Flash from a Distant Mirror

[Note: This post first appeared on another and earlier version of LaMarotte on June 8, 2009. I have closed that blog because advertisements began to appear on it. Some of the posts from that version, however, are reprinted here.}

The following quote is taken from a history entitled Caesar and Christ, by Will Durant, Simon and Schuster, 1944, pp. 111-112. It deals with an era known as the Agrarian Revolt in the Roman Republic, extending in time from 145 to 78 BC, thus the period immediately preceding the rise of Julius Caesar, who became the first emperor of Rome and thus closed the republican era of Roman history. Durant is summarizing the causes of the revolt:

The first cause was the influx of slave-grown corn from Sicily, Sardinia, Spain, and Africa, which ruined many Italian farmers by reducing the price of domestic grains below the cost of production and marketing. Second, was the influx of slaves, displacing peasants in the countryside and free workers in towns. Third, was the growth of large farms. A law of 220 forbade senators to take contracts or invest in commerce; flush with the spoils of war, they bought up extensive tracts of agricultural land. Conquered soil was sometimes sold in small plots to colonists, and eased urban strife; more of it was given to capitalists in part payment of their war loans to the state; most of it was bought or leased by senators or businessmen on terms fixed by the Senate. To compete with the latifundia the little man had to borrow money at rates that insured his inability to pay; slowly he sank into poverty or bankruptcy, tenancy or the slums. Finally, the peasant himself, after he had seen and looted the world as a soldier, had no taste or patience for the lonely labor and unadventurous chores of the farm; he preferred to join the turbulent proletariat of the city, watch without cost the exciting games of the amphitheater, receive cheap corn from  the government, sell his vote to the highest bidder or promise, and lose himself in the impoverished and indiscriminate mass.

Roman society, once a community of free farmers, now rested more and more upon external plunder and internal slavery. In the city all domestic service, many handicrafts, most trade, much banking, nearly all factory labor, and labor on public works, were performed by slaves, reducing the wages of free workers to a point where it was almost as profitable to be idle as to toil. On the latifundia slaves were preferred because they were not subject to military service, and their number could be maintained, generation after generation, as a by-product of their only pleasure or their master’s vice. All the Mediterranean region was raided to produce living machines for these industrialized farms; to the war prisoners led in after every victorious campaign were added the victims of pirates who captured slaves or freemen on or near the coasts of Asia, or of Roman officials whose organized man hunts impressed into bondage any provincial whom the local authorities did not dare to protect. Every week slave dealers brought their human prey from Africa, Spain, Gaul, Germany, the Danube, Russia, Asia, and Greece to ports of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea….

There is a great deal more along these lines, providing more detail. Durant was a very popular historian in his day, hence a copy of this book may very well be available in a decent local library. Needless to say I recommend a perusal of some pages of this important chapter. It is a kind of mirror held up to us by the past. To be sure, the economic level of Rome was on a lower stage. It was a time when agriculture was the industry and neither fossil fuels (our energy slaves) nor machines to use them had been invented yet. At the same time the public franchise had been obtained by Roman citizens who owned property; the forms of it were complex and comparable in many ways to ours. This posting will give some context to some of my past and future entries regarding the sensitive subject—sensitive because it violates our faith in the Free Market—of a national industrial policy. In the absence of one—and one based on genuine justice and values—has in the past led to chaos.

The term latifundia, plural of latifundium, was a Roman coinage of the time combining the word latus meaning “spacious” and fundus meaning “farm” or “estate.” The foundation of civilization is the fundus, the agricultural land.

Fusion Footnote

Although the theoretical background of fusion as a source of energy has been solidly established, experiments on a smaller scale have not yet yielded a positive energy balance (less total energy needed to keep the fusion process going than comes out as a net result).

     Fusion Energy Foundation (link)

Having mentioned fusion power elsewhere, I got curious about the subject again. In a sci-fi novel I once projected a future in which tokomaks (I called them takamaks, a variant spelling) were quietly supplying the world’s energy until the ocean seemed to resist the continued extraction of deuterium from its waters. A fictional speculation, to be sure. That was ten years or more ago. So now I got curious. I wondered what had transpired since. My interest, this time, was more conventional. I wanted to know the energy balance of this technology.

I was curious for a reason. A couple of years ago, in a free-lance assignment, I looked at ethanol production in this context and discovered there that, if all energy used in making ethanol is actually counted, ethanol production has a negative balance, meaning that inputs exceed the energy actually recovered. In the fusion game, this balance is referred to as Q. The output divided by the input is  Q. A Q=1 therefore means that energy expended is equal to the energy harvested. Anything higher than 1 is a gain, meaning that the technology pays for itself in an “energy economy.” If lower than 1, the technology isn’t justified in a purely physical sense. I put that phrase in quotes because energy balance is not the same as economic balance. Ethanol is cost effective, especially since it’s subsidized; from an energy point of vantage it is a loser.

