What are we gonna do?

[leitmotif]

It is interesting to watch the environmentalists and the power generation business

Hydro - many choice sites are already used and hydro is bad for fish - the Snail Darter stopped a dam in its tracks. We are now taking down some dams here in Washington state and people want more taken down. SO hydro is out.

Coal Oh lawzy there is nothing dirtier than coal. We cant have that. We cannot even ship it to China via the pristine port of Longview Wa. Coal is out.

Nuclear Well we pretty much kiboshed that in the 80's. Another 30 years of talking it and maybe we just might have one built. Buy a lottery ticket the odds are better.

Windfarms People object to noise and bird kill. So much for that.

Tidal = proposed to put one in Puget Sound 300 feet down. Concern over magnetic field affecting marine life magnetic orientation. We will see

Biofuel - ie wood waste - too much pollution. Several have been propose here in Washington - you are gonna kill the neighborhood.

Natural gas hmm just how much do we have left? But combustion of that emits CO2!!!! And natural gas often has sulfur in it (hmmm sort of sounds like coal - although diminished I admit)

Oil - well there is the Great BP incident so maybe that takes care of offshore drilling. Canada wants to exploit some fields but people dont want equipment going over the roads.
And of course foreign oil controversy. No and no.

Ah hah THE SOLUTION TO OIL we will switch from gasoline & diesel engines on cars and use electric. Hmmm what about heavy truck and salesmen or contractors who drive long distance and rail and airplanes? OK the wiring ie grid is all in place and for most part can handle the load especially if charging is done in off peak.
I am an EV advocate and they make a lot of sense
BUT where is the energy going to come from to make the prime mover make the alternator go around to make electicity?

Geothermal OK we take heat out of the earth. Sounds good but how much can we take out and where does the earth core get the energy from? What happens when we solidify the core cause we took all the heat out?

Solar Have not seen any objections -THE MAGIC ANSWER -- AND
I theorize it will reduce global warming. We extract energy from sunlight - that energy would either warm the earth or get reflected back as infrared so this extracted energy would reduce that emitted to the earth and cause cooling effect of the earth. I wait until they identify some spider that will become extinct because of shading from solar panels. I wonder where we are gonna get all the land to do it in the American fashion ie megawatt installations. Rooftop - hmm how well did that work out in California?

Conservation
ANOTHER MAGIC ANSWER
what we dont use we dont need. Makes sense. Tried doing energy conservation - what I found and have heard same experience from others is that if it does not fully pay for itself in three years it wont happen. Yes there is the capital cost argument which is hard for small businesss
- ah hah the answer government subsidy and grant -
baloney to that - government loan I am all for but no grant or other free lunch.

Are we not cutting our throats?
I sure don't have the magic answer.

Thoughts or am I all screwed up and just don't see the big picture?

I have the MAGIC ANSWER after all
Eliminate all homo sapiens. NO war, no pollution, everything will become sustainable and pristine. Let's start with you NOT Me (hmmm NIMBY ??) - Clancy wrote a good book with this theme - sigh,,, probably won't work - too many that I just can't satisfy.

Dan Bentler

 

[Malcolmt]

Hi Dan, There is some thought provoking stuff there. I firmly believe in your magic answer , there are simply too many of us. If “WE” wernt around the planet would be in much better shape. If you look at at rabbits and foxes and how the balance swings to and fro then we are no different. If we are the rabbits then the foxes are mother nature. To keep humanity sustained we need to look at low tech approaches.. ie going back to grass huts and living off the land, accepting that mother nature can “CULL” the population for the benifit of the planet. It would be a monumental change, but i seriously think its the only way out for us.
When i’ve mentioned this theory to friends they thought i was crazy...now i know I’m not alone.

 

[Doug-P]

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

 

[todster]

When i’ve mentioned this theory to friends they thought i was crazy...now i know I’m not alone.

You're still alone. I can't envision myself or anyone else I know parking their snowmobiles or 4-wheelers in a frigid grass hut.
As far as low tech approaches, our president has already tried most of them. My mistake, there is a substantial difference between low tech and hare-brained.

