Electricity

Doing Due Diligence

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To people who follow the energy industry closely, it’s a common occurrence to come across announcements from companies proclaiming to have developed the key to the ‘next big thing’ — for solving the world’s energy crisis. Maybe they say they can take any sort of waste biomass and turn it into fuel — ethanol, diesel, pyrolysis oil, mixed alcohols — at very low cost. Or they say they can produce renewable electricity at a price competitive with coal.

The layperson reads the news release and is curious: “Is this real?”

My congressman has selective science disorder

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Fred Upton been much in the news of late as chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce of the U.S. House of Representatives. He told us as recently as April 24, 2009 that “climate change is a serious problem that necessitates serious solutions.” But now that he has finally gotten a little power, he has contracted selective science disorder.

Earth’s Limits: Why Growth Won’t Return

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The 2008 crude oil price, $147 per barrel, shattered the global economy. The “invisible hand” of economics became the invisible fist, pounding down world economic growth to match the limitations of crude oil production.—Kenneth Deffeyes (petroleum geologist). An excerpt from Chapter 3 of Richard Heinberg’s upcoming book The End of Growth.

Preface to a Prelude to Peak Oil

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Prelude may be the first thriller novel explicitly about peak oil (numberless thrillers concern the nefarious machinations of international oil conglomerates — ultimately those are stories about peak oil too). It follows a short period in the life and career of Cassie Young, an oil industry analyst based in Washington, DC.

ODAC Newsletter – Feb 11

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Saudi Arabia’s recoverable oil reserves may have been overstated by 40%. That was the warning sent to Washington from its embassy in Riyadh in 2007, according to a cable released by Wikileaks this week. The source was Sadad al-Husseini, former head of E&P at Saudi Aramco, who allegedly told US diplomats in Riyadh that Saudi’s claimed reserves of some 700bn bbls were overinflated by 300 billion barrels of ‘speculative resources’, and that output would peak once the kingdom had produced half of its original proven reserves of 360bn barrels. With 116bn produced so far, the diplomats concluded that on this basis Saudi’s peak could come in the early 2020s.

Energy funds, energy flows

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The recent report from World Wildlife Fund insisting that the world can transition to renewable energy while maintaining current developed world lifestyles and abolishing Third World poverty is simply one more in a long series of loudly heralded cornucopian fantasies well detached from the hard realities of the industrial world’s predicament. The sheer amounts of cheap energy that modern civilization has to hand has blinded too many people to the fact that “vast” and “infinite” are not synonyms — and that blindness has significant implications for the near future.

Review: Localisation and Resilience by Rob Hopkins

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The dissertation is a case study of the first official Transition Town, the English market town of Totnes, long a popular tourist destination known for its alternative culture. Using interviews, focus groups, questionnaire surveys and other social science research methods, the study examines the degree to which the Transition ideals of localization and resilience have become a reality in Totnes. (Transitioners endorse a number of upbeat definitions of a resilient community, a popular one being “[a] culture based on its ability to function indefinitely and to live within its own limits, and able to thrive for having done so.”*)

To ‘Frack’ or not to ‘Frack’?

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Ohio, the home of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, and site of the world’s largest oil-producing provinces in the late 19th century, is again at the center of the action in domestic fossil fuel production as a controversial drilling technique, known as fracking, is draining Ohio’s remaining oil and gas reserves. With global oil production peaking and the number of new large oil finds dwindling, is increased domestic production in Ohio and other states through fracking a vital contribution to our energy security, or a fate to be fought?

Brave new world fuelled by clean economical energy possible and imperative by 2050

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All of the world’s energy needs could be provided cleanly, renewably and economically by 2050, according to a major new study by WWF. Two years in preparation, The Energy Report breaks new ground with its global scope and its consideration of total energy needs including transport, and making adequate and safe energy available to all.

Fantasies of hyper-globalism: the WWF’s Energy Report

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In a report meant to be both inspiring and reassuring, the WWF ambitiously declares that the world can switch to 95% renewable energy sources by 2050. The Scenario depends largely on increased efficiency and regulated flows of energy through a great system of interconnection. People are remarkably absent. The ostensible reason is that the report is focused on what is “technically possible,” which is more about joules and btus than about human behavior.