The leading fusion process attempts to fuse a deuterium atom with a tritium atom. These are forms (isotopes) of hydrogen. Hydrogen has a single proton and a lone electron. The overwhelming majority of hydrogen atoms (99.98%) are of this simple type. Deuterium has a proton and a neutron both; a minute amount of hydrogen in the ocean (0.015%) takes the form deuterium. Tritium has a proton and two neutrons. For all practical purposes it does not appear in nature, at least not for long. It is produced by cosmic rays. It can also be produced by man using lithium as a starting medium. Anyway….

When you force a D and a T close enough together, they do everything in their power to resist you. Why? They both carry positive charges and repel. You have to exert energy of 0.01 million electron volts (MeV) to overcome this resistance. When you succeed, you produce an atom of helium, a single neutron that flies off as radiation, and 17.59 MeV of extra energy. This entire reaction therefore requires the 0.01 MeV at the very last stage—by the time you’ve really squeezed the atoms together—to yield the output, thus Q=1759! That’s major, as it were.

You might wonder how much energy an MeV actually carries. Thanks to Wikipedia, I can report that 4 MeV is the stupendous force with which a single snowflake crashes down on a trembling concrete drive. Obviously, in the case of fusion, we need a whole lot of Ds and Ts colliding and fusing before we can talk about real power.

Now we know the maximum potential of this technology. It’s a whole lot more attractive than that of petroleum which, as I remember, produces something like a Q=45. And that ratio has built the modern world. So what has fusion produced thus far in its roughly 60-year history. Developments began in 1950.

The best performance on record to date was delivered by the JET program (Joint European Torus, based in Culham, Great Britain). It delivered Q=0.64 for a few seconds, the short duration being characteristic of these experimental machines. The output was 16 Megawatts, produced by the expenditure of 25 MW. The record!

The ITER program, the biggest yet and still in the building stage, expects to achieve Q=10 in short bursts and Q=5 in more sustained production runs. ITER’s original name was International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, but that name worried people what with scare-words like thermonuclear and experimental being so close together, so the long phrase is no longer used. ITER’s fusion reaction is being raised now in Cadarache, in France.

Now the projected Q is a long ways of 1759, of course, but you have to account for the fact that long before we have the D and T close enough together to give them that last, tiny, 0.01 MeV nudge, we have get them into hailing distance first. That requires creating enormously hot plasmas inside magnetic containers that require cryogenic cooling in the -273 Celsius range. The cooling alone is very energy-intensive.

As for timing, the facility won’t be built for another eight years or so—if all goes well. And the distance between 0.64 and 10 is great.

To wind this up, the conditions ideal for bumping the heads of Ds and Ts is at the core of the sun where gravity does most of this work, where D and T have nowhere to go, and very sensitive disturbances can’t simply cause that great plasma up there simply to fizz out—like the light in our tokomaks routinely does.

Re-post Note: This post appeared first on April 9, 2009 in the Wordpress version of LaMarotte. I have since deleted that entire blog to avoid having my work used by advertisers. A selection of such posts will be reproduced here over time.

Energy Slaves Per Capita

The concept of an energy slave originated with Buckminster Fuller in 1944. Using data from the United States, German, and Swiss armies, he calculated that the amount of work a person can produce in a year was equivalent to 37.5 million foot-pounds per year. Now a foot-pound corresponds to 1.355818 joules, therefore the energy output of an energy slave was 50.843 million joules a year.

So how many energy slaves do we employ every year. Fuller’s approach was to measure the total energy consumed—but he adjusted that figure by taking only 4 percent of it. He assumed that we lose 96 percent of the energy in getting it to work, thus a 4-percent energy efficiency.

The most recent Energy Outlook published by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (link) provides data for the year 2008. In that year world consumption was 505 quadrillion BTUs. Since one BTU equals 1,054.35 joules, that consumption is 532,447 quadrillion joules. Let us take 4 percent of that, as Fuller did. We get 21,298 quadrillion joules. We divide that by 50.843 million joules and get a total count of “energy slaves”: 418.9 billion of them. We divide that by the world population (6,973,738,433), and, Presto! We learn that each living human being is served by 60 more or less invisible energy slaves.

Fuller’s calculations were applied to data for 1950. In that year (the population was then 2.25 billion), the result was 38 energy slaves per capita.

Something to think about. You will find other numbers on the Internet. They are sometimes quite hokey, based, for instance, on calorie intake by humans. Here we stick with the concept’s inventor. If you don’t like the “low” number, you can make the assumption that our overall energy efficiency is higher than 4 percent. But understating something is not always harmful. Our dependence on this modern form of slavery is quite overwhelming enough when we consider sixty servants at our personal beck and call.