It is interesting to watch the environmentalists and the power generation business

It's nothing more than a contest to see who can buy the majority of the crooked politicians. It's a win-win. Even if you lose, you still get to sue the winner.

 

[JesperMP]

Start by picking the fruits that hang on the lowest branches.

I think you should start by reducing your energy consumption.
Wherever the energy is going to come from in the future, a great part of the bigger solution is to minimize energy consumption.

You can easily cut you energy consumption in half.
List of contries after energy consumption.
Try to compare US and DK. In my country the government encourages energy saving for companies and households in numerous ways. Mostly by high taxes on everything that has to do with energy (*). A liter of 95 octane gazoline costs 1.5 € ~ 2 US$. A kWH electricity costs approx. 0.23 € ~ 0.30 US$. Cars are taxed according to their energy efficiency etc.
But there are also investment benefits for investing in energy saving solutions.
So it can be done without reducing the standard of living.

The hard part is to achieve another 50% reduction in energy consumption.

*: No, there is no public uproar regarding the high taxes. The population knows that it gets it all back in schools, roads, pensions, hospitals, kindergartens etc. etc.

 

[Brownhat]

You are missing something in your objections to geothermal. There is no way man could cool the core. Worldwide annual energy consumption is on the order of 4.7e20 J. The heat content of the Earth is estimated at 1e31 J. The current rate of heat loss is 4.2e13 W naturally. This is more than twice the rate of man's energy consumption. The heat is being replenished by radioactive decay. How about that? Safe, no-waste, all-natural nuclear energy. The trouble is, unless you live in the right area, it is hard to get at. To be thorough, (even though it is pie-in-the-sky) you should add fusion to your list.

 

[milldrone]

You are missing something in your objections to geothermal. There is no way man could cool the core.

But he can abuse the resource and make it nearly unusable. See this article on the geysers steam field in northern Ca. http://www.wind-works.org/articles/Geysers.html . Granted the author has a wind energy bias, but the facts are still true. Calpine has recently been injecting reclaimed waste water into the field. http://www.geysers.com/history.htm

 

[BobB]

Some years ago I used to be on the road selling gear. One of my customers was producing solar panels - now shifted to China where there is virtually no control over emissions and waste.
I am sure efficiency in manufacturing has improved but, at the time, one of the engineers commented to me that it cost more in energy to produce a solar panel than the solar panel could ever produce in it's lifetime. Maximum efficiency is also about 16-18% - pretty useless.
It is rumoured that an Ozzie company has been doing a lot of development work and that, in the next few years, a solar panel physically sized to currently produce 1.5kW will be able to produce 10kW! Wish I knew who they were, if it is true - would go and buy a pile of shares.
The other main issue with solar panels is that they are useless in winter when you need them most.
Wind farms are causing all sorts of issues with noise and being unfriendly to birds, as mentioned, but they also are not very effieient. They also break down regularly and are production wise unreliable due to the intermittent wind conditions.
Western Australia is pretty unique in some areas as it is always hot. An engineer wanted to build a solar panel like device to heat air very quickly at the low level and then direct the heated air in a 'funnel' that narrowed dramatically and put a wind type generator in the top of the thing. As the air heated it would also expand rapidly and accelerate up the funnel with the result that the 'wind' would be at a very high velocity when it hit the wind generator near the top of the funnel. The government would not give him a grant to build one. Once again, only useful in daylight hours and most effiecient when hot and no cloud. Less uefull in winter when needed.
Many of these things require a storage method to be really usefull - batteries? Not very friendly either and short lived - abou 5 years for gell cells and glass matt types. Glass matt type are probably the most environmentally friendly - gell cells are certainly not.
Nuclear is probably the most obvious current solution but generates great heat also - and then there is the problem of getting rid of the waste.
Coal would not be as bad if the waste could be filtered to remove the 'nasties'. The technology, I have heard, is available but very expensive - that will kill it. Getting rid of the CO2 is relatively easy - plant millions of trees - they grow on it.
At the moment here lots of companies are putting in gas fired generators for tri- generation so the can get 'green ticks'. Mechanical things that are not all that efficient, break down regularly, high maintenance costs etc. Often government grants - very attractive!
What ever happened to using gas to generate steam in a boiler? High efficiency, run a turbine and alternator off it, low maintenance costs on both boiler and turbine, no govenment grant - that kills it.

