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October 31, 2007

Hydrogen, again by at 11:27 AM on October 31, 2007.

Is Hydrogen the Answer to Our Future Transport Needs?:

It’s the most commonly-occurring element in the universe, it can be burned in a combustion engine or used to fuel electric motors, and it’s vastly cleaner emissions-wise than gasoline. The automotive industry seems to have settled on hydrogen as the magic bullet solution to the looming energy crisis, and each year we see a number of fuel cell concept cars showcased by the major manufacturers — but it’s a technology with some serious hurdles to overcome before it becomes viable. So how does hydrogen compare to batteries as a means of propelling transport in the future?

Is hydrogen the answer? Honda is one of many major auto companies that think so — stating in a recent release on their FCX concept that “Hydrogen will fuel the next generation of global vehicles. It’s a fact accepted by the entire industry. And given that it’s the most commonly-occurring element in the universe, supply is not an issue.”

But what about the new and coming generations of plug-in electric vehicles? As with Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, its early days yet, but pure electric vehicles seem to have a few strong points of their own. So, with a focus on fuel cells rather than hydrogen fueled internal combustion engines, let’s take a look at the set of requirements a transportation fuel source has to meet to be viable, and see how hydrogen and batteries compare:

[See the article for the areas of comparison: Abundance, efficiency, safety, refueling practicality, environmental factors, and economics.]

On the whole, a pretty balanced treatment, although I have a nano-nit to pick with the refueling topic–the author points out that a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle can be refueled very quickly, allowing a driver to make long trips. Batteries and the associated technologies are in development to allow quick charges, but that seems to be years away. True enough, but it overlooks the basic chicken-and-egg issue–you can quickly refuel your hydrogen fuel cell car only if you can find a hydrogen filling station. (A point mentioned later in the same article.) For a long distance trip to grandma’s, it will be very problematic finding filling stations along the way, unless you and grandma both just happen to live in hotbeds of hydrogen infrastructure development.


Honda offers FCX for ‘08, bitchslaps Google:

Honda has confounded green-motoring analysts by announcing that it will offer a hydrogen-powered car for general sale in 2008, years earlier than expected.

The car in question - the third generation of Honda’s FCX fuel-cell demonstrator platform - was always expected to debut next year, but until now the plan had been to lease it to users in a motoring beta test. Now Honda has amazed the motoring world by saying that the car will go on sale in the US and Japan for just £50,000 - despite the scarcity of hydrogen filling stations.

“When the car was invented, countries weren’t full of petrol stations,” Honda chief exec Takeo Fukui said. “When the demand is there [the hydrogen economy] will happen.”

Honda is trying to get more hydrogen pumps deployed, but also has another trick up its sleeve: the planned Home Energy Station. This might be bought by FCX owners in future, and hooked up to their domestic gas supply to produce hot water and electricity for the house as well as hydrogen for the car. The Energy Station isn’t ready yet, however.

So, how many of these puppies do you think Honda will sell in the US next year at a cool $114,000? 100? 500? Not only will buyers have to deal with the scarcity of filling stations, but the depreciation on the first fuel cell cars will likely be staggering.

I’m not impressed with the Home Energy Station concept, as it ties the car to your home just as sure as an EV would, plus it will generate a lot of CO2, as it produces hydrogen by reforming natural gas. I guess the earliest adopters will feel so green and superior driving their “only emits water vapor from the exhaust!” car that they’ll overlook the CO2 emissions from their home filling station.

And yes, I realize that electrolyzing water to make hydrogen will create CO2 emissions for the majority of customers, but that scenario has at least one possible saving grace: When the source(s) of your electricity get(s) cleaner, all your electricity consumption gets cleaner, automatically. Put in a natural gas reformer and you’re stuck with its CO2 emissions as long as you use it.




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TWIP by at 10:41 AM on October 31, 2007.

The TWIP is out (emphasis added):

Summary of Weekly Petroleum Data for the Week Ending October 26, 2007

U.S. crude oil refinery inputs averaged 14.9 million barrels per day during the week ending October 26, down 13,000 barrels per day from the previous week’s average. Refineries operated at 86.2 percent of their operable capacity last week. Gasoline production fell compared to the previous week, averaging 8.9 million barrels per day. Distillate fuel production rose last week, averaging 4.1 million barrels per day.

U.S. crude oil imports averaged nearly 9.4 million barrels per day last week, up 278,000 barrels per day from the previous week. Over the last four weeks, crude oil imports have averaged nearly 9.7 million barrels per day, or 481,000 barrels per day less than averaged over the same four-week period last year. Total motor gasoline imports (including both finished gasoline and gasoline blending components) last week averaged 1,238,000 barrels per day. Distillate fuel imports averaged 325,000 barrels per day last week.

U.S. commercial crude oil inventories (excluding those in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve) fell by 3.9 million barrels compared to the previous week. At 312.7 million barrels, U.S. crude oil inventories are in the upper half of the average range for this time of year. Total motor gasoline inventories increased by 1.3 million barrels last week, and are in the lower half of the average range. Both finished gasoline inventories and gasoline blending components rose last week. Distillate fuel inventories increased by 0.8 million barrels, and are at the upper limit of the average range for this time of year. Propane/propylene inventories increased 0.9 million barrels last week. Total commercial petroleum inventories decreased by 1.1million barrels last week, but are in the upper half of the average range for this time of year.

Total products supplied over the last four-week period has averaged 20.7 million barrels per day, down by 0.1 percent compared to the similar period last year. Over the last four weeks, motor gasoline demand has averaged nearly 9.3 million barrels per day, or 0.3 percent above the same period last year. Distillate fuel demand has averaged nearly 4.3 million barrels per day over the last four weeks, down 0.7 percent compared to the same period last year. Jet fuel demand is down 2.7 percent over the last four weeks compared to the same four-week period last year.

The tables that follow display the latest U.S. Petroleum Balance Sheet and the most recent 4 weeks of Weekly Petroleum Status Report data.

[Follow link for the data tables.]

Gasoline stocks being up is the big news here–they’ve been uncomfortably low for months, so a 1.3 million barrel stock build is Good News, even if it appears to have come from imports and not domestic refining operations.

I suspect that the 3.9 million barrel drop in US oil stocks will get the most attention, especially if the Fed cuts interest rates again later today, as is widely expected. (In the simplest terms possible: Lower interest rates = more economic activity = more oil consumption.)

October 30, 2007

The vision thing by at 3:19 PM on October 30, 2007.

Opposition takes on coal plants:

Sammy Prim says he always thought environmentalists were “a little bit nutty.”

Then a New Jersey-based utility, LS Power, decided to build a $2 billion coal-fired power plant here, just a few miles across the Chattahoochee River from his rural Alabama home. If built, it could emit up to 9 million tons of carbon dioxide, the primary gas blamed for global warming, every year.

“I’ve been a Republican my whole life, but I’ll be doggoned if Al Gore isn’t right,” says Prim, 64, a retired radiologist. “Is it fair for you and me — this generation — to pollute for all the generations to come when we’re already seeing the effects — global warming, mercury, particulate matter?”

