The Scientific Consensus on Maintaining Humanity’s Life Support Systems in the 21st Century

Posted on October 13, 2014 by

May 21, 2013. the Scientific Consensus on Maintaining Humanity’s Life Support Systems in the 21st Century

In the one month since it was written, 520 global scientists have signed on to this statement. You can, too. There is more information, including ideas for solutions, at Stanford University’s Millenium Alliance for Humanity & the Biosphere website.

Earth is rapidly approaching a tipping point. Human impacts are causing alarming levels of harm to our planet. As scientists who study the interaction of people with the rest of the biosphere using a wide range of approaches, we agree that the evidence that humans are damaging their ecological life-support systems is overwhelming.We further agree that, based on the best scientific information available, human quality of life will suffer substantial degradation by the year 2050 if we continue on our current path.

Science unequivocally demonstrates the human impacts of key concern:

  • Climate disruption—more, faster climate change than since humans first became a species.
  • Extinctions—not since the dinosaurs went extinct have so many species and populations died out so fast, both on land and in the oceans.
  • Wholesale loss of diverse ecosystems—we have plowed, paved, or otherwise transformed more than 40% of Earth’s ice-free land, and no place on land or in the sea is free of our direct or indirect influences.
  • Pollution—environmental contaminants in the air, water and land are at record levels and increasing, seriously harming people and wildlife in unforeseen ways.
  • Human population growth and consumption patterns—seven billion people alive today will likely grow to 9.5 billion by 2050, and the pressures of heavy material consumption among the middle class and wealthy may well intensify.

By the time today’s children reach middle age, it is extremely likely that Earth’s life-support systems, critical for human prosperity and existence, will be irretrievably damaged by the magnitude, global extent, and combination of these human-caused environmental stressors, unless we take concrete, immediate actions to ensure a sustainable, high-quality future.

As members of the scientific community actively involved in assessing the biological and societal impacts of global change, we are sounding this alarm to the world. For humanity’s continued health and prosperity, we all—individuals, businesses, political leaders, religious leaders, scientists, and people in every walk of life—must work hard to solve these five global problems, starting today: 1. Climate Disruption 2. Extinctions 3. Loss of Ecosystem Diversity 4. Pollution 5. Human Population Growth and Resource Consumption.

The full statement has been signed by 520 global scientists from 44 countries. Those signatures were obtained within a month of completion of the statement, by direct email requests from the authors and their close colleagues to a targeted group of well-regarded global change scientists.   The signers include 2 Nobel Laureates, 33 members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences,   42 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and several members of various European scientific academies.

Since about 1950, the world has been changing faster, and to a greater extent, than it has in the past 12,000 years. 

Changes, all interacting with each other, are leading humanity in dangerous directions: climate disruption, extinction of biodiversity, wholesale loss of vast ecosystems, pollution, and ever-increasing numbers of people competing for the planet’s resources. Until now, these have often been viewed as “necessary evils” for progress, or collateral damage that, while unfortunate, would not ultimately stand in the way of serving the needs of people. Several recent comprehensive reports by the scientific community, however, have now shown otherwise. Rather than simply being inconveniences, the accelerating trends of climate disruption, extinction, ecosystem loss, pollution, and human population growth in fact are threatening the life-support systems upon which we all depend for continuing the high quality of life that many people already enjoy and to which many others aspire.

The vast majority of scientists who study the interactions between people and the rest of the biosphere agree on a key conclusion: that the five interconnected dangerous trends listed above are having detrimental effects, and if continued, the already-apparent negative impacts on human quality of life will become much worse within a few decades. The multitude of sound scientific evidence to substantiate this has been summarized in many recent position papers and consensus statements (a few samples are listed on pp. 28-29), and documented in thousands of articles in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. However, the position papers and consensus statements typically focus only on a subset of the five key issues (for example, climate change, or biodiversity loss, or pollution), and access to the peer-reviewed literature is often difficult for non-scientists. As a result, policy makers faced with making critical decisions can find it cumbersome both to locate the pertinent information and to digest the thousands of pages through which it is distributed.

Here we provide a summary intended to Clearly voice the consensus of most scientists who study these issues that climate disruption, extinction, ecosystem loss, pollution, and population growth are serious threats to humanity’s well-being and societal stability; and these five major threats do not operate independently of each other.

People have basic needs for food, water, health, and a place to live, and additionally have to produce energy and other products from natural resources to maintain standards of living that each culture considers adequate. Fulfilling all of these needs for all people is not possible in the absence of a healthy, well-functioning global ecosystem. The “global ecosystem” is basically the complex ways that all life forms on Earth—including us—interact with each other and with their physical environment (water, soil, air, and so on). The total of all those myriad interactions compose the planet’s, and our, life support systems.