Straws in the Wind

The two massive power-outages in northern India, last Monday and Tuesday, initially affecting 300, then 600, and yesterday 680 million people for a day, ought to be seen as straws in the wind; and in this day and age, repeating that in other words, thus saying that these are “signs of things to come,” seems appropriate.

People like me are labeled Chicken Little, the chick famed for crying that the sky is falling. But the point is not so much to engage in doom and gloom but, rather, to suggest how the global and local environments are shaping. Aesop has a fable that applies with equal force. It is about the Grasshopper and the Ant. Now I looked high and low in folk tale archives, and I cannot there discover any allegory about the King Who Was Too Fat to Die—nor one about a deeply caring Mother Nature who sheltered darling little Capitalism under her shielding wing.

India is the second-largest nation in the world—and only partially developed. When things fail there, vast masses are involved. When Chicken Little grows up, it worries about physical maintenance, alternative forms of energy, and ways of husbanding what fuel resources remain. An example of that is to replace, to the extent possible, private with public transportation. Which reminds me to look up some data about railroads.

Okay. So people sat about in trains with gloomy faces. Okay. Some barbers cut hair by candle light. These two events lasted about, say, 30 hours in the aggregate. From the peaks of the United States of Grasshopper, the Indians are far away and tiny. Useful outsourcing targets, they, especially those in the big cities. Don’t worry your little feathery head, Chicken Little. Mighty Technology will come to rescue us—and them. When, finally, they get with the program and cut those evil taxes.

St. Patrick's Day

By coincidence I began this second edition of LaMarotte on St. Patrick’s Day last year. The coincidence serves to remind me today that this is an anniversary. Since then I’ve made 209 posts. The favorites include posts on what might be called the subject of infrastructure. Top ranked was an entry on hydro and nuclear energy the world over, fourth ranked a post on electric power in the United States. Most read posts are shown in the left column. More tellingly, perhaps the three other posts that make up the top five are about math or measurement, thus perennial subjects rather than the flow, as it were, of generally very mixed news about the U.S. economy.

My basic interest is in economic fundamentals, something best measured in jobs. Employment trends, therefore, are a central focus here. My other focus tends to be on energy—arising from the conviction that humanity is passing through a unique and time-bounded period, the Fossil Age. The conventional economic focus is on money and on growth. But real wealth is rooted in nature and in labor. The fundamental growth-figure, therefore, is that of the population; economic growth should reflect population growth, but not much more than that. The vast growth in economic well-being since the nineteenth century has been due to the discovery of coal, oil, and gas—their sum a diminishing resource. Their exploitation through technology and automation is increasingly depriving the people of jobs. Our time horizons are short. We don’t collectively internalize what this sort of process means in the long run—assuming, as we must, that the Fossil Age will end, probably before this century is over.

Contemplating this picture—and the collective disregard of the vectors that are becoming visible—is at best sobering. I wish more people would do it. By way of diversion I turn my attention here to such fun topics as math or science or technology. Technology is particularly interesting. The modern attitude is firmly anchored in the belief that technology will save us—but ignoring the obvious fact that without free energy, which is what the fossil fuels really represent, our technological civilization is actually doomed. And the great faith in the solar solution? Well, my view is that humanity lived on solar energy exclusively from the very dawn of time to the discovery of the steam engine, which suddenly made coal “interesting.”

When We Eat, We’re Eating Energy

Herewith some startling numbers. A report by the Congressional Research Service in 2004 (link), provides direct and indirect energy consumed in Agriculture, including crop and livestock production. The numbers are in quadrillion BTUs, and the answer is that we consumed 1.7 quadrillion BTUs of energy, 1.1 quadrillion BTU in direct uses, and 0.6 quads in indirect, thus for fertilizers and pesticides. A USDA Factbook (link) tells us that “The aggregate food supply in 2000 provided 3,800 calories per person per day.” The (late) 2012 Statistical Abstract (link, Table 2) tells me that the 2002 population of the United States was 288.1 million people. So let us combine these numbers. Below the CRS data shown graphically:

Now one food calorie, also known as a kilo calorie, is worth 3.968320721 BTUs. Put another way, it takes 0.251995761 calories to make a BTU. So we can convert calories to BTUs or BTUs to calories. A quadrillion is 10¹⁵. Here is what it looks like: 1,000,000,000,000,000. So let us proceed.

If we apply year 2000 calories per capita to the 2002 population, we discover that in that year agriculture provided 1.1 trillion calories per day or 399.6 trillion calories a year to the total population. We can render that number into BTU-equivalents by either multiplying by 3.968… or by dividing it by 0.25199…. In any case we will be 1.584 quadrillion BTUs. That was the energy output of our agriculture in 2002 measured in quads of BTUs. So what did we expend in energy to get that output? What was the energy input? It was 1.7 quadrillions of BTU.