The article has a lot more to say about coal-fired generation and this one project, in particular, but the part I quoted pegged my outrage scale.

Why oh bloody freaking why is it that so many people in the world can’t grasp the simple fact that global warming is global and a peaking of the world oil supply affects the whole world? Why do so many people bounce through life in cruise mode, paying more attention to which celebrity got paparazzied coming out a club sans underwear than real issues that will affect them and all of our children for generations to come, until one of those issues literally impacts them or shows up on their doorstep?

What ever happened to vision and imagination? What the hell ever happened to enlightened self-interest, or even (gasp!) altruism?

Will we need an oil slick or coal plant or natural gas pipeline right on top of every single voter and consumer before we pull our collective heads out of our collective asses and show more survival instinct than your average sea sponge?

I know, I know–it’s an information problem. People are acting rationally because they don’t understand the gravity of the compound situations we’re facing. This is, in fact, why I’ve dedicated my career to writing about these topics and running this site.

But damn, people, it would be nice if a few more of you out there, aside from those who read this site, would care as much about yourselves and your own kids as I do and did something positive.




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Skrebowski interview by at 2:33 PM on October 30, 2007.

Here’s a transcript of Julian Darley’s recent interview with Chris Skrebowski.

I highly recommend you take a few minutes and read the whole thing. But just to tease you a bit, I’ll include some excerpts.

On the EWG report:

Julian Darley: This is at least a dramatic a report as has been released, I think, by any official or semi-official organ. Why should people take this seriously?

Chris Skrebowski: I think when you look at it and it’s publically available through the energywatchgroup.org website, you will see that it’s a very carefully done piece of work, for they’ve developed a methodology that’s basically a production based methodology. But they’ve also looked at the sort of underlying reserves, and they’ve come up with figures. They’ve contrasted these with the sort of industry data-base figures from IHS Energy. It’s a pretty solid piece of work. There’s a mildly amusing piece of circumstantial confirmation, which is that the legendary Texan oil man, T. Boone Pickens has made not millions, but billions betting against the oil industry conventional wisdom, has just announced that he thinks we have hit peak oil and that it will go down pretty rapidly from here on in. So, I wouldn’t wish to bet against Mr. Pickens. He’s got a good track record for actually getting it right, and we have a very careful report, very thorough report, which seems to be saying the same thing. So, yes, it’s fairly unnerving that this may be the start of a very major social and economic upheaval.

On production from tar sands:

Julian Darley: Are you foreseeing, in fact, an earlier peak for tar sands’ output?

Chris Skrebowski: I think, I think at this stage it is just too early to tell; but, it is a plausible and ultimately a respectable argument to say that if you can’t get the economics to add up well as the ores become leaner, you probably would have a tar sands peak, and that it would decline.

Julian Darley: And the tar sands peak, not in 50 years’ time, but rather sooner?

Chris Skrebowski: Yes, it would be in the 2015, 2020 era.

[See the interview for more detail on tar sands.]

On independent oil companies (what we in the US typically mean when we talk about “the oil companies”–the big, corporate entities like ExxonMobil, etc.):

Julian Darley: One of the other interesting graphs that they show in their executive summary and in the full report is the situation for, what I call, the international oil companies, the IOCs. The outlook is not looking terribly healthy for them in general.

Chris Skrebowski: No, no. This is a graph that, I think, will come as an unpleasant surprise to a large number of people because what this very clearly demonstrates is that by the first quarter of this year the big international oil companies were actually producing little more than they had been producing ten years earlier, in the first quarter of 1997. They did improve the production in intervening periods, and very roughly it looks as though they got to their highest level, maybe their peak, in the first quarter of 2004. The other thing that’s very clear from this graph is that the mergers between the various companies have not led to any great synergies in terms of expanding production. If you merge Chevron’s production and Texaco’s production, then it goes into Chevron-Texaco production, it’s basically the sum of the two earlier bids. Similarly with Total Fina and Elf; BP and Amoco and ARCO, and Mobile and Exxon. Quite remarkable.

And some more on the EWG report and the underlying methodology:

Julian Darley: You’ve been an oil industry analyst for a fair number of decades now, with experience with BP and the Saudi Arabians, amongst many others, and you’ve also been doing the seminal work on the oil field’s mega projects, which gives you a kind of special insight into the likely future production. So what do you make of this report? Do you think it’s more or less right? Is it congruent with your expectations?

Chris Skrebowski: Not quite, but I have to respect the fact that this is a very comprehensive report. They’ve gone back to fundamental sources, they’ve checked and they’ve come to their conclusions. My own conclusion, which, if you like, if fairly dependant on information that’s publicly available, and I think this report actually had access to some that’s less publicly available. So my work, basically tells us that if everyone does what they say they’re going to do, and all the things work as they are expected to - that’s a pretty heroic assumption - we could get out to about 2011, but no further. Now, what that means is that you would find an envelope of where you could get to, and then everything that goes wrong brings you back in time that envelope. What the Energy Watch Group, in effect, is saying is there are enough things that are going wrong, not working as people might have hoped, to bring us all the way back to it being an immediate peak now. And it’s certainly true that if you look at a standard production series, like the IEA production series, you find that we’ve been on this sort of bumpy plateau since January or February 2005. That’s nearly 30 months that we’ve been sort of bumping along without succeeding in getting the production significantly higher.

Again, please read it all, and you can directly download the full EWG report (101 page, 1.7MB PDF).




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October 29, 2007

Open thread by at 1:29 PM on October 29, 2007.

China’s oil production to peak in 2015 - report:

China’s crude oil production will peak at about 190 mln tons by 2015, according to a report by the China News Service.

The report cited Pang Xiongqi, professor at the China University of Petroleum, who also said that the country’s natural gas production would peak at 120 bln cubic meters by 2035.

China faces even more serious energy supply challenges once the peak has been passed, Pang said, and will be forced to spend more of its foreign currency reserves on increasingly expensive crude imports.

Dwindling oil production could also lead to a further increase in the consumption of coal, putting more pressure on the environment, Pang said.

Barring a major and sudden change in China’s policies and infrastructure over the next 8 years, how much more “interesting” do you think a peak in that country’s domestic oil production would make the world oil market?


Nations, States, Provinces Announce Carbon Markets Partnership Targeting Global Warming:

A coalition of European countries, US states, Canadian provinces, New Zealand and Norway have formed the International Carbon Action Partnership to fight global warming.

ICAP will provide an international forum in which governments and public authorities adopting mandatory greenhouse gas emissions cap and trade systems will share experiences and best practices on the design of emissions trading schemes. This cooperation will ensure that the programs are more compatible and are able to work together as the foundation of a global carbon market to boost demand for low-carbon products and services, promote innovation, and allow cost effective reductions so as to allow swift and ambitious global reductions in global warming emissions.

