Author Archives: energyskeptic

GAO on why ethanol, and other non-drop in fuels, face pipeline & installation at service station challenges

Posted on April 9, 2015 by

[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 →

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Biofuels do not scale up enough to power society

Posted on April 9, 2015 by

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 →

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Oil shortages: Transportation needs to go back to high inventories, not just-in-time delivery

Posted on April 8, 2015 by

Huge amounts of fuel are wasted as trucks arrive half full with just the needed parts at factories and warehouses and return empty. As oil shocks strike, fuel will be less available.  Large inventories will help by cushioning businesses from … Continue reading →

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A third of Nuclear Reactors are going to die of old age in the next 10-20 years

Posted on April 3, 2015 by

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 →

Posted in ! PEAK EVERYTHING, Nuclear Power Energy | Tagged , | 7 Comments

EROI negative for Coal-to-Liquids (CTL) at Shenuha Direct Coal Liquefaction plant

Posted on March 29, 2015 by

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 | Comments Off on EROI negative for Coal-to-Liquids (CTL) at Shenuha Direct Coal Liquefaction plant

Kurt Cobb Cheap oil, complexity and counter-intuitive conclusions

Posted on March 23, 2015 by

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 →

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All About Coal

Posted on March 20, 2015 by

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 →

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Richard Heinberg: Only less will do

Posted on March 19, 2015 by

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 →

Posted in Birth Control, By People, Climate Change, Overpopulation, Richard Heinberg | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Hydropower has a very low energy density

Posted on March 17, 2015 by

To store the energy contained in 1 gallon of gasoline requires over 55,000 gallons to be pumped up 726 feet (CCST 2012). As a thought experiment look at what it would take generate all of America’s 4,058 TWh electricity, where … Continue reading →

Posted in Energy Storage, Hydropower, Pumped Hydro Storage (PHS) | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Gail Tverberg The oil glut and low prices reflect an affordability problem

Posted on March 12, 2015 by

Tverberg, G. March 9, 2015. The oil glut and low prices reflect an affordability problem. ourfiniteworld.com For a long time, there has been a belief that the decline in oil supply will come by way of high oil prices. Demand … Continue reading →

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