To get a ratio here, we take the input and divide it by the output. The result is 1.072. In other words, we expended more calories in industrial energy to get 1 calorie that we could eat. But the energy ratio calculation is not yet done.

We learn from this story in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, by William G. Mosely, co-author of a 2010 National Academy of Science study, “Understanding the Changing Planet: Strategic Directions for the Geographical Sciences,” that in addition to direct and indirect energy uses, an equivalent amount is used in processing and packaging of food. These two are, according to Mosely, 7 percent each of national energy use. And then another 3 percent of national energy consumption is used in food distribution.

Using these additional inputs, it turns out that in 2002 we used total energy of 4.13 quads as input for that 1.58 quads of caloric output. The cost now turns out to be 2.6 units of energy in for each unit of edible energy out.

Therefore it is absolutely true that we are eating energy in this modern day and age. This should make us very alert when we think about World Population. It has now reaching 7 billion—projected to reach 8 billion in 2050—a time by which we shall have pretty much consumed currently know hard reserves and only shale stuff will be left to take us to the next billion-person addition to the human family.

Added later. Thanks to russel’s comment to an earlier version of this post, I realized that I was using the wrong kinds of calories, not the kilo calories used in food. This post has therefore been updated to correct that very big error. I appreciate the correction.

Shale Oil and Gas: The Years They Add

The real hot topic in energy these days is not wind or solar. It is shale. By way of an example, today’s New York Times carries a story titled “The Energy Picture, Redrawn.” The focus is on shale oil and on shale gas respectively. As is usual in such coverage, the broader context provided by current reserves and trends in consumption are not highlighted at all. The graphics suggest, instead, plenty of both for a long time to come.

By way of a useful footnote to news coverage, I’ve undertaken to calculate for you just how long current proven reserves will last and how much longer the fossil age will last assuming that projected shale reserves actually pan out.

Here is a graphic that tells the tale. After that I’ll tell you how I did it.

What we see here is that without exploitation of global shale oil reserves, oil will run out by 2037. If we succeed in exploiting all reserves of shale oil, we get another 44 years and the world runs out of oil in 2081. The same for natural gas. Current conventional world gas reserves now are seen to last longer (until 2048), but exploiting all shale gas will only extend gas use by 25 years, to 2073.

What I did was to assemble three categories data: (1) current reserve estimates; I chose the World Oil estimates (link) because they are the highest. On the oil side these already include some portions but not all Canadian tar sands—which are not part of the shale of projection. (2) I obtained shale oil reserves from this Wikipedia compilation and shale gas estimates from the Energy Information Administration (link). (3) I obtained oil and gas consumption estimates from the EIA (link, link). For oil I calculated the consumption growth trend from 1982 through 2008; I extended that trend into the future. The growth is at a rate of 1.4 percent a year in barrels. For gas, the EIA provided forward estimates out to 2035; the growth here is at a rate of 1.6 percent a year, measured in trillions of cubit feet. These I extended at the same rate into future years as well.

Having a projected consumption out through 2100, I calculated, first, how rapidly known reserves would be consumed. Next, I added shale reserves to current reserves and did the calculation once again. The results are charted above.

Part of the down-side of loudly cheering shale reserves is that it lets the public fall back into an easy slumber—of ignorance. Shale is not a long-term solution. First of all, both resources will cost a lot more to exploit than crude oil and natural gas. Exploitation will have huge environmental consequences. And current estimates may well be optimistic.

The next two graphics show the same relationships in quantitative forms, the first for oil, the second for gas.

This Could Be Big

It might be possible to split water into oxygen and hydrogen using solar energy for the process and a relatively inexpensive semiconductor material. The hypothesis was published in Physical Review B on August 1 of this year. My source is Science News (link). The researchers unveiling this most seductive hint were Professors Mahdu Menon and R. Michael Sheetz, University of Kentucky’s Center for Computational Sciences and Professor Mahendra Sunkara and Graduate Student Chandrashekhar Pendyala, University of Louisville Conn Center for Reneable Energy Research.

The field to which they made their contribution is photoelectrochemical water splitting. The innovation here is the substitution of an inexpensive semiconductor material for much more complex materials used as the base of current experiments. To quote my source, the team at University of Kentucky “demonstrated that an alloy formed by a 2 percent substitution of antimony (Sb) in gallium nitride (GaN) has the right electrical properties to enable solar light energy to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen.”

This could be big. But the Big Caution here is that this was a theoretical discovery, not a physical, experimental demonstration. Thus the researchers were modeling chemical outcomes on a computer.

