Perhaps we can all have office buildings like this in the future. And why not? Buildings consume more than half the world energy usage.
About an hour after I made my post above, I found this article on peakoil.com. It indicates that ethanol has a negative EROEI. While the figures will no doubt be disputed, even the most optimistic assessment of ethanol I’ve seen gives it an EROEI of less than 3:1.
July 17, 2005, 12:13 PM EDT
Study says ethanol not worth the energy
By Mark Johnson
[i] ALBANY, N.Y. – Farmers, businesses and state officials are investing millions of dollars in ethanol and biofuel plants as renewable energy sources, but a new study says the alternative fuels burn more energy than they produce.
Supporters of ethanol and other biofuels contend they burn cleaner than fossil fuels, reduce U.S. dependence on oil and give farmers another market to sell their produce. Gov. George Pataki said last year he wants to “make New York’s biofuels industry one of the strongest in the nation.”
But researchers at Cornell University and the University of California-Berkeley say it takes 29 percent more fossil energy to turn corn into ethanol than the amount of fuel the process produces. For switch grass, a warm weather perennial grass found in the Great Plains and eastern North America United States, it takes 45 percent more energy and for wood, 57 percent.
It takes 27 percent more energy to turn soybeans into biodiesel fuel and more than double the energy produced is needed to do the same to sunflower plants, the study found.
[/i]
Read the rest of the article:
newsday.com/news/local/wire/ … -apnewyork
I was gonna start a new thread because of the interesting site I happened across tonight, but I guess it can just go here.
I somehow (independently of this thread) found the peakoil site and got off on the biofuel idea again. It had always fascinated me ever since I read The Emperor Wears No Clothes in university. The nice thing about biofuels is that they are usable without any greenhouse effect as there is not net addition of carbon to the cycle by burning plants.
I searched on Google for “biofuel hemp” and got a surprisingly small result of 8,140 pages. I then did just “biofuel” and got 224,000, but a hell of a lot of them were about peat.
But some were about biodiesel and ethanol/methanol production. Apparently in America a bit of a movement is afoot. Some Nebraska farmers are pushing methanol as a partial solution to the looming gas crunch. Ethanol from corn that is.
The movement to put hemp into the spotlight as a viable source of ethanol has always made sense, but it has always been marginalized. This has always puzzled me, because the logic of the argument is so easy to understand. I can’t figure out why it hasn’t caught on. This meme is really slow to spark. Any comments on why?
The argument:
Hemp, if bred in that direction, and somecall it the dog of the plant kingdom, can yield something like 70% cellulose by weight. This is the best of almost any known plant. This feedstock can be turned into diesel, charcoal, and methanol. It grows fast, anywhere, and doesn’t harm the soil much. It certainly could be profitable to produce fuel this way, therefore it is an unnaturally suppressed industry that might come back and save our sorry asses anyway. If only Ayn Rand could write a book about it.
The links:
Some chatter:
Suggestive graphic:
And try not to think about drugs when you read it, otherwise don’t bother.
This is really something…
And this nice little site has a good intro to biodiesel too.
wnbiodiesel.com/technology.html
Most of their outlets seem to be in Texas. One in SC and one in CA.
Moderator Note
Everyone: Please remember to abbreviate your links using the what you call the link technique. Long links stretch the page horizontally, and make it inconvenient to read for people who do not have large monitors.
Cheers,
Hobbes
Sorry for the sloppy linking before. I, uh, forgot how to do it properly at the time, and uh, forgot to go back and clean it up the next day. Shant happen again.
I posted a “question” here on the issue of biofuels:
I really like the concept of this site, www.askquestions.com. It’s run by one of the founders of PC Magazine and MacWorld magazine. They want people to vote on what stories the news media should be covering, but aren’t.[/url]
"The U.S. oil production peak in 1970 was what led to the OPEC disturbances of that decade, as other nations with younger oil industries discovered that world pricing power had suddenly shifted to them and took advantage of the situation. America went through a harrowing decade of
A good discussion here with Daniel Yergen, the author of “The Prize”. He doesn’t accept that peak oil is imminent. He is on the side that argues market forces will improve the technology in extracting things such as the tar sands in Canada. His bigger concern is the availabilty of oil with respect to the politics between nations.
It’s definitely at odds with the book, “Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil” by Daniel Goodstein, that I’m reading right now. Dr. Goodstein argues that peak oil is here or almost here. His argument against market forces driving new technologies to extract things like tar sands is efficiency. He seems to say that we will end up putting just as much if not more energy into extracting the stuff as we get from it. His bigger concern is the problem of getting through peak oil while switching to solar and nuclear energy.
Well yet again…
We are not short of cassandras, predicting that this or that will happen.
The “end of oil”, “peak oil” or whatever you would call it has been predicted before. I agree with the cassandras in that it will happen eventually, however I don’t really think that they are right in their time scale. also, I think the end of oil will be when a better alternative arises, not when we run out.
Running out of oil does not equal running out of energy. We can still get nuclear, geo-thermal, hydro, solar, and wind power. It does mean more electric cars. I welcome the end of oil because these sources, while less efficient are less polluting than oil. The conversion will be difficult, but Taiwan has hordes of unctuous foreigners we can tap to salve the transition.
The major dislocation will be caused by the lack of inexpensive, convenient transportation. Which of those energy sources for example would an ocean freighter use? The jet aircraft you came to Taiwan on?
Right now an illiterate person in the sub-Sahara can scrape together the resources to acquire oil-powered transportation needed to run a small business and maintain a foothold in the world economy. When oil becomes a precious commodity and only nuclear, solar and wind forms of energy are available for transportation use, the cost and complexity of the technology will almost certainly be beyond his means. Multiply the consequences of that disenfranchisement by millions.