EXTINCTIONS

Humans have been an integral part of the global ecosystem since we first evolved; now we have become the dominant species in it. As such, we strongly influence how Earth’s life support systems work, in both positive and negative ways. A key challenge in the coming decades is to ensure that the negative influences do not outweigh the positive ones, which would make the world a worse place to live. Robust scientific evidence confirms that five interconnected negative trends of major concern have emerged over the past several decades:
• Disrupting the climate that we and other species depend upon.

• Triggering a mass extinction of biodiversity.

• Destroying diverse ecosystems in ways that damage our basic life support systems.

• Polluting our land, water, and air with harmful contaminants that undermine basic biological processes, impose severe health costs, and undermine our ability to deal with other problems.

• Increasing human population rapidly while relying on old patterns of production and consumption.

These five trends interact with and exacerbate each other, such that the total impact becomes worse than the simple sum of their parts. Ensuring a future for our children and grandchildren that is at least as desirable as the life we live now will require accepting that we have already inadvertently pushed the global ecosystem in dangerous directions, and that we have the knowledge and power to steer it back on course—if we act now. Waiting longer will only make it harder, if not impossible, to be successful, and will inflict substantial, escalating costs in both monetary terms and human suffering.

Background Information: Dangerous Trends in Our Life Support System

Biological extinctions cannot be reversed and therefore are a particularly destructive kind of global change. Even the most conservative analyses indicate that human-caused extinction of other species is now proceeding at rates that are 3-80 times faster than the extinction rate that prevailed before people were abundant on Earth28, and other estimates are much higher29-32. If the current rate of extinction is not slowed for species and their constituent populations, then within as little as three centuries the world would see the loss of 75% of vertebrate species (mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish), as well as loss of many species of other kinds of animals and plants28. Earth has not seen that magnitude of extinction since an asteroid hit the planet 65 million years ago, killing the dinosaurs and many other species. Only five times in the 540 million years since complex life forms dominated Earth have mass extinctions occurred at the scale of what current extinction rates would produce; those mass extinctions killed an estimated 75%-96% of the species known to be living at the time. !

Currently, sound scientific criteria document that at least 23,000 species are threatened with extinction, including 22% of mammal species, 14% of birds, 29% of evaluated reptiles, as many as 43% of amphibians, 29% of evaluated fish, 26% of evaluated invertebrate animals, and 23% of plants33-35. Populations—groups of interacting individuals that are the building blocks of species—are dying off at an even faster rate than species. The extinction of local populations, in fact, represents the strongest pulse of contemporary biological extinction. For example, since 1970 some 30% of all vertebrate populations have died out36, and most species have experienced loss of connectivity between populations because of human-caused habitat fragmentation. Healthy species are composed of many, interconnected populations; rapid population loss, and loss of connectivity between populations, are thus early warning signs of eventual species extinction.

Ecosystem Transformation

As humans have become more abundant, we have transformed large parts of the Earth’s surface from their pre-human “natural” state into entirely different landscapes and seascapes58. Some of these transformations have been necessary to support basic human needs; others have been inadvertent and unanticipated$!! As of 2012, somewhat more than 41% of Earth’s ice-free lands (36% of total land surface) have been commandeered for farms, ranches, logging, cities, suburbs, roads, and other human constructs59-61. This equates to an average of a little less than 2 acres of transformed land for each person on Earth. Conversion for agriculture accounts for most of the landscape change, with crops covering about 12% and pastureland about 26% of ice-free land (the percentages are about 10% and 22%, respectively, for the proportion of all Earth’s land). Urban lands account for another 3%. On top of that are vast road networks that fragment habitats across some 50% of the entire land surface, dams that modify water flow in more than 60% of the world’s large rivers and in many smaller ones62, and continuing deforestation that has been proceeding at the rate of about 30,000 square kilometers (=11,000 square miles) per year for the past 16 years63. This per-year loss is roughly the equivalent of clear-cutting the entire country of Belgium or in the United States, the states of Massachusetts or Hawaii in one year.