Splitting water into its components using established methods is very energy-consumptive; it uses a lot of electricity. Indeed the energy balance is not favorable; therefore current industrial ways of obtaining hydrogen start with hydrogen-rich methane (4 hydrogen atoms to one carbon). But if we could tweak cheap semiconductors to do the job—with sunlight supplying the external energy yet—that would be a MAJOR breakthrough.

There’s many a slip twixt modeling and demonstration—but I certainly hope these guys are on to something real! To use water (in effect) as the source of fuel—with the exhaust from the engines being water, again, why that would save our high-energy culture—and Fossil Sunset would not be quite so threatening as it is now.

A Glimpse of Our Oil Future

The Department of Energy’s Energy Information Agency issued Annual Energy Outlook 2011. It is available here. The Outlook invites us to contemplate what things might look like in 2035 from a 2009 perspective, thus to look 27 years ahead. The report appears to emphasize natural gas—because we’re apparently doing well in that regard—even if the brightness of that future seems to be lit mostly by shale gas. I have a summary on shale on this blog, and can only agree with the EIA which also, rightly, emphasizes that there are many, many unknowns in that field.

I decided to concentrate on the petroleum liquids instead. Here in a nutshell is the EIA’s projection for that sector:

In other words, in 2009 we consumed the equivalent of 6.9 billion barrels of crude. Of that we imported 52 percent. In 2035, we shall consume just shy of 8 billion barrels of crude equivalent. Our imports will have dropped to 41 percent; some fraction of our biofuels, however, will also be imported (presumably from Brazil). The new kid on the block is liquid from coal, as high as 3 percent of our future liquid fuel. Makes me wonder where the hydrogen will come from to get that hard coal to flow.

It is difficult to discover, in such reports, “big picture” perspectives that let the reader eyeball the reasonableness of such projections. I dug out some numbers to provide myself perspective. Let’s look at petroleum reserves and consumption world-wide and in the United States.

World reserves in 2009 were put at 1,239 billion barrels by BP (link) and world production, thus consumption, was 26 billion barrels the same year (link). If nothing changes—thus if no growth in consumption takes place and no new fields are discovered—we have 47 years of oil left.

U.S. reserves stand at 30 billion; U.S. consumption was nearly 7 billion barrels of crude equivalent. Using that number, we have 4-plus years of oil left. In effect we imported 52 percent of our oil, therefore only consumed, from domestic sources, 3.3 billion barrels equivalent. Using that number, we have nine years left.

But in EIA’s projection we have to go out 27 years and reduce our reliance on imports from 52 to 41 percent. So how is this going to happen? Well, buried in the report is the answer. The base case EIA uses includes a magic trick. The EIA magician holds out the shiny black top hat. Drum roll. And then the magician pulls 69.3 billion barrels of as yet un-discovered new reserves from the hat. These reserves will be discovered in off-shore locations all around the contiguous United States and in Alaska. Well! That’s a lot of oil! It is more than twice the reserves BP credits us as having (30 billion). Others are less generous. The Oil and Gas Journal and World Oil both think that our current reserves are just 21 billion barrels.

Other assumptions I find EIA making in building its base or reference case also strike me as rather optimistic. EIA assumes a $125 per barrel of crude price out in 2035. If I was a betting man and expected to live well beyond 99—I’ll be that age in 2035—I’d put hard cash against that number. The case also rests on other cheerful developments like a very abstemious American public, dramatically improving automotive efficiency, and an economy that will let us buy the new technology as soon as it its been delivered, presumably by Caesarean section, out of the labs.

The glasses seem tinted a shade too rosy. The curves they just keep going up. EIA is tweaking trends going downward up, with just a few token revisions. Technology wins. Foreign competition for the precious oil is muted. But that’s the nature of huge institutional establishments, like the EIA. Keep driving straight ahead, grip the wheel hard, don’t blink—but keep the pedal to the metal.

Rocky Mountain Low

It’s Colorado rocky mountain low
It’s rainin’ fire elsewhere but here prices are below
Friends around the campfire and everybody’s high
Why? Rocky mountain low!
     With apologies to John Denver

I had the unique experience the other day of filling up our car and paying more than $4 per gallon. The bill bravely approached but then kindly stayed just this side of $50. Not for long, I would suppose. Herewith the latest on gas prices across the country, as of May 2, 2011, courtesy of the Energy Information Administration here.

Data are by regions. Sub-regions are shaded light and the U.S. average red. I live in the Midwest, and the price shown there, $4.01, is on the optimistic side. It was higher in actuality where I bought my gas. The West Coast can legitimately mourn, especially California, but this time, anyway, Rocky Mountain Low!