And nuclear? Current U.S. policy is to deny nuclear power to any unfriendly nation which doesn’t have it unless it buys nuclear fuel from it or the EU. When oil is gone how will these already adversarial nations have the wherewithal to buy all their energy from abroad except for solar and wind?
The alternative will be a world full of unstable, unfriendly nations lit by dodgy nuclear power plants selling nuclear fuel byproducts to the highest bidder.
Don’t forget hydro and recycled veg oil.
And Tesla Coils!
Nikola Tesla, bless him, wanted to provide the world with free electricity. The evil dog-killing Edison did NOT. Corporate greed contolling politics aren’t a new idea.
mind-course.com/wireless.html
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla
crystalinks.com/tesla.html
leyada.jlm.k12.il/proj/edsntsla/hist3.htm
So Spook, guess who controls the solar? Your friendly neighborhood oil barons, of course:
bp.com/modularhome.do?catego … Id=7004852
autoindustry.co.uk/news/indu … 3-09-05_12
[quote][b]Israeli developer presents
Would anyone consider that the concept of “peak oil” is merely another method of consolidating power (manufactured scarcity and all the rest)?
Quote from the article:
“Thomas Gold, astronomer and professor emeritus of Cornell held for years that oil is actually renewable primordial syrup continually manufactured by the earth under ultra hot conditions and tremendous pressure.”
Besides, coal and oil manufacturing isn’t unheard of. The right conditions can produce either, without vast eons of time commonly thought necessary.
[quote=“jdsmith”]http://www.autoindustry.co.uk/news/industry_news/23-09-05_12
[quote][b]Israeli developer presents
[quote=“MaPoSquid”][quote=“jdsmith”]http://www.autoindustry.co.uk/news/industry_news/23-09-05_12
[quote][b]Israeli developer presents
There are still plenty of people, including scientists, who have a great faith in our ability to find and harnass some new infinite energy source. Cold fusion is still a big hope for some. That debate has never really gone away.
This Web site has a 117 page pdf file for download, with many articles by scientists, SF writers (Arthur C. Clarke) and the faithful.
Here is another. Click the graphic to visit.
Isn’t it more fun to have faith than to be a skeptic?
I would love to believe that cold fusion or something else will come to save the day. However, developing technology costs money, which the current US administration is not eager to spend…
Federal R&D Investment Declines Despite Energy Woes
At a time of soaring gas prices, public concern over the country’s dependence on foreign oil, and mounting evidence of global warming, the nation’s investment in energy research and development is declining, according to a report by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley.
renewableenergyaccess.com/re … y?id=38151
Of course, the USA is not the only country in the world. The future may well belong to Russia, because they’ve got the oil. Or to France, China, and Japan, which are developing nuclear power in a big way.
Sad.
Well, if you folks would follow events, you’d know that:
forumosa.com/taiwan/viewtopic.php?t=40076
new forms of lighting are being developed which should significantly lower energy consumption in the U.S. Lighting is roughly 20% of the total energy usage, so there’s a roughly 6% drop in usage right there.
Also, despite the best efforts of so-called “environmentalists”, utilities in the U.S. are taking a serious look at increasing nuclear power generation there. Personally, I’m hoping the German pebble-bed/helium reactors will take off in a big way since it is physically impossible for them to melt down.
There’s been a lot of interest in pebble-bed reactors, including from, guess who:
[quote="Wired: “Let a Thousand Reactors Bloom” "]Explosive growth has made the People’s Republic of China the most power-hungry nation on earth. Get ready for the mass-produced, meltdown-proof future of nuclear energy.
China is staring at the dark side of double-digit growth. Blackouts roll and factory lights flicker, the grid sucked dry by a decade of breakneck industrialization. Oil and natural gas are running low, and belching power plants are burning through coal faster than creaky old railroads can deliver it. Global warming? The most populous nation on earth ranks number two in the world - at least the Kyoto treaty isn’t binding in developing countries. Air pollution? The World Bank says the People’s Republic is home to 16 of the planet’s 20 worst cities. Wind, solar, biomass - the country is grasping at every energy alternative within reach, even flooding a million people out of their ancestral homes with the world’s biggest hydroelectric project. Meanwhile, the government’s plan for holding onto power boils down to a car for every bicycle and air-conditioning for a billion-odd potential dissidents.
What’s an energy-starved autocracy to do?
Go nuclear.
While the West frets about how to keep its sushi cool, hot tubs warm, and Hummers humming without poisoning the planet, the cold-eyed bureaucrats running the People’s Republic of China have launched a nuclear binge right out of That '70s Show. Late last year, China announced plans to build 30 new reactors - enough to generate twice the capacity of the gargantuan Three Gorges Dam - by 2020. And even that won’t be enough. The Future of Nuclear Power, a 2003 study by a blue-ribbon commission headed by former CIA director John Deutch, concludes that by 2050 the PRC could require the equivalent of 200 full-scale nuke plants. A team of Chinese scientists advising the Beijing leadership puts the figure even higher: 300 gigawatts of nuclear output, not much less than the 350 gigawatts produced worldwide today.
To meet that growing demand, China’s leaders are pursuing two strategies. They’re turning to established nuke plant makers like AECL, Framatome, Mitsubishi, and Westinghouse, which supplied key technology for China’s nine existing atomic power facilities. But they’re also pursuing a second, more audacious course. Physicists and engineers at Beijing’s Tsinghua University have made the first great leap forward in a quarter century, building a new nuclear power facility that promises to be a better way to harness the atom: a pebble-bed reactor. A reactor small enough to be assembled from mass-produced parts and cheap enough for customers without billion-dollar bank accounts. A reactor whose safety is a matter of physics, not operator skill or reinforced concrete. And, for a bona fide fairy-tale ending, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is labeled hydrogen. [/quote]