The international and interregional agreement was signed today by US and Canadian members of the Western Climate Initiative (Arizona, British Columbia, California, Manitoba, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington); northeastern US members of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York); and European members including the United Kingdom, Germany, Portugal, France, the Netherlands, and the European Commission. New Zealand and Norway joined on behalf of their emissions trading programs.

Perhaps it’s my economics training kicking in again, but I can’t help but see the lost opportunity cost of the US federal government (not to mention Canada’s–what’s up with that?) being completely absent from this effort.


Censoring science:

A few days before she was to appear before a Senate committee on the public health implications of global warming, Dr. Julie Gerberding submitted her written testimony for White House review.

As director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Gerberding has considerable expertise. Sending her comments to the Office of Management and Budget was considered so perfunctory that her office simultaneously shared the document with public health groups.



We have learned at great cost over the past seven years that aligning documents with administration policy is not the same as aligning them with reality. Sometimes that has meant “editing” the science in reports and testimony. Sometimes it has involved trying to muzzle world-renowned scientists, such as NASA climate expert James Hansen. And sometimes, as with the war in Iraq, the administration’s efforts to mold truth to match its policies have led to tragedy.

A Bush official once bragged to a reporter that the administration had the power to create its own reality. That boast has been proved wrong time and again over the last seven years. The ham-handed attempt to stifle Dr. Gerberding is just the latest example.

More on the recent CDC testimony mess. Highly recommended, but only if you can spare the blood pressure points.


Blog I just discovered: The Clean Slate Report


Singapore To Build World’s Largest Solar Energy Plant:

The world’s largest manufacturing plant for making solar energy products will be built in Singapore, it will be the first such plant in Southeast Asia.

The plant is expected to start production of wafers, cells and modules used to generate solar power by 2010. It will be built by leading Norwegian solar energy firm Renewable Energy Corp (REC) in the Tuas View area with space set aside for supporting industries.

The plant will be able to produce products that can generate up to 1.5 gigawatts (Gw) of energy annually. That is enough to power several million households at any one time.

Excuse my techie econo-talk, but that’s one big-ass PV plant, and I’d bet a whole lot more like it are comin’.


James Lovelock: Reducing emissions could speed global warming:

A rapid cutback in greenhouse gas emissions could speed up global warming, the veteran environmental maverick James Lovelock will warn in a lecture today.

Prof Lovelock, inventor of the Gaia theory that the planet behaves like a single organism, says this is because current global warming is offset by global dimming - the 2-3ºC of cooling cause by industrial pollution, known to scientists as aerosol particles, in the atmosphere.



According to Professor Lovelock’s gloomy analysis, the IPCC’s climate models fail to take account of the Earth as a living system where life in the oceans and land takes an active part in regulating the climate.

He will argue that when a model includes the whole Earth system it shows that: “When the carbon dioxide in the air exceeds 500 parts per million the global temperature suddenly rises 6ºC and becomes stable again despite further increases or decreases of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

“This contrasts with the IPCC models that predict that temperature rises and falls smoothly with increasing or decreasing carbon dioxide.”

First, I never know what to make of Lovelock. I see a lot of statements from him like this, yet I never hear about where they come from. Is there some large, sophisticated model he’s working from, or is it instinct and reasoning? This isn’t meant to be a harsh criticism of Lovelock, just an observation that if the same things were said by someone named Smith most people would either ignore him completely or demand a lot more proof than we do from Lovelock.

Second, am I the only one who remembers that in those first days after 9/11 we saw a noticeable warming in the US because of the lack of airline traffic (and there sunlight-reflecting contrails)? Clearly there is something to this notion of stuff we put into the air both heating (greenhouse effect) and cooling (albedo effect) the environment. How they balance out is way above my pay grade, though.

Third, can we finally agree that we have been and still are performing an immense exercise in geo-engineering, regardless of whether it was intentional or even if we recognized it as such before now?

Related: Gee-Whiz Geoengineering


Worth pondering: PEAK OIL AND THE FERMI PARADOX, By Mike Byron, Ph.D.

And that reminds me of one of the most interesting quotes I’ve ever encountered:

It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing high intelligence this is not correct. We have, or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned. The same will be true of other planetary systems. On each of them there will be one chance, and one chance only.

Of Men and Galaxies, 1964




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Testing markets by at 10:30 AM on October 29, 2007.

One of the frustrations of being an economist (aside from the whole “not knowing diddly squat about money” thing) is that we can’t run experiments the way those working in many hard sciences can. Care to test your hypothesis about what an overnight tripling of the price of gasoline would do in the US, or how the economy would handle a massive natural gas shortage? Forget it, Poindexter, you’ll have to settle for trying to simulate it on a computer and then arguing endlessly with other economists about whether your “surprising” and/or “interesting” results have revealed a Deep, Heretofore Unrecognized Truth about the US economy or simply exposed a flaw in the data or software you’re using, resulting in a political food fight that gets you dropped from the department head’s Christmas party and triggering long-running feelings of resentment and inadequacy.

But I digress.

One of the classic economics thought experiments is for a vendor to announce a schedule of price cuts for some item that traditionally has an enormous markup. Said seller tells the world on Day 1 that on Day 10 the price will drop from $1,000 to $900, on Day 20 it will drop to $800, etc. By tracking sales, the notion goes, the vendor can figure out what price s/he should charge to maximize profits, since the customers had perfect information about future prices, and only bought when they were truly comfortable with the price and didn’t care to wait any longer for a further discount. (I have some serious reservations about the value of the data one would collect via this experiment, but I won’t bother to go into that; this is just an example to illustrate the mindset.)

While waiting at a red light the other day, it occurred to me that car companies could do something quite interesting that follows the spirit of this thought experiment. Specifically, imagine that you walk into the local Bazooka Motors dealership, and inquire about buying the new Hybrid Belchfire 9000, a plug-in hybrid version of the wildly popular Belchfire 9000. The salesperson tells you that the car costs $25,000, and it includes a battery pack that provides about 10 miles of electrons-only driving range.

But wait! There’s more! The salesperson also points out after selling you the undercoating that you can add one of several sizes of supplementary battery packs, either at the time of initial car purchase or later on as a dealer-installed accessory. For an additional $2,000, you can bump the battery-only range to 20 miles, for $4,000, you can push it to 30 miles, and for $6,000 you can stretch it to 40 miles. Obviously, we would see different customers take different paths at this point. Some would be happy with the basic plug-in capability, some would want more, some (like readers of this site) would want to max out the battery range, and some would want to wait and see if their driving habits and finances would allow for a later addition of the pack.

Wouldn’t you just love to see the breakout of how many of each of the battery options Bazooka Motors sold, broken out into initial sales vs. later add-on, as well as by demographics (location, income, age, education), against the price of gasoline and electricity? Man, I’m drooling on my keyboard just thinking about it.

And imagine what not just Bazooka Motors, but all the other car companies would be able to do with that data.

Just to be clear, I’ve heard not so much as a rumor of any car company, fictional or otherwise, doing something like this. But I’d bet that it would be pretty simple and relatively cheap for a car company to try this with one car model. And it would answer a lot of questions about how people feel about plug-ins, and give both the customers and the car company the flexibility to bump up the battery capability as batteries declined in price and/or gasoline rose in price.


