Energy Infrastructure

Review: Life Without Oil by Steve Hallett With John Wright

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“Imagining a world without oil” describes in stark detail what might happen if one day the world decided to decommission all its oil tankers, rigs, pipelines and strategic reserves. The authors, environmental scientist Steve Hallett and journalist John Wright, expect that we’d initially see sky-high prices and long lines at pumps. After a few weeks, fuel wouldn’t be had at any price and even first-world citizens would struggle to stay fed and out of the elements. This is no Hollywood doomsday scenario—it’s a levelheaded extrapolation from current trends in the fast deteriorating world energy situation. [An essay prefiguring the book originally appeared in The Washington Post.]

The debt bomb, net energy and ancient Greeks

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The sooner we can admit that a large portion of the loans now outstanding will never be paid back in full and move on, the sooner we will be able to invest in the steps we need to prepare ourselves for a future marked by limits on resources. However, if no acknowledgement is forthcoming, then we are likely to face a long-term stagnation that will starve society of the capital it needs to make important investments in a more sustainable world.

How I learned to start worrying and hate the tar sands pipeline

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Bill McKibben sure is making a big deal over a commodity piece of oil infrastructure. He and more than 200 climate activists think it’s worth getting arrested to stop TransCanada from building the Keystone XL Pipeline. Sure, tar sands are uber-dirty. But with such a low energy return, won’t high costs just make them go away on their own? That’s what I always assumed. But now I’m starting to think this thing could be bad. Really bad.

The roads to our alternative energy future

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How fast do we need to transition off of fossil fuels? What industrial capacity is available today for different alternative energy technologies and what is likely to be available in the future? What might we do if we can’t replace fossil fuels with alternatives fast enough, and what might the consequences be? I finally got around to re-doing these calculations, and wanted to go through the numbers.

Fukushima – Aug 18

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-The explosive truth behind Fukushima’s meltdown
-Cracked Fukushima: Radioactive steam escapes danger zone
-Mushrooms Join Growing List of Radioactive Threats to Japan’s Food Chain
-5 Months After Meltdown, Fukushima Citizens Still Face Radioactive Risks
-Japan utility may face delay in Fukushima cleanup plan
-Fukushima Daiichi Radioactivity Down to 20% of July Levels
-Japan reopens first nuclear reactor since tsunami

Jevons’ coal question: Why the UK Coal Peak wasn’t as bad as expected

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In his book The Coal Question from 1865 William Stanley Jevons examined for how long the United Kingdom could continue to fuel its economy based on cheap supplies of coal. At the time the UK consumed about 93 million tons of coal providing nearly all of its energy supply. His estimate was that within a maximum of a hundred years, or perhaps even within one or two generations, production would be in retreat due to an increase in the cost of mining which would, in Jevons’ words, “Injure the commercial and manufacturing supremacy of England.”

In this post I’ll look back at history to show that Jevons correctly foresaw the fate of the British coal industry. In Britain a peak in production occurred around 1913 caused by increasing coal mining costs, lack of technological innovation, rising competition from abroad, a number of political decisions disadvantaging coal as a fuel source, declining profits, and a slump in British economic growth coinciding with World War I.

ODAC Newsletter – July 22

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Thirty days on from its decision to release reserve oil stocks, the IEA announced Thursday that it will take no further action for the moment. This, along with positive news from the latest European emergency summit, and signs from Washington that the US may avoid its looming self-inflicted default, saw oil prices strengthen to more than $118/barrel.

Solar storms, EMP and the future of the grid

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Today, the world we live in might be thought of as one big telegraph system composed of computer chips, telephone lines, fiber optics, cellphone towers, satellites, undersea cables and an electrical grid that supplies energy to the terrestrial parts of that system. An event as severe as the 1859 solar storm–called the Carrington Event after the respected British astronomer Richard Carrington who detected it as it developed–could cripple vast areas of the world, shutting down entire national grids not just for days, but possibly for months or years.

Profligacies of Scale

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Promoters of big centralized power generation schemes often justify their plans by invoking economies of scale. That logic made sense at a time when economic expansion and abundant resource supplies defined the framework for all economic activity, electricity generation very much included; in a post-abundance world, what were once economies could very easily turn into something else.

Can renewable energy outshine fossil fuels?

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I’m not popular with environmentalists when I tell them that renewables can only provide a small fraction of the energy that fossil fuels do in powering industrial civilization. In fact, I was recently called a liar at the screening of an anti-nuke film for suggesting so.

Pedal powered farms and factories: the forgotten future of the stationary bicycle

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If we boost the research on pedal powered technology – trying to make up for seven decades of lost opportunities – and steer it in the right direction, pedals and cranks could make an important contribution to running a post-carbon society that maintains many of the comforts of a modern life. The possibilities of pedal power largely exceed the use of the bicycle.