Published by The New American (http://thenewamerican.com)
While our federal government refuses to support drilling for oil in Anwar, which I support, and whereas others have yet to sign on to support Assemblyman Chuck DeVore’s promotion of nuclear energy, which I also support, I thought you might enjoy reading the following report from The New American magazine that will out in the next two weeks.
The “Other” Renewables
By Ed Hiserodt
Created 2007-11-12 06:00
Over the past several months, THE NEW AMERICAN has looked at some of what are deemed “renewable energy resources” — hydrogen, ethanol, wind, and solar — and found them wanting. Wind and solar power have been shown to be undependable, environmentally disastrous, and puny providers of industrial-grade electricity. Ethanol requires high-grade energy in the form of electricity, natural gas, and petroleum products to convert valuable agricultural products to an inferior and troublesome fuel. Hydrogen was exposed to be no energy source at all because there simply aren’t any naturally occurring deposits of hydrogen, and it, too, requires wasting high-grade electrical energy and/or natural gas in its production to yield a thoroughly impractical, untransportable energy commodity.*
None of these would exist commercially in a free market with an informed public. Even though these “renewables” have received an immense flow of government subsidies and media hype, they are still unpopular with private entrepreneurs because they don’t make fiscal sense. As shown in the pie chart below, “renewables” account for 10.4 percent of electrical generation in the United States. This is further broken down to show that solar and wind generation — after years of subsidies, grants, and other preferential treatment — still produce less than one percent of our total electrical power. So we’ve covered the most politically popular renewables and found they had major drawbacks. But what about the “others”?
Hydropower
The energy in falling water has been harnessed for centuries and was the primary source of non human, non animal energy before Watts’ steam engine. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, water power drove the New England mills, making that region a competitive force in many energy-intensive industries, notably textiles. Hydroelectricity came into its own in the United States in the early 20th century with the hydroelectric plants built in connection with the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Hoover Dam, and many other less well-known but crucially important hydroelectric projects.
One might consider hydroelectric power the ultimate source of electrical generation as it can be turned on and off in short order, is nonpolluting, and has rain and melting snow as its fuel. Of course, every power source must have some drawbacks and dangers since that is the nature of potential energy. Dams silt up over long periods of time, and dam failures caused by earthquakes or design flaws have annihilated communities in minutes. Then, too, the flow might be too low during the periods when energy is needed, but all in all, hydroelectricity is a solid, reliable contributor of about seven percent of U.S. electrical-energy production.
However, as a solution for meeting our growing energy needs, hydroelectricity is dead in the water. There are too few, if any, generating sites available with the topography for dam construction — requiring both a large volume of flow and a considerable vertical distance between the “head water” and the “tail water.” (Hydroelectric energy is proportional to the volume of water channeled through the turbine, times the difference in reservoir levels.) In recent years, many dams have been removed, some because they have become decrepit and weren’t worth refurbishing, others because of pressure from environmentalists to return the rivers to their natural states.
Geothermal
We all know that it gets warmer as we drill deeper into the Earth, so it seems a simple enough matter to drill a hole, pour water into it, and wait for the steam to come rushing out. Actually that’s not far from what is done in a geothermal “Hot Dry Rock” system, except two geothermal wells are drilled with the rock between them explosively ruptured at a great depth. This is not a tunnel as such, just fractured rocks so the feedwater can come in contact with the hot rocks (with as much surface area as possible) before becoming superheated and being pumped to the surface where it is flashed into steam. At most locations, to get sufficiently high temperatures to produce steam would require drilling to a depth of 30,000 feet — nearly six miles down! This is between the deepest land-based well ever drilled (24,000 feet in California) and the deepest well in the world (36,000 feet in Russia). Costs for drilling to these levels are not readily available, but drilling to 20,000 feet would cost an estimated $10 million, with costs rising rapidly at increasing depths. It wouldn’t be surprising for the cost to exceed $50 million per well to drill to a depth of 30,000 feet — provided someone could be found with the equipment and technology to take on such a project.
In several volcanic locations, for instance Yellowstone Park and Iceland, the depth of the geothermally active level is much shallower than normal. In these areas, different technologies are available. Flash Plants take advantage of the fact that as pressure is released from superheated water, the water “flashes” into steam just as it does in the case when the superheated water is produced in a high-pressure boiler. This steam can be used directly for powering a generator with as much condensate as practical returned to the water table. A third method routes warm water through a heat exchanger, where the heat is transferred to a low-boiling-point liquid, which produces the gas to drive the generator. Because of the two fluids involved, this is known as the Binary Cycle and is the method of choice for most geothermal plants now being designed.