Measuring the percentage of the oceans that have been transformed is much more challenging, but it is clear that pollution, trawling, and ship traffic and noise have caused major changes along most of the world’s coastlines64,65. For example, bottom trawling alone has been estimated to annually destroy an area of seabed equivalent to twice the area of the continental United States66. Human debris, particularly plastics, also is ubiquitous in ocean waters, even far offshore67. The human footprint extends even outside of the ecosystems that have been transformed wholesale by people. Nearly every terrestrial ecosystem in the world now integrates at least a few species that ultimately were introduced by human activities68-70, sometimes with devastating losses in ecosystem services71, and invasive species now number in the hundreds in most major marine ports72,73 and in the thousands on most continents70,74,75. All told, 83% of the entire land surface exhibits human impact defined as influenced by at least one of the following factors:
human population density greater than 1 person per square kilometer (=1 person per 0.4 square miles, or 247 acres); agricultural activity; built-up areas or settlements; being within 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) of a road or coastline; or nighttime light bright enough to be detected by satellites76,77. Adding in the effect of climate change, every place on Earth exhibits at least some human impact, even the most remote parts of the land and oceans78.

 

PEOPLE WISHING TO READ THE FULL SUMMARY OR THE ENTIRE REPORT CAN FIND THEM AT http://mahb.stanford.edu.

Posted in Scientists Warnings to Humanity | 2 Comments

Renewable incentives destabilize, harm electric grid

Posted on October 11, 2014 by

Wald, Matthew L.   7 Oct 2014. How Grid Efficiency Went South. New York times.

Summary:

1) society would be better off if homeowners faced their rooftop solar panels westward, the peak time more energy is needed, but they won’t because they won’t make as much money as south-facing panels

2) coal, natural gas and especially nuclear plants keep the grid stable by selling energy around the clock.  wind and solar energy can flood the market with power and push down the prices received by coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants (low ghg).  Nuclear power plants can’t stop running (unlike natural gas), and are going out of business because wind is incentivized – they get money for generating (too much) power, but nuclear isn’t rewarded for providing grid stability and contribution of low ghg emissions.

3) Natural gas plants can cycle up and down, so capitalists would say this is great, we’ll build even more natural gas plants.  But this brief time of fracked natural gas will go downhill fast once the peak is reached sometime between 2015 and 2020, since fracked gas wells decline 60% after the first year.  Natural gas truck fleets are far more valuable than electricity given the role trucks play in our society (When trucks stop, America Stops).

Excerpts from article:

Almost every rooftop solar panel in the United States faces south, the direction that will catch the maximum energy when the sun rises in the southeast and sets in the southwest.  This was probably a mistake.  The panels are pointed that way because under the rules that govern the electric grid, panel owners are paid by the amount of energy they make. But they are not making the most energy at the hours when it is most needed.  Solar panels thus illustrate how the rules add cost and reduce environmental effectiveness, critics say, because they are out of step with what the power grid actually needs from intermittent renewables like wind and sun, and from zero-carbon nuclear power.

With the existing price structure, “we incentivize maximum power generation,” said James Tong, the vice president for strategy and government affairs at Clean Power Finance, an investment firm. But in most parts of the country, there is plenty of electricity available from other sources in the morning and midday. Crunch time is late afternoon, when temperatures are higher and air-conditioners are working hard, and inefficient plants running on natural gas or even coal are cranked up to the maximum.

“The needs of the grid may mean that they should be pointed west,” more toward the setting sun, said Mr. Tong. That way, a bigger portion of their production would come at the hours when electricity was most needed. But their total production would be a bit lower, and that would hurt panel owners, at least under current rules.

The debate is over how to pay contributors to the grid so the system has an adequate amount of both energy and power, crucial to maintaining the stability of the system.

Solar panels and especially wind turbines produce vast amounts of energy, but on their own schedule, when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. The more conventional installations — coal, natural gas and especially nuclear plants — earn their keep by selling energy around the clock. Put enough wind and solar units on the grid during the hours when they are running and they flood the market and push down the hourly auction price of a megawatt-hour of energy.

Sometimes the price goes to zero. Oddly, it can go even lower. When demand is very low in the middle of the night and the wind is blowing hard, there may be too much electricity on the system and grid operators will charge generators that want to add more. Nuclear plants cannot quickly modulate their output so they are, in effect, fined for production.

But wind farms still make money because they earn a tax credit for each kilowatt-hour they generate.

The problem is especially acute for nuclear reactors because their costs for fuel are roughly the same whether they are running or not. They are refueled on a fixed schedule, not when the uranium is used up. Their labor costs, mortgage costs and maintenance costs are roughly the same, too. But if the hourly price for energy is suppressed by wind and sun, suddenly the nuclear plants can’t make enough money to keep running.

Thus some have already closed and more are threatened, even though carbon dioxide limits are unlikely to be met without them.

