce the pressure in the currently flowing well and cut-off the leakage of perhaps 50 million barrels of oil contained there by the injection of concrete deep into the sea-bed. The relief wells require drilling to depths of perhaps 2 -3 miles, hence the seemingly long schedule for their expected completion. What is clear is that much useful information is being gleaned about how to deal with a disaster of this kind, which can be expected to happen again, and other kinds of spills, as the prospect of deep-water drilling for oil is realised. While B.P. are taking a lot of flak for the incident, they are employing the best of the few engineers worldwide who have the knowledge to deal with it.

There are naive calls that there should be no more such exploration and that surely alternatives can be accessed, but this misses the underlying truth that much of the conventional easily-got onshore oil has already been pulled from the earth. If the oil-based civilization of humanity is to continue (accepting the natural limits imposed by peak oil) and not be brought to an abrupt and anarchic halt, bearing in mind that not only does oil account for 40% of the entire world energy budget but is the only serious liquid-fuel for all global transportation, and the raw feedstock for all manufacture including food production, it will be necessary to derive oil from a number of different and inhospitable sources including the deep-sea.

There are many sources of unconventional oil but which provide it much more slowly than do the conventional fields we are used to. In the case of heavy oils (e.g. from Venezuela) more intensive processing is required to refine them, thus reducing the production EROEI. The simple truth is that future provision of oil and natural gas will be an extraordinarily complicated and expensive business, which tests and inaugurates the limits of technology. There are still cheerful media pieces being written that blithely attempt to reassure us that there is plenty of oil left, but which ignore these aspects, and also the better than odds-on chance that there will be plenty more damage to vulnerable ecosystems as lie in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil, in the future.

So far, the environmental impact of this incident is far less than e.g. an oil-tanker running aground (the Exxon Valdez, say), since the spill is 50 miles offshore, and the oil is being largely dissipated in the water column before it reaches the surface. So far it ranks as the only 40th worst oil-spill disaster, but it might ascend the league-tables depending on how long it takes to truncate the flow.

Unquestionably, this is a tragedy, but if there is any defining message to be drawn from it, it is that the age of cheap, easy oil is over and we may now contemplate the dawn of hard oil.

Icelandic Volcano and Quiet Skies over London.

The Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland began erupting a few weeks ago, but a combination of factors is now wreaking havoc on European air-travel. The interaction of the molten lava with an ice-sheet 100m thick is sending a thick plume of "ash" high into the atmosphere, which is being driven to the south-east by unusual winds and has caused the grounding of all flights in the U.K. and most flights across Europe. Ryanair has suspended all flights until 13.00 on Monday, which concerns me as I am scheduled to fly to Bratislava by Ryanair on Wednesday for a small lecture tour in Slovakia and it is debatable whether all will be resolved by then.

It is what insurance companies used to call an "act of God" and we are held at the behest of the weather conditions. The volcano last erupted 200 years ago, but continued to do so for more than a year. Now in the jet-age, the risk of ash (in reality finely divided volcanic rock) being drawn into the engines of an aircraft pose the real threat of taking-out all four engines within minutes. The engine itself will be trashed by the glass produced by fusion and subsequent solidification of the ash, and the fuel-flame extinguished, thus risking aircraft literally falling from the sky should they fly through the ash-cloud.

Consequently, the inhabitants of villages and parts of London under the Heathrow flight-path can hear the birds singing on these beautiful spring days, not obscured by the cacophony of planes overhead, in a foretaste of life in the post jet-age era which will come when there is insufficient fuel to put into planes. It seems bizarre to talk of building a third runway and a sixth terminal at Heathrow and treble the number of flights by 2020, when the world is at the tipping-point of oil production, and rising demand, and all evidence is that perpetual growth is a fallacy and we are probably witnesses to the end of Capitalism.

Without cheap, plentiful oil the world will have trouble producing enough food to sustain its burgeoning population, and plane-travel will be the least of our concerns. I will probably get to Slovakia all right, but meanwhile it is worth contemplating how we might manage in the post-oil, post global-transport era.

Report Says, Algal Biofuels May Not Cut Carbon Emissions, but Read it More Closely.

A new study suggests that overall the CO2 emissions attendant to producing biofuel from algae may be worse than those from corn, canola (rape-seed) or switch grass. The main problem is the use of carbon dioxide brought from elsewhere in "gas-bottles" and inputs of fertilizer, particularly nitrogen and phosphorus. According to a Life-cycle analysis, the land-based crops all were found to sequester more carbon than that incurred in growing them, while the contrary was true for growing algae, meaning that replacing fossil fuels by algal fuels could cause an overall increase in carbon emissions.

Not surprisingly, the report just published in the prestigious American Chemical Society journal, Environmental Science and Technology, has put the cat among the pigeons, since there are many companies gearing-up to produce algal biofuels. The US Algal Biomass Organisation has claimed that the study contained "faulty assumptions" and was based on "grossly outdated data".

Now, I am a fan of growing algae not the least of which because to do so means that far more fuel might be produced per unit area than is the case from the above mentioned land-based crops, as algae have a better photosynthetic yield; there is no need to use freshwater since algae grow well (even better) on saline waters or wastewaters, thus preserving an already endangered resource; you can put the tanks on any land (even deserts), so there is no need to compromise food-production in a competition over the same arable land to grow food-crops or fuel-crops; they might be used to clean CO2 from the smokestacks of power-stations fired from e.g. gas or coal; they might be used to clean wastewaters of nitrogen and phosphorus.

On closer inspection, the report is in fact very positive about growing algae, particularly in the latter two respects. Read positively, the data are only in opposition to making fuel from algae if nitrogen and phosphorus nutrients are added in their mineral forms, and if the CO2 has to be injected into the system (transported as a compressed gas) as made mainly by the process of steam reforming methane, along with most of the world's available hydrogen:

(Overall) CH4 + 2H2O --> CO2 + 4H2.

That H2 is used to make nitrogen (ammonium sulphate and nitrate) fertilizer by reacting it with N2 via the Haber Bosch process to make ammonia (NH3), and so there is in a way a symbiosis between the production of CO2 and NH3. The phosphorus would likely come from mining "rock phosphate", which requires energy too.

However, the figures in this "cradle to farm gate" analysis (i.e. they do not include the energy costs of processing the algae or other biomass into fuel per se) show that if the production of algae is combined with a wastewater treatment strategy, so that N and P are removed from it by the algae (an otherwise energy intensive procedure), and fed with CO2 from smokestacks, most of the environmental burdens attendant to growing algae are offset (i.e. an algae production plant, a power station and a sewage-works should all be placed in mutual proximity). Of three possible municipal wastewater effluents evaluated as a source of N and P, the most effective was source-separated urine with a very high content of these elements, in which case growing algae became more environmentally beneficial than the land-based crops.

Even if there remains some dispute over the exact figures used, what the study does highlight is the importance of developing an integrated paradigm of production and recycling for algal fuel production as I stressed before in the context of rare metals such as are required to maintain the electronics and solar power industries.

Related Reading.
"Environmental Life Cycle Comparison of Algae to Other Bioenergy Feedstocks," By Andres F. Clarens, Eleazer P. Ressurreccion, Mark A. White and Lisa M. Colosi, Environ. Sci. Technol., 2010, 44, 1813.