On a related note, consider this comment over at AutoblogGreen about the so-cute-it-makes-your-teeth-hurt Toyota iQ:

Although gasoline prices have remained under $3 a gallon around these parts recently, the price of crude is still climbing and reaching $90 a barrel. Toyota US executive VP for Sales Jim Lentz commented that the iQ concept is something that might work in the US market. It’s probably safe to assume that everyone in the business will be closely watching the sales of the Smart ForTwo after its US launch in January. If it takes off, cars like the iQ and Volkswagen up! (hopefully with a different name) will probably get the green light.

Every company’s actions are a market test case for every competing company. If one of them gets a hit with something, you can bet your Internet connection that others will jump on the bandwagon like so many Hollywood or network TV execs playing follow the leader.


One more riff on that theme comes from Mitsubishi to Launch i MiEV in 2009, Nissan to Launch EVs in 2012:

Mitsubishi Motors Corp plans to launch its i-MiEV all-electric compact car in 2009, a year ahead of schedule, according to company president Osamu Masuko.

Separately, Carlos Ghosn, CEO of Nissan Motor Co and Renault SA, said that his auto group is planning to mass produce an electric car mainly targeted at big cities by 2012.

I note that while necessity is the mother of invention, desperation is the mother of action. I’ve been saying for some time that what we needed was one of the major car companies to be desperate enough to take the leap into EV’s, to embrace a highly disruptive technology. Mitsu has been talking for some time about doing this–originally (still?) it was to be a Colt EV in 2010–and their publicly announced plans seem to have only become more aggressive.

And that, in turn, brings up another thing I’ve been meaning to, well, bring up: The chunkiness of economic change. Economists like to do everything with smooth curves (get your head out of the gutter, people), and gloss over the fits and starts of large-scale changes in markets. Often enough this is a harmless and quite useful simplification. When you’re talking about people trading stocks (the classic example of “the closest thing we have to perfect competition”) or other markets with a very large number of both buyers and sellers executing transactions with floating prices, approximating discrete (if sometimes indiscreet) actions with a continuum works just peachy.

But when we’re talking about a classic oligopoly (small number of large sellers), like the car business, then things get weird. In general, we can say that as the price of gasoline rises we’ll see more fuel efficient offerings, something that’s clearly going on right now. But it takes time, time for the car companies to become convinced that the increase in gasoline prices is long-lived enough to shift customer buying patterns, time for the car companies to modify and market new designs, time for the companies to make enough profits on those new models to pay back the enormous design and retooling costs. In other words, car companies have to be really sure that gasoline prices won’t plummet in 6 or 12 or 24 months before they’ll make a major shift in their product lineup. But they’re doing it, which tells you everything you need to know about what they’ve concluded about the oil situation.

And they can’t possibly downsize or re-engineer every single model at once, so we see GM talking to everyone who will listen about the Volt even while they continue to run countless TV ads for their “GMC Truck Month” campaign (coming soon to a Hallmark greeting card store near you) in which they try to sell as many trucks to people who don’t really need them as possible.

Is it the behavior we would like to see? No. Is it logical and consistent? Yes. Is it our job to give all the car companies an incentive to push harder and faster on making their product lines more fuel efficient? If you have to ask, then you just haven’t been reading this site long enough…

October 26, 2007

1,200 days to the peak? by at 11:57 AM on October 26, 2007.

David Strahan recently interviewed Chris Skrebowski about his comments at the recent ASPO conference that we have about 1,200 days before the worldwide peak in oil production. See that page for a link to the 7:48 interview in mp3 format.

This situation leaves me deeply conflicted. While I agree with Skrebowski’s bottom-up methodology and his general conclusion of a 2010-to-2012 peak, I have a serious philosophical disagreement with the faux precision tactic of nailing it down to “1,200 days”. I think it needlessly implies a degree of accuracy that’s unwarranted, and it also opens up the possibility for the cornucopians to ridicule the prediction and the efforts of all of us writing about this issue. Imagine, for example, that the actual peak comes in about 1,300 days. You can bet your Internet connection that starting on the day the stats are released showing that new, all-time high, in 1,300 days we’ll hear endless drivel from the extreme optimist end of the spectrum about how wrong the prediction was, how oil is yet again denying the pessimists, etc.

But if Skrebowski does a detailed analysis, and it say we’ll hit the peak in roughly 1,200 days, shouldn’t he simply say, as he does, that’s what the numbers say and we’ll find out in time if they’re right? Listen to the interview, and you’ll hear that Skrebowski is his usual reserved self; he’s clearly no wackjob attention whore pulling scary numbers out of his hat.

Not to be overlooked in all of this is the value of making an attention-getting prediction, in terms of helping to educate people, ala Ken Deffeyes’ famous prediction that the peak would fall on Thanksgiving Day (US version) 2005.

So, let me ask: If you had Skrebowski’s expertise and relatively high profile in the oil world, would you have made the 1,200 days prediction? Leave aside the issue of whether you believe it’s correct; assume for the moment that you did the best analysis possible, using whichever methodology you preferred, and came up with a date 1,200 days in the future.

I probably wouldn’t have done it; I’m not convinced that’s the right decision.




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Open thread by at 11:31 AM on October 26, 2007.

White House: Global Warming Is Good For You:

Olivier Knox, Agence France Presse’s man in the White House Press Corps, alerted me to a funny moment he wrote about today. One tenet of the White House’s policy on climate change is, apparently, “What, me worry?”

On Wednesday, spokeswoman Dana Perino told reporters that US experts were trying to determine “what are going to be the health benefits and the health concerns of climate change, of which there are many.”

Asked to detail what the benefits would be, Perino replied: “Look, this is an issue where I’m sure lots of people would love to ridicule me when I say this.”

“But it is true that many people die from cold-related deaths every winter. And there are studies that say that climate change in certain areas of the world would help those individuals,” she added. “I’m not an expert.”

Holy crap. This one is so boneheaded, so willfully, destructively, and inanely wrong that I don’t ven know where to start.


Beyond the Age of Petroleum:

This past May, in an unheralded and almost unnoticed move, the Energy Department signaled a fundamental, near epochal shift in US and indeed world history: we are nearing the end of the Petroleum Age and have entered the Age of Insufficiency. The department stopped talking about “oil” in its projections of future petroleum availability and began speaking of “liquids.” The global output of “liquids,” the department indicated, would rise from 84 million barrels of oil equivalent (mboe) per day in 2005 to a projected 117.7 mboe in 2030–barely enough to satisfy anticipated world demand of 117.6 mboe. Aside from suggesting the degree to which oil companies have ceased being mere suppliers of petroleum and are now purveyors of a wide variety of liquid products–including synthetic fuels derived from natural gas, corn, coal and other substances–this change hints at something more fundamental: we have entered a new era of intensified energy competition and growing reliance on the use of force to protect overseas sources of petroleum.

