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TDP: The Next Big Thing
Robert Rapier, The Oil Drum
If you are a layperson, it may not be clear to you just how much of the current infatuation with cellulosic ethanol is hype, and how much is based on realistic assessments. So, I thought I would take you down memory lane and revisit another technology that was going to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
The Hype: TDP Will Save the World
In May of 2003, Discover Magazine published Anything Into Oil. It was a look at a technology called thermal depolymerization (TDP), which could take any organic material and turn it into oil. This was a high profile write-up with a lot of hype, and the technology of Brian Appel and his company Changing World Technologies (CWT) was really going to change the world.
I remember the first time I read the article, and I thought to myself “Wow, this is really something special.” However, the hype of the technology didn’t quite match up with reality. Let’s take a look back at that original article, and see if we can draw some parallels with some of our current biofuels delusions.
…CWT still exists as a company today. Like cellulosic ethanol, TDP is a technology that actually works. But the technology was hyped beyond reason. People did not apply enough skepticism before embracing the promise of the technology. It was really going to be “the next big thing.”
But costs and complications were grossly underestimated. They fell victim to The Law of Receding Horizons. They learned that the public doesn’t like smelly plants in their community. Discover ran an updated article in 2006 in which Appel admitted “We have made mistakes. We were too aggressive in our earlier projections.” The hype just ultimately did not match the reality. And while TDP may make some small contribution to our energy needs, it isn’t going to make any measurable dent in our fossil fuel usage.
But at least we have cellulosic ethanol, which I have heard really is “the next big thing.”
(11 April 2007)
Robert Rapier is right about our desperation to believe in technological fixes. In covering energy, one runs across scores of technologies that “might just might” be the answer to our energy problem (hydrogen, nuclear fusion, algae, tar sands, oil shale, etc.). In all of these, the “costs and complications were grossly underestimated” just as Rapier reports for TDP. -BA
US Renewable Fuel Standard Established
Staff, Environmental News Service
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, has established the nation’s first comprehensive Renewable Fuel Standard, RFS, program.
EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson, joined by Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman and National Highway Traffic Safety Administrator Nicole Nason explained at a news conference Tuesday that the RFS program requires American refiners, blenders, and importers to use a minimum volume of renewable fuel each year between 2007 and 2012.
The minimum level or standard which is determined as a percentage of the total volume of fuel a company produces or imports, will increase every year.
For 2007, 4.02 percent of all the fuel sold or dispensed to U.S. motorists will have to come from renewable sources, roughly 4.7 billion gallons. ..
(11 Apr 2007)
Sustainable energy has powerful future
Mark Diesendorf, The Age
OPPONENTS of renewable energy from the coal and nuclear industries, and their political supporters, are disseminating the fallacy that renewable energy cannot provide base-load power to substitute for coal-fired electricity.
If this becomes widely accepted, renewable energy will remain a niche market rather than achieve its potential of being part of mainstream energy supply technologies. ..
Some renewable electricity sources have identical variability to coal-fired power stations and so they are base-load. They can be integrated into the electricity supply system without any additional back-up. Examples include:
■ Bio-energy, based on the combustion of crops and crop residues, or their gasification followed by combustion of the gas.
■ Hot rock geothermal power, which is being developed in South Australia and Queensland.
■ Solar thermal electricity, with overnight heat storage in water or rocks, or a thermochemical store.
■ Large-scale, distributed wind power, with a small amount of occasional back-up from a peak-load plant.
Moreover, energy efficiency and conservation measures can reliably reduce demand for base-load and peak-load electricity. ..
By 2040, renewable energy could supply more than half Australia’s electricity, reducing greenhouse emissions from electricity generation by nearly 80 per cent. In the longer term, when solar electricity is less expensive, there is no technical reason to stop renewable energy from supplying 100 per cent of grid electricity. The system could be just as reliable as the dirty, fossil-fuelled system that it replaces.
The barriers to a sustainable energy future are neither technological nor economic, but the immense political power of the big greenhouse gas polluting industries — coal, aluminium, iron and steel, cement, motor vehicles and part of the oil industry.
Dr Mark Diesendorf is the director of Sustainability Centre, senior lecturer in environmental studies at the University of NSW, and a member of the EnergyScience Coalition. His new book, Greenhouse Solutions with Sustainable Energy, will be published by UNSW Press next month.
(13 Apr 2007)
The Peak Oil Crisis: Alternatives – Decentralized Power
Tom Whipple, Falls Church News-Press
Something few of us are aware of is the massive waste built into the energy systems we have built over the last 100 years. This week, I am going to talk about electricity generation, but the same point can be made about the internal combustion engine which is a monument to inefficiency.
Most electricity is generated in massive remotely located plants – be they powered by coal, oil, natural gas, or nuclear reactors. These edifices, on average, waste two-thirds of the fuel that goes into them. Most energy is lost as waste heat that goes into the air or a local body of water, and the rest in line loses while bringing the power tens or hundreds of miles from the generator to the user.
In terms of green house gases, we could have the same lights, appliances, heating and air conditioning for half the carbon emissions if we simply switched from the current paradigm to decentralized power generation. If we toss some user conservation into the equation — more efficient lights, appliances, insulation, and whatever – it just might be possible to stretch dwindling supplies of oil, natural gas, coal, and uranium far enough to allow time to replace fossil fuels with renewable sources of energy.
(12 April 2007)
Geodynamics says it has ‘hottest rocks on earth’
Staff, Australian Associated Press
HOT rocks explorer Geodynamics has identified a geothermal resource in South Australia’s Cooper Basin which it says has an energy output equal to 15 Snowy Mountain hydro electricity power schemes.
The resource contains more than 400,000 petajoules and could support the generation of in excess of 10,000 megawatts of electricity. Geodynamics chief executive Adrian Williams said with a temperature between 250 and 300 degrees, the resource contained the hottest rocks known on earth.
But Geodynamics has proven that the granite in the Cooper Basin is naturally fractured, and the fractures are full of pressurised water. “You put this all together and it means that we can have water flow from the fractured rocks to the surface and we can abstract the heat and re-inject it in a completely closed system,” he said. “We do not have any need for an outside water source and we don’t produce any wastewater.” ..
But according to New Zealand government there are environmental impacts. It found arsenic and boron are natural geothermal discharges while mercury is discharged into the air from geothermal cooling towers and into water from geothermal wells. The extraction of heat and fluid could also cause land subsidence, the NZ government said. ..
(9 Apr 2007)
