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Recent Posts
- The staggering destruction of knowledge by Christians in the Roman Empire
- The staggering cost of Net Zero in Britain
- Why the R/P Reserves to Production ratio does not show when oil will run out
- Catton on Collapse “Bottleneck: Humanity’s Impending Impasse”
- Book Review of Grain Brain: Extraordinary claim not backed up by evidence
- Why did everyone stop talking about Population & Immigration?
- What would happen if trucks stopped running?
- How to survive a nuclear winter
- The insect apocalypse will kill billions more people than climate change
- The war on drugs. A book review of “Chasing the scream”
- Peak crude oil did not happen in 2018. But we are running out of time
- Sheriffs have too much power
- Book review “They poisoned the world: Life & death in the age of Forever Chemicals”
- John Howe on one child per woman: still too high to stay under limits to growth curves
- Ted Trainer: The radical implications of a zero growth economy
Author Archives: energyskeptic
Petroleum council urges Arctic oil to offset declining production in lower 48
The U.S. should immediately begin a push to exploit its enormous trove of oil in the Arctic waters off of Alaska, or risk a renewed reliance on imported oil in the future, an Energy Department advisory council says in a … Continue reading
All Electric Trucks. Probably not going to happen. Ever. Why not?
There are “forms of transport that cannot be electrified — heavy-duty trucks and planes… Even if the electricity problem can be solved, it won’t address the needs of planes, trucks, ships and some industrial heating that cannot be electrified” (Long). … Continue reading
Posted in Batteries, Lithium-ion, Trucks
Tagged A123, all electric, battery, e-truck, electric truck, fuel cell, Smith Electric, subsidy
5 Comments
GAO on why ethanol, and other non-drop in fuels, face pipeline & installation at service station challenges
[The challenges that ethanol faces in being put into new or modified pipelines and added to gas stations are issues faced by all alternative fuels (methanol, CNG, LNG, DME, diesohol, CTL, hydrogen, and so on) in a transition from gasoline … Continue reading
Posted in Automobiles, Biofuels, Fuel Distribution, Pipeline
Tagged biofuel, E85, ethanol, non drop-in fuel, pipeline, service station
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Biofuels do not scale up enough to power society
Richard, T. August 23, 2010. Challenges in scaling up biofuels infrastructure. Science. (329) Below are excerpts from this paper. Look at the impossible scale of biomass required: 150 EJ/year = 15 billion metric tons of plant biomass = 200 billion … Continue reading
Posted in Biofuels
Tagged biofuel, delivery, densification, lignocellulosic, limits to growth, scaling up, transport
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A third of Nuclear Reactors are going to die of old age in the next 10-20 years
70% of reactors are over 25 years old, 23% are over 35 years old, so within 10 to 20 years about a third will have to be decommissioned, far more than the 63 under construction. Some are bound to fail … Continue reading
EROI negative for Coal-to-Liquids (CTL) at Shenuha Direct Coal Liquefaction plant
Kong, Z. et al. 23 January 2015. EROI Analysis for Direct Coal Liquefaction without and with CCS: The Case of the Shenhua DCL Project in China. Energies 8(2): 786-807. Many nations see coal-to-liquids (CTL) as a way to avoid … Continue reading
Posted in Coal to Liquids (CTL), EROEI Energy Returned on Energy Invested
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Kurt Cobb Cheap oil, complexity and counter-intuitive conclusions
Kurt Cobb. March 22, 2015. Cheap oil, complexity and counterintuitive conclusions. Resource Insights. It is a staple of oil industry apologists to say that the recent swift decline in the price of oil is indicative of long-term abundance. This … Continue reading
Posted in Inflation or Deflation, Kurt Cobb
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All About Coal
Preface. Below are my notes, statistics, and so on about coal from many publications. Way more fun to look at and understand the coal used to make steel (a different kind is used to generate electricity) is this site: 2022 … Continue reading
Posted in Coal
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Richard Heinberg: Only less will do
Richard Heinberg. March 16, 2015. Only Less Will Do. Post Carbon Institute. [portions of this article were cut, reworded, and rearranged] Almost nobody likes to hear about the role of scale in our global environmental crisis, because if growth is … Continue reading