 

[leitmotif]

Thanks for comments. I guess I am just as confused uncertain as everyone else.

Are we really going to absolutely ZERO emissions? I just don't see how we can really do that. Washington state just outlawed lead wheel weights - claim there are 40 tons of em per year lost on highways.

IF we assume there is NO MORE oil - which is what we are all basically used to BUT we are going to run out - there were only so many dinosaurs who died.

THEN
We must stop waisting energy. I look all around industrial Seattle - in cold weater stacks are emitting water / warm air. Air compresssor ftercoolers dump wasted heat to ambient - one outfit I know used it for winter building heat - worked well. We need to find a way to use this heat we are wasting. At home for another example the dryer is ducted directly outdoors. Takes approx 2 kW to dry load of clothers.

How much does all this wasted heat contribute to global warming? I cannot believe that global warming is causes solely by greenhouse gases.

Coal I just don't know about this yes you can scrub out SO2 and maybe mercury and use it for something else. Same for CO2. BUT large coal plant uses about 50 ton per minute or so. Even if you scrub out 99.99% there is still some tons per day emitted.

Nuc great stuff in my mind BUT I am a Navy trained nuc so assume biased. I am told wasted fuel can be used in breeder reactor to develop medical and industrial isotopes.

The times are a changin that is for sure. The question is can we?


I have never understood why we put our generating facilities especially steam based out in the boondocks. They should be in teh city where we can use waste heat for house heat in winter - DOWNSIDE what about summer?

Dan Bentler

 

[Gil47]

I sat down the other day and added up all those devices that are always on, just waiting for me to push the button to turn fully on, and I assumed 10 watts per item, they came to a point that it made up 20 % of my power bill each month , and I have read that the number of such items will at least double in the next 5 years so there goes 40 % of my power bill.

 

[BobB]

They should be in teh city where we can use waste heat for house heat in winter - DOWNSIDE what about summer?

Absorption chiller? They are all the go on gas engine tri-generation sites at the moment.

 

[leitmotif]

Absorption chiller? They are all the go on gas engine tri-generation sites at the moment.

Absorption chiller works quite well if you have a heat source with high enough temperature. Ours on submarine ran on 15 psi steam - about 230 F. Not sure if it could work on steam plant condensor cooling water (around 80 maybe 120 ??) Kinda forgot about that. OK gotta run two lines for circ water so another 15 or 50 psi steam and condensate should not a big deal.

Dan Bentler

 

[V0N_hydro]

some thoughts:

1. hydro: many plants are being built around the world, and existing plants are being upgraded even in washington (eg snoqualmie) to get increased output. Maybe the little tiddler that made littler energy to begin with and had a large ecological impact is being removed, but hydro is not 'out'.

2. Natural gas: There is lots, particularly due to shale type discoveries. Check the price of natural gas and the amount consumed: supply has gone way up, consumption has gone way up, price has come down, thus there is lots of supply compared to demand.

3. There are something like 30 nuclear sites under construction in the world at this moment. I think it is either 0 or 1 of them that is in the USA. The rest of the world is improving nuclear technologies and building the next generation of reactors, the USA will have to buy one from overseas because they won't know how to build one on time and on budget when they finally decide it is an acceptable solution.

the USA needs to get up to speed on nuclear waste recycling and processing like france. 99% of USA waste can be turned into fuel, 1% is then left to store forever and a day.

4. Conservation: Use less energy to do the same work, eg increased efficiency, is fine but there needs to be an incentive for people to conserve or pay more for higher efficiency devices. The best incentive would be more expensive energy.

Ontario also has the brilliant plan to pay people to conserve (not use electricity). I am not using a whole lot of electricity right now so they owe me big time. The reward for not using electricty should be not having to pay the (high) price for consuming it.

5. Solar: photo-voltaic efficiency continues to rise and solar-thermal plants are being constructed on small scale, but more R&D is required.

