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Recent Posts
- 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
- “More and More and More” one of the best books on energy ever written
- The staggering destruction of knowledge by Christians in the Roman Empire
- Why the R/P Reserves to Production ratio does not show when oil will run out
- Catton on Collapse “Bottleneck: Humanity’s Impending Impasse”
Category Archives: Energy
Global oil risks in the early 21st century, Energy Policy 2011
[This is a large excerpt from an excellent 18-page paper I think predicts how the future will unfold as well as a good overview of our predicament. Alice Friedemann] Fantazzini, Dean; Höök, Mikael; Angelantoni, André. 2011. Global oil risks in … Continue reading
Posted in Other Experts, Peak Oil, Scientists, Scientists Warnings to Humanity
Tagged contracting economy, debt, Export Land Model, food and fuel riots, peak oil, pensions, social welfare programs, supply chains
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Natural Gas limits: 20-40% of recoverable resources are low EROI Sour Gas
SBC. October 2014. Factbook Natural Gas Factbook. SBC Energy Institute There are 855 trillion cubic meters (tcm) of technically recoverable resources, which means that regardless of cost … Continue reading
Posted in Natural Gas
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Coal or Biomass & Coal to Liquids: CTL, DCL, & CBTL technology
Gray, D., et al. August 1, 2012. Topic Paper #8 Production of Alternative Liquid Hydrocarbon Transportation Fuels from Natural Gas, Coal, and Coal and Biomass (XTL). National Petroleum Council Background With national energy security still being a dominant concern because … Continue reading
Posted in Coal to Liquids (CTL)
Tagged CBTL, CTL, DCL, XTL
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New land converted to cropland to grow biofuel crops equal to 34 coal-fired power plants
Summary of article below: Between 2008 and 2012 over 7 million acres new land, much of it grasslands, were converted to croplands, damaging native ecosystems, and mimics the extreme land-use change that led up to the Dust Bowl in the … Continue reading
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
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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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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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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Short-circuiting a solar boom in Japan
Spain is still feeling the painful effects of the costs of overbuilt solar PV, and now Japan is finding itself in the same position. This article does a lousy job of explaining that the grid must be in exact supply … Continue reading
Posted in Distributed Generation, Grid instability, Photovoltaic Solar, Renewable Integration
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