A longish, highly recommended piece with a more mainstream-audience approach than many things I link to. But please note that I’m not as convinced we’re locked into a militaristic future for our energy policy as Klare is in this article and his books.

Michael T. Klare is one of the handful of authors I put on my “read every word they write” list. Others on said list include James Hansen, Matt Simmons, Dave Cohen, Fred Pearce, and George Monbiot.


Oil rises back above $89 on OPEC report:

Oil futures jumped back above $89 a barrel Thursday on news that OPEC production increases aren’t coming as fast as expected and that the cartel won’t announce new output quotas when it meets next month.

Prices were already higher on growing concerns about conflict in the Middle East and declining supplies of crude in the U.S. when Oil Movements, a company that tracks oil tanker traffic, reported that crude shipments from Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries members will grow more slowly than anticipated through early November, according to Dow Jones Newswires.

Meanwhile, OPEC Secretary General Abdalla el-Badri told The Wall Street Journal Asia that the cartel is not in discussions to boost production by 500,000 barrels. El-Badri’s comments counter rumors that Saudi Arabia is pushing for a production increase. In September, OPEC bowed to Saudi pressure and announced a production increase of 500,000 barrels a day, effective Nov. 1.

That story was from yesterday. Overnight, oil hit a new intra day high of $92.22, and is at $91.17 as I type this.

Everyone is focused on the Bush’s announcement of sanctions against Iran and the continuing discussion that his administration is intent on attacking Iran before leaving office. While that would be an unmitigated disaster on more than one front, this news of OPEC’s reluctance to raise output levels further is more interesting, even though it received very little attention.

I’ve said countless times (or so it must seem to readers of this site) that we were headed for a showdown this year with OPEC over oil supplies. I was far from alone in this prediction; if anything, I think it was so obviously in the cards that it shouldn’t really be called a prediction, more a recognition of the inevitable.

As for what it means, just hop on over to the TWIP page and check the graphs on the left side of the screen showing the spot prices for oil and gasoline. We’re at a time of the year when these price normally go into a pretty marked swoon, and instead they’re taking off.

Unless something changes pretty drastically between now and the time when prices normally ramp up in about four months, we’re in for one hell of a ride.




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October 25, 2007

Carbon capture and sequestration by at 12:07 PM on October 25, 2007.

University of Texas to Begin First Long-Term Underground CO2 Storage Test in US:

The Bureau of Economic Geology at The University of Texas at Austin has received a 10-year, $38 million subcontract to conduct the first intensively monitored, long-term project in the US studying the feasibility of injecting a large volume of carbon dioxide for underground storage.



The bureau’s project will study the feasibility of injecting large volumes of CO2 at high rates into deep brine reservoirs. The project has been designed to develop best practices for future large-volume injections by gathering a greater variety of subsurface data than any previous experiments. Key issues include estimating the CO2 storage capacity of brine reservoirs, understanding the effects of injection pressure and developing methods for documenting retention of CO2 in the injection zone.

Let me say up front that whenever I hear a serious discussion of CCS, I flash back to that famous scene in the TV show MASH when Radar O’Reilly famously observed, “that looks pretty breakdownable.”

I mean–storing a gas, underground, permanently?

But intuition shouldn’t be a guide in such matters, and from what I’ve read in various sources, the science seems to say, pretty convincingly, that this will work. We’ll no doubt have a few surprises along the way, in terms of rates of injection, which types of geology are better or worse for our purposes, etc., but the bottom line is that this technology very likely can and will be made to work for permanent (there’s that heebie jeebie-inducing word again) CO2 storage.

And frankly, it damn well better work, because if we’re serious about making the kind of overall reductions in CO2 emissions that the scientists (as opposed to the politicians) say we must (80 to 90% by 2050), then we’ll have almost no choice but to make very heavy use of CCS. Consider it one of those “inescapable conclusions” I’ve mentioned before.

Consider the details given in the current DOE/EIA Annual Energy Review:

The US has 1,493 coal fired electricity plants, nearly all of which cannot be retrofitted for carbon capture at anything approaching a “reasonable” cost, i.e. in many cases it would be cheaper to tear them down and build a new plant. Similarly, virtually none of them were sited with the intention of transporting their captured CO2 emissions to an appropriate place for permanent sequestration, further raising the cost of retrofitting CCS onto existing plants, as we now have a need for new CO2 pipelines.

Add to this static snapshot one of the the dynamics of our energy and environmental situation I talk about most, the coming, creeping electrification of transportation via plug-in hybrids and EV’s. That trend will be welcome, on one hand, as it reduces the CO2 emissions of US transportation, also, oddly enough, about 32% of the total. That increased demand for electricity will make it even harder to reduce our total CO2 emissions from that sector–we won’t be able to build out renewable generation quickly enough to both meet new demand and displace CO2-intensive coal generation at the needed rate.

Therefore, CCS damn well better work, and even if it does, expect electricity to get more expensive and the entire electricity sector to change at a surprising rate. Nowhere will we see the trend to our “D&D” future–decentralized and diversified–more clearly. We’ll be using much larger shares of wind, wave, solar, tidal, and geothermal generation, with many more homes, businesses, and institutional buildings sporting their own solar PV panels.

Related: Pace of coal-power boom slackens




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October 24, 2007

TWIP surprise by at 11:16 AM on October 24, 2007.

Today’s TWIP (This Week in Petroleum report) (emphasis added):

U.S. crude oil refinery inputs averaged 14.9 million barrels per day during the week ending October 19, down 183,000 barrels per day from the previous week’s average. Refineries operated at 87.1 percent of their operable capacity last week. Gasoline production rose compared to the previous week, averaging nearly 9.0 million barrels per day. Distillate fuel production fell last week, averaging 3.9 million barrels per day.

U.S. crude oil imports averaged 9.1 million barrels per day last week, down 1,305,000 barrels per day from the previous week. Over the last four weeks, crude oil imports have averaged 9.9 million barrels per day, or 414,000 barrels per day less than averaged over the same four-week period last year. Total motor gasoline imports (including both finished gasoline and gasoline blending components)last week averaged 838,000 barrels per day. Distillate fuel imports averaged 235,000 barrels per day last week.

U.S. commercial crude oil inventories (excluding those in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve) fell by 5.3 million barrels compared to the previous week. At 316.6 million barrels, U.S. crude oil inventories are near the upper end of the average range for this time of year. Total motor gasoline inventories decreased by 2.0 million barrels last week, and are at the lower end of the average range. Both finished gasoline inventories and gasoline blending components fell last week. Distillate fuel inventories decreased by 1.8 million barrels, and are at the upper limit of the average range for this time of year. Propane/propylene inventories increased 0.6 million barrels last week. Total commercial petroleum inventories decreased by 7.9 million barrels last week, but are in the upper half of the average range for this time of year.