6. Geothermal: Agree with Brownhat's post. expect to see more and more geothermal plants. Seismic activity can be a concern.

7. to the kiwi, you should measure how many watts are being used by devices that are plugged in but not on. I doubt they are all 10 watts. New Zealanders love to to turn stuff off as all the receptacles have switches although it is annoying when you sit down on the couch to watch the TV but have to get up to plug it in before you turn it on. Worth the 30 cents a month for me to leave it plugged in all the time.


8. Electric cars: while I don't see them being all that great in cold climates, great stuff ahead

 

[Mike6158]

Oil- The world has become so dependent on products derived from oil that I am increasingly skeptical that we have the capacity to break the cycle. An example how interwoven oil is into our life can be found in the book "The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (everyone should read this book). The industrial food machine is a big consumer of oil. The following is paraphrased from the book.

Every acre of corn grown requires at least 50 gallons of oil and there are a lot of acres planted ever year. Everything from the fuel required for planting, tending, harvesting, and transporting the crop to the fertilizers and pesticides that have to be applied to the crop consumes oil. More than 1/2 of all of the synthetic nitrogen made is applied to corn. Synthetic nitrogen is derived from natural gas. Hybrid corn is "designed" to convert nitrogen to food at greater speed. The trade-off (among many) is that it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel to produce a calorie of food. As a form of insurance most farmers over fertilize. In my hay farming days I would read the soil report and kick the recommended application rate up a little to make sure that I got a good crop (It turns out that rain was a bigger determinant for yield than fertilizer). The irony is that plants have a limited capacity for taking in nitrogen. What they don't take up evaporates into the air where it acidifies rain. Ammonium Nitrate is transformed into Nitrous Oxide which is one of the greenhouse gases that everyone is so excited about. Some seeps into the water table (along with pesticide residue). The rest is washed into creeks and rivers during the spring rains. During the spring rains, some cities actually have something called blue baby alerts that warn parents not to give their babies water from the tap. The nitrates in the water (from fertilizer runoff) convert to nitrite, which binds to hemoglobin, which compromises the ability of blood to carry oxygen to the brain.
More than half of the world’s supply of nitrogen is man made. The excess fertilizer has made it to the Gulf of Mexico where the nitrates poison the marine ecosystems. Google earth shows the locations of marine dead zones, some of which are caused when the excess nitrogen stimulates algae growth, which smother the fish, which creates a hypoxic zone as big as the state of New Jersey. Pre-fertilizer the local farm ecology was a sun-driven cycle of fertility. Legumes fed the corn. The corn fed livestock. Livestock manure fed corn. The loop was closed.

Corn is cheap protein. It wasn't always so. At one time the US had farm programs designed to limit production and support prices (and farmers). In the Nixon era the programs were redesigned to increase production and drive prices down. When the book was written the price of a bushel of corn was about a dollar less than the actual cost to grow it. In a strange twist of economic madness, the farm programs that are in place now drive production up and prices down. A farm family needs a certain amount of cash flow every year to support itself (don't we all), and if corn prices fall, the only way to stay even is to sell more corn. Desperate to boost their yields, farmers degrade their land, plowing and planting marginal land, applying more nitrogen, anything to squeeze out a few more bushels for the soil. Yet the more bushels the farmer produces the lower the prices go thus stimulating the spiral of overproduction. This is where the free market seems to fail. Most farmers work second jobs to support their families. If you want to see an example of the "abundance" of corn go to an elevator at harvest time and see the waste. Not to worry though, big agriculture is working tirelessly to create new and different uses for corn. Things like High Fructose Corn Syrup (probably the most significant contributor to the health problems of today). Government subsidies for things like ethanol synthesized from corn will ensure that the excess corn, 10 billion bushels when the book was written, has a use. 3 out of 5 kernels of the corn produced ends up on the factory farm where hundreds of millions of animals eat it and convert it to meat. It might surprise most people to know that the cow, a major player in this enterprise, is not by nature a corn eater.

With the advent of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations the market has seen the advent of cheap meat. Not so cheap however when you look at the contribution to environmental and health problems: polluted water and air, toxic wastes, new and deadly pathogens.