I’m also showing, next and from the same source, price tends for the United States from end of October 2008 through the end of April of this year. Somehow I seemed to have missed that dip in December of 2008, but, as the young now say, whatever…

House-Garage Distance Indicator

Houses are quite close to garages, but two hundred years ago the distance between functionally equivalent structures (house-stable) was much greater. Now two hundred years from now, I predict that the HGDI will once more return to 1811 levels. Why do I say this? Well, the smell of gasoline in a sealed tank is almost impossible to discern, but the smell of horse manure in a stable calls much more attention to itself. And in two hundred years we won’t have any gasoline left but we’ll still have horse manure.

Shale Summary

We heard it yesterday in the context of President Obama’s speech on energy—so it will become a catch-phrase. Bet on it. “We are the Saudi Arabia of Shale.” If wishes were horses then beggars would ride—and if rock flowed like water we’d be the Saudis of shale. The happy claim turns out to be a numbers game. Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves are put at 267 billion barrels. Never mind that serious people doubt that. Over against that, the estimated crude oil potential of shale deposits in the United States would yield 800 billion barrels. I have this number from the Energy Information Administration, so it must be true.

Where is it? Our shale deposits are located in three states, Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. The richest deposits are on Federal lands in Northern Colorado. If you drew a triangle with Casper Wyoming, Denver Colorado, and Salt Lake City, Utah at its points, you would more or less enclose the area. To see for yourself...

View a Map

That’s the superficial location—meant literally. The oil shale is deeper down. Deposits here start at 1,000 feet (three-football field lengths plus below). The best deposits are 2,000 below the surface (more than a third of a mile deep). For this reason two methods of getting the oil out are on offer: in situ and ex situ. The first means digging down and establishing a processing facility deep underground in a man-made cave. The other means conventional mining of ore, lifting it, moving it by trucks to a surface processing plant, and extracting oil on the surface.

As it happens, in situ is the better way. It yields more oil, requires no transport, and huge waste disposal operations are unnecessary. The downside is that that you have to preheat the mountain, as it were, for a period of 18 to 24 months before production can begin. Preheat how? It must be done by employing electrical resistance or radio waves.

What is it? Oil shale is rock, sedimentary rock to be precise. The inset shows that it looks like. (The source is Wikipedia here, and the object on the rock is a hammer.) The useful part of it is kerogen, the organic portion of such rock. When the kerogen portion is high in such rock, it is called oil shale. Another way to put it is that oil shale is future oil. Our crude oil was formed when these formations sank deep enough, to be heated high enough (140-320°F; water boils at 212°F) to yield their oil. The process must take place in an absence of oxygen. Not all but most of the kerogen turns into liquid oil or flammable gas.

The ratios of kerogen to mineral are an important aspect of shale. Share of kerogen per ton of shale ranges from 23 down to 13 percent, meaning that 77 to 87 percent is mineral waste. Another interesting fact about shale oil—never mentioned in political speech—is that its hydrogen to carbon ratio is lower than that of crude. Data from Estonia (here)—the world’s largest shale oil extractor— indicates that shale oil has 9.8 percent hydrogen versus Brent crude at 13.3 percent. Brent crude is a light, sweet variety. Crude has 1.4 times more hydrogen. Numbers from other sources tend to be in this range too. This means that shale oil must be hydrogenated—pure hydrogen must be obtained and added to it—before it is equivalent to, ah, Saudi oil. The best source for hydrogen is natural gas by steam reforming. This is another high-temperature process (1292-2012°F), thus adding to the energy needed to get energy out. Shale oil is also sulfurous (“sour,” in trade jargon), and its processing requires desulfurization.

What is its EROEI? Those letters stand for energy return on energy invested—tat for tit, you might say. Per Wikipedia’s summary here, a 1984 study put EROEI to between .7 and 13.3. Royal Dutch Shell’s research program, using electrical heating of the sort used in in situ operations, suggested 3 to 4. Conventional oil extraction yields 5 units for every unit expended. It isn’t clear whether these ratios include secondary refining processes like hydrogenation and desulfurization. Probably not.

Another source (here) cites recent studies of low EROEI for surface processing, less than 1.5 out for 1 unit of energy expended (2006, 2007) and 1.9 to 2.5 for in situ (2007). Canadian experience in tar sands processing is 2 to 4, but tar sands are easier to handle and less energy-intensive. The sand kernel is surrounded by water; the wet kernel is then surrounded by bituminous oil. Separating oil from water takes less energy than separating oil directly adhering to a mineral substrate.

Worth noting here is that, economics aside, a positive EROEI is all that is required. The return on crude is also dropping. It used to be 100 for 1. Now it is 5 or thereabouts—3 in the United States and 10 in Saudi Arabia. But, for these very reasons, some people doubt claims of 3 to 4 for shale—arguing that, in that case, shale would already be a booming business. But economics may not be put aside—and may explain the lack of a shale bubble now or in the near-term.