Total products supplied over the last four-week period has averaged nearly 20.8 million barrels per day, up by 0.4 percent compared to the similar period last year. Over the last four weeks, motor gasoline demand has averaged 9.2 million barrels per day, or 0.2 percent below the same period last year. Distillate fuel demand has averaged nearly 4.3 million barrels per day over the last four weeks, up 1.0 percent compared to the same period last year. Jet fuel demand is down 3.3 percent over the last four weeks compared to the same four-week period last year.

The tables that follow display the latest U.S. Petroleum Balance Sheet and the most recent 4 weeks of Weekly Petroleum Status Report data.

And from Bloomberg we have Crude Oil Rises After Report Shows Unexpected U.S. Supply Drop:

Crude oil rose for the first time in four days after the Energy Department reported that U.S. oil and gasoline inventories unexpectedly declined.

Crude oil supplies fell 5.29 million barrels to 316.6 million barrels last week, the report showed. A gain of 963,000 barrels was expected, according to the median of 16 responses in a Bloomberg News survey. Imports plunged 13 percent to 9.1 million barrels a day, the lowest since the week ended March 2.

“There’s no way to look at this report as anything but bullish,” said Rick Mueller, an analyst with Energy Security Analysis Inc. in Wakefield, Massachusetts. “This is an exhibit of the tightness we’ve been talking about. There just isn’t enough oil out there and the situation won’t be remedied until OPEC opens the taps.”

Crude oil for December delivery rose $1.68, or 2 percent, $86.95 a barrel at 10:49 a.m. on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Futures touched $84.68 earlier today, the lowest since Oct. 15. Prices are up 47 percent from a year ago.

Aaaaaaand we’re off!

Open thread by at 10:37 AM on October 24, 2007.

Daimler wants to mass produce fuel cell vehicles by 2012-2015:

Daimler fuel cell system development director Christian Mohrdieck told a conference in Stuttgart recently that by the 2012-2015 time frame they will be able mass-produce fuel cell cars on a cost competitive basis with other technologies. If so that would be put them only a couple of years behind General Motors, which expect to be able to do that by the end of this decade. So far Daimler has built over 100 fuel cell vehicles that have accumulated over 2.3 million miles of testing.



Now there is just the pesky problems of producing and distributing all the hydrogen.

“Pesky”, indeed.

Once again, a limited test with a few or even (gasp!) 100 cars, no matter how many miles they rack up, proves nothing about the scalability of hydrogen fuel cells to an economy-wide solution. And it’s not just a matter of dollar cost (which is most definitely non-trivial when you’re talking about building out a massive, new infrastructure), but the additional burden of reducing economy-wide CO2 emissions. (Yes, it would be nice if we completely accounted for CO2 emissions in all energy costs, but I honestly don’t expect to see that happen in the US.)


The Peak Oil Issue — A Progress Report:

ASPO-USA’s 3rd annual World Oil Conference has now come and gone. The gathering was an unqualified success, so our thanks go to the organizers and volunteers who made the conference possible. About 525 people attended, probably the highest total so far for any peak oil conference held to date anywhere in the world. Any detailed post-mortem is necessarily incomplete. Perhaps it is more important to explore the significance of the conference in its larger context. Is there greater clarification of the peak oil issues? How is the world reacting to those issues?

In its narrow sense, the phrase “peak oil” refers to the zenith of global oil production, but the term now often refers to more general resource constraints on “business as usual” going forward. There are issues about coal, natural gas and other commodities. The connection between anthropogenic climate change and future resource availability is now being explored in greater depth as new data-driven analysis comes to light.



Looking on the bright side, peak oil is not so much a fringe idea as it once was, and the internet is full of good writing on the subject. Major reports like those issued by the GAO and the NPC—who acknowledged the peak oil problem mostly by avoiding it, choosing instead to talk about poorly articulated “hard truths”—have addressed peak oil directly. Unfortunately, these reports also did not get nearly the attention they deserved, just as they did not fairly characterize the state of our knowledge about peak oil. On the other hand, the AAPG’s Hedberg Research Conference headed up by Nehring was held primarily to clarify our knowledge about the future oil supply and predict the peak or plateau of world production.

So there is some progress to report in the 4th quarter of 2007, even if it does not warrant much optimism that most people are finally coming to grips with reality. Like many observers, Tom Whipple believes it will take a traumatic event to awaken the public to peak oil. On second thought, even the typical human response to crisis has attendant problems. A geopolitical upheaval will spawn explanations about the event itself, explanations that have nothing to do with our peak oil vulnerability. Similar explanations would be offered in the case of a severe economic downturn, mutatis mutandis. The upside is that both events would force us to consume less oil. The downside is that a severe interruption in oil production will engender great human suffering while the peak oil problem will remain unseen in the background.

Thus we understand the basic reasons that explain the underlying pessimism evident at ASPO-USA’s conference. The news is mostly bad but few are acknowledging these warning signs. It’s never easy to be the bearer of bad tidings. So we do the best we can at ASPO-USA, as exemplified by this year’s excellent conference. And we will try harder in the future. The rest of our fate is in God’s hands, or if you prefer, in the ineluctable workings of a Universe over which we ultimately have little control. Nature—including Human Nature—will win in the end, it always does. If it helps, take the Prozac.

Dave Cohen’s summary of the just-completed ASPO-USA conference. First rate stuff, even by his standards. Go read.

The PDF’s of the presentations are available here.


Hybrid or All-Electric? Car Makers Take Sides:

Big auto makers revving up efforts to electrify automobiles are taking shots at each others’ strategies, in a style more familiar to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs than the auto industry’s usually circumspect leaders.

The argument surfacing among auto-industry leaders gathering for the Tokyo Motor Show this week is over whether it is time to skip past partial electrification of cars — represented by gasoline-electric hybrids such as the Toyota Prius — and push instead to revive the idea of an all-electric car.

On one side are Toyota Motor Corp. and General Motors Corp. Both have played down all-electric cars in favor of developing gasoline-electric hybrids, though they disagree on the best technology and how quickly it can be implemented.

On the other side are two allied car makers, France’s Renault SA and Japan’s Nissan Motor Co., as well as Honda Motor Co. The three have expressed skepticism about the economic wisdom of hybrids and are talking up all-electric cars.

Welcome to the protracted messiness as the economy responds to higher oil prices by “sorting itself out”, as economists are fond of saying.

One fundamental issue here that seems to have flown below almost everyone’s radar is what we should read into the fact that the car companies are having this discussion (or argument) at all. If they thought we were seeing a short-term spike in prices that would subside in six months or a year or two years, do you think they would be allocating this much of their resources to developing different automotive technologies? Of course they wouldn’t, which only proves that they now believe what the peak oil crazies (like, well, me) have been saying all along: This time it’s different and the age of cheap oil has ended. In other words, we’re seeing these companies do exactly what they feel is in their own best interest: Develop more oil-efficient vehicles, even at great cost, because that’s what the market will want for the foreseeable future.

The signs that many companies and governments “get” peak oil and recognize that we’re in a permanent oil crunch are all around us. Some of those signs are more pleasant than others, but they’re all there, nonetheless.



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October 23, 2007

The California fires by at 10:07 PM on October 23, 2007.