Steers bound for C.A.F.O's start out on grass pastures. At about 500 - 600 pounds they are weaned from their mothers, taught to eat from a trough, and gradually acclimated to eating corn, a food that they are not designed to eat. Once the steer has been acclimated it is shipped to a feedlot where it is finished on a diet of crushed, steamed corn flakes, liquefied fat (beef tallow from the processing plant in a lot of cases), protein supplement consisting of molasses and urea (synthetic nitrogen), antibiotics, and growth hormones. They used to use rendered cow parts from the processing plants but mad cow disease put a stop to that. However the FDA ban on feeding ruminant protein to ruminants makes an exception for blood products and fat. Things like feather meal and chicken litter (bedding, feces, and discarded feed) are permitted feeds.
The addition of antibiotics to the feed is necessary to keep the cow healthy enough to make it to slaughter on it's unnatural diet of corn and other "products" that are used for feed. The cow spends it's remaining days standing in it's own waste (and the waste of those before it). It eats 25 pounds a day of corn and on average will reach a weight of 1,200 pounds. In it's lifetime it will consume the equivalent of 35 gallons of oil, nearly a barrel for each of the 100 million cattle being fed in America at any given moment.

The process of milling corn for its components is a water and energy intensive operation. About 5 gallons of water is used to process each bushel. For every calorie produced in a wet milling operation ten calories of fossil fuel energy is burned. About 530 million bushels of the annual corn harvest is turned into 17.5 billion pounds of high fructose corn syrup yet we can't seem to figure out why obesity is an epidemic.

Did you know that there is almost no chicken in a chicken McNugget? Of the 38 ingredients in a McNugget, 13 can be derived from corn: the corn fed chicken; modified corn starch (binds the pulverized chicken meat); mono-, tri-, and diglycerides (these are emulsifiers. They are used to keep the fats and water from separating); chicken broth (restoration of flavor); yellow corn flour and more modified corn starch (batter);cornstarch (filler); vegetable shortening; partially hydrogenated corn oil; and citric acid (preservative). There is some wheat in the batter and on any given day the hydrogenated oil could come from soybeans, canola, or cotton, depending on market price and availability.

There are also some synthetic ingredients in a McNugget. The quasi-edible substances are derived from a petroleum refinery or chemical plant, not corn. These chemicals are what make modern processed foods possible, by keeping the organic materials in them from going bad or looking strange after months in the freezer or on the road. First there are the leavening agents: sodium aluminum phosphate, mono-calcium phosphate, sodium acid pyrophosphate, and calcium lactate. These are antioxidants added to keep the various animal and vegetable fats in the nugget from turning rancid. Then there are antifoaming agents like dimethylpolysiloxene, added to the cooking oil to keep the starches from binding to air molecules, so as to produce foam during frying. The problem is evidently grave enough to warrent adding a toxic chemical to the food: According to the Handbook of Food Additives, dimethylpolysiloxene is a suspected carcinogen and an established mutagen, tumorigen, and reproductive effecter; it's also flammable. But perhaps the most alarming ingredient in a Chicken McNugget is tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ, an antioxidant that is either sprayed directly on the nugget or inside the boxes it comes in to "help preserve freshness." According to A Consumer's Dictionary of Food Additives, TBHQ is a form of butane (ie., lighter fluid) the FDA allows processors to use sparingly on our food: It can comprise of no more than 0.02 percent of the oil in a nugget, which is probably just as well, considering that ingesting a single gram of TBHQ can cause "nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse." Ingesting 5 grams can kill.

The average processed food item travels 1,500 miles before it is consumed.

And that's just food. I doubt if you can find a single thing in your environment that hasn't been touch by oil in some way. When people discuss alternatives to oil they forget about the things that the big fans on the prairie, dams on the rivers, and atom splitters can't do.

 

[leitmotif]

Interesting feedback and differing views.

Mikes post only goes to show that we rely on oil gas and coal as precursors (best term??) for many products. I think his ending statement sums it up for non energy uses of oil.

Thank you all
Dan Bentler