What are the Problems? Surface processing lowers yields and increases costs. Mining of large masses of rock from significant depth is required. The rock must be crushed. The heat process is pyrolysis, thus heating in the absence of oxygen, thus in tight containers. Waste containment (the residues are high in Arsenic) and disposal is a requirement. Water use is 2 to 10 gallons per ton of oil shale processed according to the Bureau of Land Management in surface extraction mining and retorting operations.

In situ processes required long lead times (that 2-year pre-heat period). Groundwater contamination is a serious problem.

Massive capital requirements are involved with, at present, not altogether predictable results. Publicly-owned, operated development is unimaginable in our political environment, and private money will stay away from this one until somebody else besides Estonia proves it to be big and very profitable. When that time comes our Lords of Industry will wrap themselves in white robes, bind their heads in white scarves, and head for the water spots in the Med. But I’m not holding my breath.

And now a footnote on problems. Here is the concluding paragraph of a brief EIA paper on the subject. Read this remembering that the very best deposits in the U.S. are on Colorado Federal lands:

In addition, current regulations of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management require that any mineral production activity on leased Federal lands also produce any secondary minerals found in the same deposit. On Federal oil shale lands, deposits of nahcolite (a naturally occurring form of sodium bicarbonate, or baking soda) are intermixed with the oil shales. Relative to oil and other petroleum products, nahcolite is a low-value commodity, and its price would fall even further if its production increased significantly. Thus, co-production of nahcolite could increase the cost of producing oil shale significantly, while providing little revenue in return.

Twenty Years of Electric Power

While on the subject of electrical energy, I thought I would update my understanding on the total picture—thus beyond nukes and hydro. A very nice data set is available here from the Department of Energy’s hard-working Energy Information Administration. Let’s first look at total electrical generation, in billions of kilowatt hours (kWh) from 1990 through 2009.

At the beginning of this period, we consumed 3 billion kWh. Our use of electricity peaked in 2007 at 4.157 billion. Usage had dropped to 3.95 billion kWh by 2009—indicating that even electrical generation responds to economic turndown by a matching dip in production.

The lower curves show the generation of electricity by selected types of fuels or methods like hydroelectric and wind. Note here that until 2006 the top two were coal and nuclear. After that time natural gas became more important than nuclear. Fourth is hydroelectric. Petroleum was fifth until, in 2008, wind power began to generate more electricity than oil. The categories shown do not exhaust the list— but since petroleum and wind barely show on this chart, a closer view of the others needs another graphic. Herewith the shares of fuels and methods in 2009 as a pie chart:

I am showing the percentage share of the leaders—coal, natural gas, nuclear, hydro, and wind. Together these accounted for just a hair under 97 percent of all electrical generation in 2009. Please note that solar and photovoltaic, while in the pie, is such a tiny sliver so as not to show at all (0.02%).

Finally, here is a chart that shows the growth rates of the various fuels/methods used to get that spark into the wire:

Now this is a most illuminating chart. It shows that wind-power wins, hands down, growing at 18.8 percent—and that’s every year in the 1990-2009 period! The big loser is petroleum. Some of the categories here need additional commentary—also revealing:

• The category “Other Gases” includes, to quote from my source, “blast furnace gas, propane gas, and other manufactured and waste gases derived from fossil fuels.”

• The “Other” category, growing at 6.5 percent a year, includes “non-biogenic municipal solid waste, batteries, chemicals, hydrogen, pitch, purchased steam, sulfur, tire-derived fuels, and miscellaneous technologies.” By non-biogenic I think they mean unlikely to rot, thus paper, cardboard, plastics, wood, etc.

• “Wood and Wood Derived” fuels include “paper pellets, railroad ties, utility poles, wood chips, bark, red liquor, sludge wood, spent sulfite liquor, and black liquor, with other wood waste solids and wood-based liquids.” Various liquids mentioned here are wastes in paper pulping mills.

• “Other Biomass” includes “biogenic municipal solid waste, landfill gas, sludge waste, agricultural byproducts, other biomass solids, other biomass liquids, and other biomass gases (including digester gases and methane).” Biogenic wastes are those that rot, ferment, and throw off gases.

Did you notice the interesting common feature of these categories? They all represent recovery of energy from wastes of some sort. The “Other” category ranks second in overall growth. We can come up with an Environmentally Friendly grouping: Wind, Solar, Wood, Biomass, and Other. In 2009 these accounted for 3.6 percent of total electric power generation. And in 1990? In 1990 they were 0.05 percent of the total—thus a 72-fold increase in the last twenty years. A tiny fraction of total megawattage, but the trend is there—and the growth rates are there as well.