I wasn’t planning on talking about this horrific situation, as I didn’t think it was necessary for me to chime in when there’s such an avalanche of media attention, including, as best I can tell, responsible discussion of the “is this related to climate change” angle.

But then I got a very sarcastic and downright nasty e-mail from some deservedly anonymous jackass who assumed I would blame these fires on global warming. Since there clearly are such knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing, rock bangers out there who somehow have figured out how to use the Internet, let me state the painfully obvious:

And, of course, if you’re one of those people with an expressed activism gene and you simply must Do Something To Help, you can always make a donation to the American Red Cross. While I have no connection with the Red Cross, I do have a great deal of respect for them, and I remember quite clearly the help they provided to my mother and me, and many, many others in the Pennsylvania flood that was caused by Agnes in 1972.

Bush’s war on science by at 9:40 PM on October 23, 2007.

White House edits CDC climate testimony:

The White House severely edited congressional testimony given Tuesday by the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the impact of climate change on health, removing specific scientific references to potential health risks, according to two sources familiar with the documents.

Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Atlanta-based CDC, the government’s premier disease monitoring agency, told a Senate hearing that climate change “is anticipated to have a broad range of impacts on the health of Americans.”

But her prepared testimony was devoted almost entirely to the CDC’s preparation, with few details on what effects climate change could have on the spread of disease. Only during questioning did she describe some specific diseases that likely would be affected, again without elaboration.

Her testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee had much less information on health risks than a much longer draft version Gerberding submitted to the White House Office of Management and Budget for review in advance of her appearance.

“It was eviscerated,” said a CDC official, familiar with both versions, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the review process.

The official said that while it is customary for testimony to be changed in a White House review, these changes were particularly “heavy-handed,” with the document cut from its original 14 pages to four. It was six pages as presented to the Senate committee.

Go read the whole sad, pathetic, disgusting, infuriating thing, assuming you have the stomach for it.

At at time when so many people are working so hard in various organizations and capacities to do something about global warming, we have this sorry excuse for a US presidential administration.

How much more perverse can this situation become? How much more can those of us who care deeply about the twin issues of global warming and peak oil wish we had someone even moderately competent living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?

How many days until January 20, 2009?

And how many ways can those of us deeply concerned about global warming and living in the US apologize to the world for having a president who not only isn’t attempting to take the lead on this terrifying issue, but is actively working to perpetuate ignorance about it?

This is all I have left: To all of you reading this from outside the US, I beg your forgiveness and your patience. The same US that helped Europe defeat the Nazis and then helped much of Europe rebuild itself is still here; the pendulum will swing back, and we will once again be the good and great partner you need in addressing global warming.

Honda goes nuts, too by at 2:11 PM on October 23, 2007.

In this morning’s Open Thread I beat up on Toyota for be less than enthusiastic about plug-in hybrids. It seems they’re not alone in this world view.

Honda president, CEO: plug-in hybrids “unnecessary,” don’t reduce emissions:

Honda is the second largest hybrid car maker, after Toyota, but Takeo thinks plug-in hybrids like the Volt are just electric vehicles with an “unnecessary” gas motor with no “real advantages.” Takeo says he could make one in two years but don’t think it will “reduce emissions.” Here are some of his quotes from a Reuters article out today:

“My feeling is that the kind of plug-in hybrid currently proposed by different auto makers can be best described as a battery electric vehicle equipped with an unnecessary fuel engine and fuel tank. … I’m not sure what kind of real advantages they [plug-ins] would have. … I don’t think that [plug-ins] will contribute to the global environment or to reducing carbon dioxide.”

Holy crap, to use a technical economics term.

The grand poobah of Honda sees no difference between a plug-in hybrid with, say, a 20 to 40 mile battery range, and a full-on EV? Really???

He can’t see any way in which batteries might be capable enough, but still too expensive, to get all the way to a marketable, full EV the size of an Accord, but could still be affordable enough to build a plug-in hybrid?

And plug-in hybrids don’t reduce emissions? A Civic-size plug-in getting 4 mile/kWh in battery-only mode emits 0.3125 pounds of CO2/mile (assuming the US average of 1.25 pounds of CO2/kWh for generated electricity). A similarly sized car getting 50 MPG (assuming a parallel hybrid with no plug-in) will emit 0.4 pounds of CO2/mile. Clearly he’s making a generous assumption about the efficiency of parallel hybrids, as one would have to average 64 MPG to meet the battery-only-mode emissions of a plug-in.

And he can’t see the benefits of softening the transition to electrified transportation via plug-ins? (Build a plug-in with a small battery pack and customers can later upgrade it, and the car company can modify the design to bump up the battery capacity at a trivial cost.)

Yowza.


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Links by at 11:51 AM on October 23, 2007.

Tom Friedman on ‘the greenest thing you can do’:

In an op-ed titled, “Save the Planet: Vote Smart,” N.Y. Times columnist Tom Friedman makes a point that is a central theme of this blog:

People often ask: I want to get greener, what should I do? New light bulbs? A hybrid? A solar roof? Well, all of those things are helpful. But actually, the greenest thing you can do is this: Choose the right leaders. It is so much more important to change your leaders than change your light bulbs.

I’m not the biggest Tom Friedman fan around, but I agree with him completely on this point.

This is why I’ve talked a lot about how we need to view our actions in two realms, private activism (basically our individual consumption decisions and patterns), and public activism (everything we do to influence the behavior of others, from running a web site to voting to trying to influence institutions and large businesses to do things better). And yes, this will be one of the “tent pole concepts” in The Book.

This is also one of the reasons why I say the hardcore rightwingers will have a lot to hate in our e+e future: There will necessarily be a bigger role for government in terms of accelerating and steering our transition away from CO2-emitting and oil-consuming technologies and practices. (The lefties will be equally pissed off thanks to the increased use of nuclear power, the much slower than desirable reduction in CO2 emissions, and the perceived coddling of large corporations threatened by rising oil prices.)


Scientists see coal as key challenge:

The proliferation of coal-burning power plants around the world may pose “the single greatest challenge” to averting dangerous climate change, an international panel of scientists reported Monday.

Governments and the private sector are spending too little on research into a partial solution — technology to capture and store the carbon dioxide emissions from such plants, the group said.

The study by 15 scientists from 13 nations, “Lighting the Way: Toward a Sustainable Energy Future,” was commissioned by the governments of China and Brazil and is the product of two years of workshops organized by the InterAcademy Council, the Netherlands-based network of national academies of science.

The 174-page report details current and developing technologies, and government incentives and other policies that could lead both the developed and developing world to clean, affordable and sustainable energy supplies.

Coal is bad? Gee, who’d a thunk it.

See also the study’s home page and the PDF download page for the report in several pieces. (Note that as I type this the PDF download links don’t seem to work.)

Related: The Energy Solution: Do Something


Chile to Lay Claim to Piece of Antarctica:

Chile’s foreign minister said Monday that his country will ask the U.N. Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf to recognize Santiago’s claim of sovereignty over a chunk of Antarctica.