It appears that geothermal electrical generation is feasible at least to some degree, although much needs to be learned as to its economies and long-term reliability. There is concern that localized cooling will occur, interrupting the availability of sufficiently hot water/steam. Physical constraints (such as well diameters and friction losses) and some state environmental regulations (California regulates everything!) tend to limit the generator capacity to between one-twentieth and one-fifth of a nuclear or coal-fired plant. The cost per kilowatt output is two or three times that for coal or nuclear.
We all know that there’s a virtually limitless supply of hot rocks some five or six miles straight down — which gives geothermal the potential for producing electrical power. But it remains to be seen if technology in the foreseeable future will be able to utilize it.
Biomass
“Biomass” is the buzz word to describe the burning of wood, farm stubble, and garbage — itself now known as waste or municipal waste. Tree-huggers can rest assured that this practice does not entail cutting down trees for the purpose of generating electricity. In fact, it would take a stack of oak logs four feet wide by four feet high by over four hundred miles long to fuel a 1,000 MW power plant for a year. Instead, the wood-products industry long ago recognized the advantage of burning bark and otherwise unusable tree parts to heat boilers for local steam, and (later) using this steam to “co-generate” electrical power in cooperation with a local utility. Obviously this is not going to be an exciting new energy source, but it still generates nearly as much electricity as the highly subsidized wind and solar industries — and with a great
deal more dependability.
Burning municipal wastes is not so straightforward. Most garbage arrives at the power plant just the way you put it on the curb — bottles, cans, paper, food, plastic, etc. This refuse is separated by machines and human labor to remove recyclables and burn the flammables. Even that is not so easy. Soggy garbage must be dried out before being ignited, usually with a natural-gas burner. Then large draft fans are used to insure combustion, and other systems remove particulates and odor-causing gases. While this may not be the wave-of-the-future in industrial electricity production, it at least gives cities an option on the size of landfills they must come up with.
Also Rans
Most of us have heard of the very high tides in the Bay of Fundy where the water level changes by about 50 feet during diurnal tides and would agree this is probably the best place in the world for tidal power. But such sites are very limited and, we might remember, have two periods each day when no power can be generated because there wouldn’t be a strong enough incoming or outgoing tide. Indeed, a generating plant might well be constructed across the bay entrance. But although this limited and localized source of energy would likely provide the power for Fundy, Cleveland would be a very different matter.
There are many other possible energy sources: wave motion, river turbines, landfill gases, chicken manure, and the latest — burning salt water in a radio-frequency energy field. All (except the saltwater fraud) have the potential of generating some positive energy. But our country doesn’t operate on a few kilowatts of piddle power, it takes millions of kilowatts — gigawatts — to power our homes, our factories, our water and wastewater systems, and our other electrical needs. The “also rans” are dreams, none of which have any chance of becoming a factor in large-scale, reliable energy production.
Of the “other renewables,” we can see that the energy contributions from hydro and biomass are essentially constant and not expected to grow, with biomass providing much less energy than hydro. Geothermal generation has — and perhaps will always have — great potential. Of the many other interesting and inventive ideas, none have caught the imaginations of wise investors.
The hard reality is that we are a nation of electricity users and our use goes up every year. To provide the trillions of kilowatt hours necessary for our health, safety, and enjoyment, our choices are coal, oil, natural gas, and uranium. Oil and natural gas are options for fueling a power plant boiler, but they are non-economical and a waste of valuable fuels that can be put to other uses. Coal will be with us for many years, but its disadvantages compared to nuclear power — in fuel cost, in pollution, in deaths from mining and transport, in actual (not eco-lawyer inflated) power-plant construction costs — make it unattractive to those without a vested interest.
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As I anticipate OPEC raising the cost of a barrel of oil, that will break $100 per barrel by this Christmas, other than paying a higher price at the pump what option for energy independence are you willing to support?
Since the first OPEC embargo (in 1973) during the Carter Administration, when we waited in long lines to fill our tanks nothing meaningful has been undertaken by any administration. Yes, we are now in the process of switching to Ethanol but it has yet to reach any of the service stations in CA with one exception in San Diego.
Facts: In 1973 36% of our energy consumption was in foreign oil. In 2000 it grew to 58% and as of 2005 our dependence on foreign oil hit 66%.
We can no longer keep our heads in the sand. Unless the plan is to go back 100 years to the horse and buggy, environmentalists need to step aside and allow for the drilling in Anwar and the construction of nuclear plants without all of the associated red tape.
LG’s final comments. While many on the other side of the aisle argue that the war in Iraq is about oil, yet they block our efforts to break free of that dependence.
Become part of the solution or please get out of the way.
Hey partner, this is the best article written for this rag since
you started writing! Superior
our dear friend, Superior!
