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Recent Posts
- ‘The oil we eat’. Following the food chain back to iraq
- Vanishing open spaces: population growth and sprawl in America
- Admiral Rickover 1957: Energy Resources & Our Future
- The Green New Deal is not a solution for the real problem: Overshoot
- A transition from fossil fuels to renewables could take a century – if it ever happens
- Electrifying freight trains in the U.S. is a bad idea
- Why Nuclear Power can’t replace fossil fuels
- Energy, Water, & Climate Change are interdependent
- Why fusion power is Forever Away
- Climate Change dominates news coverage at expense of other existential planetary boundaries
- Excerpt from “The Geopolitics of Resource Wars”
- Homes & Buildings
- Book Review “The Outlawed Ocean” by Ian Urbina
- Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future
- Motherboards: too complicated to make after oil
Category Archives: Energy
Renewable EROI must include storage, low capacity factor, wide boundaries
[ Trainer argues that when you consider how the capacity factor of wind and solar are to fossil plants, seasonality of wind and solar the number of facilities is quite large to deal with the intermittency problem. Therefore the storage … Continue reading
Energy from cow flatulence
[ Other “energy alternatives” in the Far Out category of menu item Energy include escaping to Mars, liposuction fat, whirlwinds, playground power, garbage, tornadoes, and turning seawater into fuel. Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy … Continue reading
Posted in Far Out
Tagged brown waste, cow, cow fart power, fart, flatulence, methane digester
5 Comments
Royal Society on peak oil and how much oil is left
[ This is a great introduction to the whole topic of oil, reserves, resources, and so on. It’s very long so I’ve only excerpted bits of it and reworded some of it. I can’t say there’s anything new in here … Continue reading
Posted in How Much Left
Tagged conventional, oil, peak oil, unconventional
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One of the biggest risks to the world’s financial system is the $3 trillion of debt owed by oil and gas firms
[ Yet another “crash coming soon” post, if it hasn’t happened already (I scheduled this article and others to appear a year or more later, since crashes always take longer to happen than you expect. Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com author of … Continue reading
Posted in Bond Market, Crash Coming Soon, Debt, Oil & Gas Fracked
Tagged crash coming soon, debt, oil and gas
1 Comment
Power density of biomass, wind, & solar take too much land to replace fossil fuels
Volumetric versus specific energy density for selected energy carriers. Source: Palmer, G. 2020. Energy storage & civilization: a systems approach. Springer. Preface. Vaclav Smil writes “The fact that wind, solar, and biomass have incredibly low energy density per square meter … Continue reading
Posted in Alternative Energy, Biomass, Coal, Hydropower, Natural Gas, Oil
Tagged alternative energy, biodiesel, biomass, coal, ethanol, natural gas, oil, renewable energy
1 Comment
Peak Carbon
[ This is from the Seneca Effect written by somebody in the Netherlands, wish I knew who, he or she is quite brilliant. Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer … Continue reading
Can the lights be kept on with distributed generation? 2015 U.S. House hearing on a reliable electric system
Preface. Corporate speakers testify mainly, rather than less biased researchers from universities or national laboratories. Corporations are selling a product, and likely to exaggerate what their product can do. The most interesting testimony is from Dean Kamen, who is “selling” … Continue reading
Posted in Congressional Record U.S., Distributed Generation, Grid instability
Tagged distributed energy, generators, house of representatives
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Richard Heinberg on why low oil prices do not mean there is plenty of oil, EROI, collapse
[ Yet another wise, thoughtful, and wide-ranging essay from my favorite writer of the many facets of a civilization about to decline as it is starved of the fossil fuels that feed it. Although the topics are quite varied, Heinberg … Continue reading
Posted in Oil, Peter Turchin, Richard Heinberg, Social Disorder
Tagged 100% renewable, collapse, EROI, oil, prices, richard heinberg, social instability, violence
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Oil theft around the world: Cartels and exploding donkeys
Preface. Oil thefts cost Nigerian oil producers at least $18 billion a year. In Mexico, cartels spend only $5-8,000 to tap into pipelines and withdraw “unlimited” amounts of gasoline, and did so 7,000 times in 2016, resulting in $1 billion … Continue reading
Posted in Peak Oil, Threats to oil supply
Tagged oil, production, theft
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How horses changed native cultures after 1492
[ This is a very brief overview of Peter Mitchel’s “Horse Nations”. As oil and other fossils decline, will we will almost certainly return to using more horse “muscle power” as we did in the past. Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com author … Continue reading
Posted in Agriculture, Farming & Ranching, Muscle Power
Tagged horses, muscle power, pack animals
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