Alejandro Foxley told reporters the move is in response to Britain’s announced intention to assert rights over oil and gas resources in a portion of the Antarctic seabed that overlaps Chile’s
claim.

“No one can encumber Chile’s rights in regard to Antarctic territory,” the minister said, pointing out that the deadline for filing a motion with the U.N. Commission is May 2009.

He said Chile would argue that that Antarctic seabed “is a projection or prolongation of the continential shelf.”

The Bi-Polar Ice War continues.


NASA scientist urges action on climate change:

NASA’s top climate scientist painted a dire picture Monday - from flooded coastlines to apocalyptic wildfires - unless the world finds a cleaner way to power its light bulbs, motor vehicles and factories.

“We’re setting the planet on a trajectory of very dramatic consequences within this century,” James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told an overflow crowd at the University of Montana.

Despite the bleak warning, Hansen said he was confident that clean replacements for coal, oil and natural gas can be found if people put enough pressure on their politicians and policymakers.

“We’re losing the battle, but I’m optimistic we can solve this problem,” Hansen said. “We need to get beyond fossil fuels. It will be a very different planet if we continue business as usual.”

Hansen renewed his call for a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants that don’t capture and safely store their greenhouse gas emissions.

My view, exactly. We’re in some deep trouble, but we can pull out of this nose dive.


Half of [Britain’s] nuclear power stations closed for repairs

Five U.S. nuclear plants shut units for refueling and repairs



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Open thread by at 9:50 AM on October 23, 2007.

Growth Rate of Concentration of Atmospheric CO2 Accelerating:

An international team of scientists has found that the annual rate of increase of the concentration of atmospheric CO2 has accelerated since 2000 to an average 1.93 ppm per year—an average annual rate 28% higher than that of the 1990s.

Lead author of the study and Executive Director of the Global Carbon Project, CSIRO’s Dr Pep Canadell, says that the acceleration is due to three factors: global economic growth; the world’s economy becoming more carbon intense (that is, since 2000 more carbon is being emitted to produce each dollar of global wealth); and a deterioration in the land and oceans’ ability to absorb carbon from the atmosphere at the required rate.



Between 2000 to 2006, human activities such as burning fossil fuels, manufacturing cement, and tropical deforestation contributed a net average of 4.1 billion metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere each year, yielding an annual growth rate for atmospheric carbon dioxide of 1.93 parts per million (ppm)—the highest since the beginning of continuous monitoring in 1959, according to the report.

By contrast, the growth rate in the 1970s was 1.3 ppm y-1; in the 1980s, 1.6 ppm y-1; and in the 1990s, 1.5 ppm y-1. The present atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is 381 ppm, 35% above pre-industrial levels, the highest concentration in the last 650,000 years, and probably in the last 20 million years.

The study attributed 65% of the current acceleration to increased activity of the global economy. The study found that deterioration of the carbon intensity of the global economy—i.e., the increasing inefficiency in the use of fossil fuels—accounted for another 17% of the increase, while the other 18% came from the decline in the efficiency of natural land and ocean sinks which soak up CO2 from the atmosphere.

In a way, the most alarming part of this item is the last thing I quoted–that 18% of the increased rate of CO2 concentration came from a declining ability of the land and sea to absorb new emissions.

I couldn’t locate the paper at the link Mike provided, but the 33-slide presentation by the same authors (PDF) is there.


Yucca Mountain project posts key notice about document network:

The federal Energy Department says it’s met a requirement to open its collection of documents supporting plans for a national nuclear waste dump in Nevada.

The declaration “certifying” the electronic Licensing Support Network is a key step toward applying for a license to operate the Yucca Mountain project.

The department plans to make that license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by June 30.

Congress in 2002 picked the Yucca site about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas to entomb 77,000 tons of spent nuclear reactor fuel.

Project director Edward F. “Ward” Sproat III says the LSN contains more than 30 million pages and more than 3.5 million scientific, geologic and engineering documents.

I mentioned this yesterday, and the documents have apparently appeared (or at least the web site where they’re supposed to reside) here.


Speaking across the ages:

One of the thorniest long-term problems is what to do with nuclear waste. Many Western countries may build new nuclear plants; they see the energy as clean and secure. But their publics remain dubious, and nuclear waste tops their list of worries.



Still, while nature may not unearth the nuclear nasties that humanity has secreted away, people are much less predictable. At Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert, the site of America’s first big nuclear waste dump, scientists are wrestling with the problem of how to remind future generations what is stored there. A similar study was carried out in the 1990s, when the Department of Energy assembled a team of linguists, archaeologists and materials scientists to study how to construct warning signs around a smaller waste dump in New Mexico that would last for 10,000 years.



Current plans for Yucca Mountain call for a series of unnatural-looking 25-foot markers around the site entrance, designed to attract attention and to resist everything from floods to encroaching sand dunes. They would be inscribed with warnings in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish, with picture symbols as backup. Smaller, nine-inch markers would litter the site. A few larger monuments, built in the fan-shape of the international radiation symbol, would contain documents explaining what lies beneath.

Much thought has gone into the scheme, but no one really knows if it will work. Scientists plan to keep refining their ideas until the depository is finally sealed, which will not happen for many decades. That, at least, is one advantage of dealing with long-term problems: there is no immediate deadline, and plenty of time to think things through.

[insert blistering snark here]


Toyota takes baby steps to plug-in car:

Questions about expense, reliability and profitability are good reasons for Toyota to take its time on a plug-in electric hybrid, a company executive said Monday.

Yoshitaka Asakura, project general manager in Toyota’s hybrid vehicle system-engineering division, said Monday in an article in The Wall Street Journal that Toyota is taking into account that not all consumers, despite vocal environmentalist groups, may be interested in a car that has to be re-charged daily.



The company’s attitude toward plug-in electric hybrids is noticeably more conservative than the one that rival General Motors has put forth.

GM has promised that its Chevy Volt, a plug-in electric hybrid car that will run on lithium-ion batteries, will be tested in spring 2008 and available for purchase in 2010. The company has been touring the concept Chevy Volt car around the U.S. to promote its future sale.

Toyota has not given a timetable for when its plug-in electric car will be available to consumers, though it has been working on pilot projects with household plug-in cars in Japan.

When the hell did Toyota become scared of its own shadow? What will it take to make the point, masses of would-be customers storming Toyota’s US offices with pitchforks and electrical extension cords?

I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating. When I talk to people who have zero familiarity with plug-ins I often tell them they work like this: You never have to plug them in. If you do, you save money on every mile you drive on electricity instead of gasoline. And instantly they want one. They want to know where and when they’re available, how much they cost, and how far they can go on just the battery.

Here’s a hint, Toyota: These things will sell themselves, as fast as you can screw them together. Get off your overly cautious butt and turn this technology into a real world product. If you don’t, GM and other companies that understand the emerging market dynamics better will leapfrog you just the way you leapfrogged them to build the first generation of parallel hybrids.


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