The only other responses will be
from those lovely “anonY” “mouses”
that haven’t got a clue! Congratulations…you did what no
other has done – you put a sock
in stupidity! Thanks so much!
Be careful..Red County is going
to want to make you a bonus baby!
Well, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, but you have outdone yr odds here. The article represents shiningly some of the technologies that will require loads of Big Gov money, yet you slight solar? Long -term research has produced some excellent systems–IN OTHER COUNTRIES. Reagan removed the solar panels from the White House. He is still your hero, old OC? The partisan note you strike at the end would be seen as completely absurd anywhere but behind the Orange Curtain. Oh and I’m annoynmoose because I have gainful employment threatened by small minds.
The New American is a publication of the John Birch Society! Always on the cutting edge, OC, but this is truly hilarious. A real FEMA type trick, citing a completely discredited partisan rag as real science- only in the OC!
Does OPEC set the price of a barrel or is it derived from the cost of producing oil beyond the capacity of OPEC producers. Sepecifically, is it based on the cost of extracting it from Canadian tar sands or from some ultra deep field off the coast of Angola? It does not mater that the Saudies can produce for $10 per barrel if the needed quantities can only come from some hard to get at location.
Is peak oil at hand or have I been drinking the Koolaid too long over on theoildrum.com
Hate to tell you this about ANWAR.
It is all about the bottom line. The cost of retreival makes the oil companies desire weak until the cost of oil rises sufficiently to drill. If hte headend costs are going to be literally billions of dollars spent before the first dollar is pumped out of the ground and the cost per barrel means decades before costs are recovered, there is no incentive to go get the oil, with or without Federal protection. There are various sources of oil, such as oil shale, which aren’t cost-effective to harvest when the price of a barrel of oil drops below a certain threshold.
Former Secretary of the Interior Gayle Norton had been dingalinging a little bell trying to entice the oil companies to show interest in bidding on sites in ANWR (keep in mind what this means to the Feds in Treasury receipts from the drilling rights). She received at best a lukewarm response, while each year Interior has somehow found a way in increase their estimates of how much oil is below that ANWR site. The amount currently translates to approximately 1,000,000 barrels per day, when everything is running at full capacity (which means longer than the decade required just to begin drawing oil at all). The US currently pumps something like 5 million barrels per day so if Norton’s figures are correct this would be a help, but not be anything close to making us independent of imported oil. Those 5 million barrels represent about 45% of our daily consumption, so one million more will still keep us importing plenty. We won’t be anywhere close to energy self-sufficiency, with or without drilling in ANWR and it will take a minimum of a decade for any of this to take place.
Those companies also want the Feds to indemnify the companies against any claims resulting from oil spills or any other unfortunate outcome to their actions.
As a conservative I’m sure you can understand there is more to oil companies not drilling in ANWAR because of environmentalists. Blaming enviros for stopping ANWAR is specious at best considering conservatives had majorities in Congress for six years enabling them to basically ignore liberal concerns.
It was a matter of dollars and cents. The oil companies don’t drill for national pride. It’s safe to assume the ROI wasn’t there to make the project feasible.
R Hackett:
I would not disagree with your comments that every industry is always on the lookout for maximizing their ROI.
I also agree that ANWAR by itself is a band aid on our huge oil consumption appetite.
While I have no love for the French they are getting upwards of 80 percent of their energy from nuclear plants. I simply do not see a Chernobyl happening in the USA using the latest technology.
That USSR disaster occured over 40 years ago. We can solve the disposal concerns.
For those that need to stay “Anony”
“Mouse”…because of whatever very
important reason: The price of a
barrell of oil is based on the highest price a willing buyer wants
to pay! It has little or nothing
to do with scarcity or rarity. Gold, Diamonds and Platinum are all
priced arbitrarily and controlled
by so-called “moderate institutional investor’s and buyers”. What is the price U238
Plutonium? Well, if you qualify…
probably not much compared to the
relative ability of the product
to destroy human, animal and plant
life. If China didn’t have our
money from Balance of Payments
along with India and Japan….no
one would have the money to buy
oil for $92 dollars a barrell.
The actual cost of for a barrell
of oil is around #20 bucks…everything else is sub-prime mortgage stuff. Just another
Hedge Fund boyz! That is why side
deals are so important. During the
last run up on oil back in 1979..
during the great Carter years…oil
was going for close to $40 dollars
a barrell. At that point,the US
made a deal with Mexico to supply
the US market at $18 bucks a barrell for 10 years. That deal
ran out and oil took off to $22
bucks a barrell during the first
Bush Presidency! Until the war
with Iraq…prices were fairly
steady. We leave it to the great
minds out there to figure out why
War causes material shortages of
basic commodities and the eventual
price spikes!