Hydro Potential U.S.A.

Yesterday’s post made me aware that I’d never before mentioned hydro-electric power on this blog before, although it interests me a great deal. As mentioned, we obtain 6 percent of our electric power from hydro plants. I got to wondering how many such plants we have—and whether or not a nice map may be available. Thanks to the Department of Energy, I found this wondrous map here.

The map shows all existing hydro-power plants as little yellow squares. The legend, which shows areas (in purple) unsuitable for hydro power because of federal laws or policies prohibit such facilities, also shows areas which have a potential for future use (in brown). That category is labeled “high head/low power.” In trying to understand that, I gained some insight into how hydro-power is classified.

The word head refers to the height achievable for water to drop from one level to the other. A high head means greater than 500 feet, a low head less than 500 feet. The height we’re talking about here needs to be geological, thus due to the mountainous character of a region. That is why the brown areas correspond to such regions in the United States. Masses of water must be contained, and a man-made “head,” thus a reservoir resting on monstrous concrete pillars, would be too costly.

The word power refers to electrical capacity an area is capable of generating, measured in megawatts (MW). This measure is an indirect way of speaking about the amount of water available. The more water, the greater the power potential. A high power is 1 MW or greater; a low power is less than 1 MW.

MW refers to a capacity to generate power all at once, thus without reference to time. Turn it on, and its turbines put out that amount immediately. The flow of energy, the actual output, is designated by kilowatts per hour (kWh). In 2008 the U.S. generation was 4.156.7 billion kWh.

Based on the above, hydro plants are classified as High/High, High/Low, Low/High, and Low/Low. The brown area on the map (never mind DEA’s use of the word orange) represent areas where drop distances are 500 feet or greater but the water available is such that power potential is less than 1 MW. DEA’s selection of this midlevel potential is because the High/High situations have been mostly exhausted already. To look at the top category, here is a tabulation of the top five hydro-power sites in the United States sorted by capacity.

Some notes to this table:

• Coolee, Bath County, and Hoover would be classified as High Head/High Power whereas Niagara and John Day would be classified as Low Head/High Power.
• The actual height of Niagara Falls (the natural phenomenon) is 167 feet. The head in the power facility at Niagara Falls is achieved by diverting water from the river to another point.
• The Bath County, Virginia facility is pumped storage, meaning that water is held in two reservoirs, one high, one below the power station. In periods of high power demand, water is released to generate power. In periods of low demand (late at night), the water is pumped back to the high reservoir.
• The Hoover Dam is on the border between Arizona and Nevada.

What the DEA map tells me is that we do still have a lot of potential—but to exploit it we need to build many, many small plants—until the brown regions turn yellow. The Chinese have a saying: Yellow is the Middle Way—thus it is the route we must find to avoid both Scylla and Charybdis. (If that last phrase puzzles you, look here.)

Electric Leaders: Nukes and H2O

A table appearing in the 2011 United States Statistical Abstract (here) provides an interesting view of power generation across the globe in 2008. Some extracts from that table are graphed here. I am presenting one bar-graph on the top twenty countries in nuclear electric —and another on the top twenty in hydro-electric generation.

The United States produces 19.4 percent of its electric power using nuclear technology but ranks a distant thirteenth among the twenty leaders in the world. (I like that ranking. We’re contrarians in this family, and 13 is our lucky number.) Notice that Europe is very prominent on this list—and France leads the pack. At 78 percent of its total electricity, it generates 22.2 percent more than its nearest rival, Belgium, at 58.8 percent.

This bar graphs shows the top twenty in hydro-power generation—something of a misnomer. Hydro power relies on gravity. Water is its medium. And capturing tidal power is also due to the gravitational pull—of the moon. Here I show the United States as the twenty-first country. The U.S. doesn’t make the top twenty, but I thought I’d show us by way of comparison. Russia, another country with a large land area, produces 18.3 percent to our 6. China produces 14.1 percent. The leader is Paraguay. And speaking of Paraguay, notice the strong representation here by Latin American countries. Four of the top five are Latin American—and they’d sweep if Norway would not be butting in so powerfully. Aren’t they satisfied to have off-shore oil and gas. Ah, these northerners.

Five countries make both lists. These are, in order of their hydro-rankings, Sweden, Argentina, Romania, Russia, and Finland. And in their nuclear rankings, Sweden (again), Finland, Russia, Romania, and Argentina. Most balanced in this sub-list are Sweden and Russia. Both produce roughly the same percentage of electricity from both nukes and hydro-electric.

You might think that countries ranking high in hydro had it made. Nukes have the major problems of safety and waste disposal. Hydro-electric has the problem that dams eventually silt up and natural water flow is subject to climate change. Nobody is ever dealt the perfect hand that will take the pot forever and ever more.