PS. Anyone beating up on the New
American better have their facts
and figures together before they
go blasting these extreme conservatives. They will eat you
for lunch dude! No other group is
so vetted and sweated. They do
great research!
If the oil companies are paying such high prices for the oil they convert into gas.
Where is the huge profits fatting up there bank accounts coming from?
Good morning Cook.
Let’s begin by asking the question as to how many new refineries are under construction in the US? Zero?
Let’s do a hypothetical.
Statistics. A 42 gallon barrel of (crude)oil costs yields 19.5 gallons of gasoline. Crude oil is roughly 50 percent of the cost of gasoline. The US consumes almost 400 million gallons of gasoline per DAY. When a barrel of oil cost $40 we were probably paying $1.00 per gallon at the pump (not including state and federal taxes). Fast forward to today where a barrel of oil costs $90 while we pay $2.50 per gallon (without taxes). I believe that the oil companies pricing is tied to a profit percentage vs actual costs. If that be true than you can easily see how much larger their profits have become due to the increase cost per barrel of light (or heavy) crude. All this without any additional expenditures.
The oil companies deal with production and refining. I have not researched how much money the major players are investing in either of these two areas.
I’m winging it with this response but you can see how they benefit even while maintaining the same profit percentage.
Some time ago State Board o fEqualization member Bill Leonard commented on the massive “windfall” the state is getting simply as a result of the increased cost per gallon we pay at the pump.
Said another way eveyone in the pipeline wins while you and I lose.
You may recall that our April 2006 US Senate hearing on the possibility of hitting them with a “windfall” profit tax.
Larry,
Do you spend any time reading the oil drum?
Not much was said about wind. Irvine’s Composite Technology has the state of the art wind turbine that will be produced on the first turbine assebly line in the world (By Tecco Westinghouse in Texas.)
But that is not why I am writing. I was reading where San Francisco’s turn out the lights effort had zero measurable results. So I guess if consumers will not conserve, it would be nice to see US utilities embrace the transmission cable produced by Irvine’s Composite Technology Corp. The comment came out this week:
“Energy Efficiency” is our new marketing message: More efficient transmission conductors promote utility and utility customer cost savings and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by allowing a significant reduction in fossil fuel power generation while delivering the same amount of power to the consumer. To support this message, our team has built a sophisticated conductor comparison model that contrasts ACCC conductors against all competing products including the traditional ACSR conductor product. Modeled and real world operational data demonstrate that ACCC conductor can reduce electricity losses by 30 – 36% as compared to identically sized traditional conductors as well as having other superior performance attributes. The loss reduction is based upon a stronger, lighter weight ACCC core carrying over 28% more conductive aluminum as compared to identical weight and diameter ACSR steel cored conductor.
The economic impacts of the 30%+ reduction are significant. For example, on a modeled constrained (running at or near capacity) ACSR line of 40 miles, replacement with ACCC conductor costs approximately $5 million installed but eliminates over $2.7 million per year of additional generation costs required to deliver the same amount of power using the ACSR line (assuming a $0.05/kWh cost). Further, because ACCC conductor delivers the same amount of power to the consumer, but with less power generation, it allows for optimization of renewable generation, thereby reducing dirty “fossil fuel” power generation. This in turn significantly reduces greenhouse gas emissions, which is a highly sensitive topic for many US and all European utilities, which have regulatory mandates to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.”
I just don’t get why the Chinese are the only ones buying this cable in mass!
Andy.
Having driven over one million miles in my lifetime I have probably purchased several oil drums. But no, I do not read the oil drum.
As to wind power we were in the Palm Springs area two weeks ago and witnessed where several of the huge blades were on a coffee break. The same is true when we visited our family in northern CA as we drive along the 580 in the wind farm area adjacent to Lawrence Livermore Labs.
However you may be on to something. There are a large number of “windbags” serving in Congress and our state Legislature.
Larry,
That is precisely why we need to see CTC’s turbines. The Voith drive should last a whole lot longer:
“Voith has experienced a 30-year
“mean time between failure” on their Vorecon technology and we believe that the D8.2 introduces a new level
of reliability and efficiency to wind generation that will further enhance the excellent operational record of the
existing D8 turbine.”
Here is the link to the Oil Drum. They are somewhat doom and gloom and so take what they say with a grain of salt. But, it does make for very fascinating reading.
http://www.theoildrum.com/
Andy.
While I have not checked “the oil drum” web site I did call a neighbor who works for one of the three majors in this field. My concern related to the cost per barrel and the yield. He reminded me that they also get by products from each drum so they surely are not losing any money.