Even relatively clean natural gas plants are hurt; they are generally on the margin, the first to shut when new solar comes on line.

“We’ve moved to a system focused on resources that provide energy when they want to.

A system that must compensate for rising and falling wind and solar generation makes the flexible plants, like those using natural gas, more valuable

The homeowner with panels on the roof may think he or she is disconnected from the system, when in fact the connection has become stronger, making the household a supplier as well as a consumer of energy, and a consumer of all the grid’s other functions, like capacity, transmission and distribution.

 

Posted in Alternative Energy, Natural Gas, Nuclear Power Energy, Photovoltaic Solar | Comments Off on Renewable incentives destabilize, harm electric grid

LNG overview

Posted on October 9, 2014 by
Qatar LNG plant

Qatar LNG plant

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Liquefied natural gas is natural gas chilled down to -260 F which reduces its volume by about 600 times.

Exports

2013 LNG Exports by Country & Incremental Change Relative to 2012 (in MTPA)

 

Share of Global LNG Exports by Country, 1990-2013

Share of Global LNG Exports by Country, 1990-2013

 

LNG Exports by Region, 1990-2013

LNG Exports by Region, 1990-2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Imports

2013 LNG Imports by Country & Incremental Change Relative to 2012 (in MTPA

 

LNG Trade B etween Basins, 2013, MT

LNG Trade B etween Basins, 2013, MT

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LNG Storage Tank Capacity by Country (mmcm) and % of Total, as of Q1 2014 Note: “Smaller Markets” include Argentina, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Dominican Republic, Pue rto Rico, Kuwait, Israel, Greece and the UAE. Each of these markets has under 0.3 mmcm of capacity

LNG Storage Tank Capacity by Country (mmcm) and % of Total, as of Q1 2014 Note: “Smaller Markets” include Argentina, Malaysia, Indonesia,
the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Kuwait, Israel, Greece and the UAE. Each of these markets has under 0.3 mmcm of capacity

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

References

IGU. 2014. World LNG report. International Gas Union.

Wiki LNG

DOE 2005  Liquid Natural Gas. Understanding the Basic Facts.

 

Posted in LNG Liquified Natural Gas | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on LNG overview

Wall Street Journal Gets it Wrong on “why peak oil predictions haven’t come true”

Posted on October 8, 2014 by

WSJ Gets it Wrong on “Why Peak Oil Predictions Haven’t Come True”

 October 6, 2014 by

On Monday, September 29, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published a story called “Why Peak Oil Predictions Haven’t Come True.” The story is written as if there are only two possible outcomes:

  1. The Peak Oil version of what to expect from oil limits is correct, or
  2. Diminishing Returns can and are being put off by technological progress–the view of the WSJ.

It seems to me, though, that a third outcome is not only possible, but is what is actually happening.

3. Diminishing returns from oil limits are already beginning to hit, but the impacts and the expected shape of the down slope are quite different from those forecast by most Peak Oilers.

Area of Confusion

In many people’s way of thinking, the economy is separate from resources and the extraction of those resources. If we believe economists, the economy can grow indefinitely, with or without the use of resources. Clearly, with this view, the price of these resources doesn’t matter very much. If one kind of resource becomes more expensive, we can substitute other resources, once the scarce resource becomes sufficiently high-priced that the alternative makes financial sense. Incomes can rise arbitrarily high–all it takes is for each of us to pay the other higher wages. And we can fix any problem with the financial system with more money printing and more debt.

This wrong version of how our economy works has been handed down through the academic world, through our system of peer review, with each academic researcher following in the tracks of previous academic researchers. As long as new researchers follow the same wrong thinking as previous researchers, their articles will be published. Economists were especially involved in putting together this wrong world-view, but politicians helped as well. They liked the outcomes of the models the economists produced, since it made it look like the politicians, with the help of economists, were all-powerful. All the politicians needed to do was tweak the financial system, and the world economy would grow forever. There was not even a need for resources!

Peak Oilers’ Involvement 

The Peak Oilers walked into a situation with this wrong world view, and started trying to fix pieces of it. One piece that was clearly wrong as the relationship between resources and the economy.  Resources, especially energy resources, are needed to make any of the goods and services we buy. If those resources started reaching diminishing returns, it would be harder for the economy to grow. The economy might even shrink. Dr. Charles Hall, recently retired professor from SUNY-ESF, came up with one measure of diminishing returns–falling Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI).

How would shrinkage occur? For this, Peak Oilers turned to the work of M. King Hubbert, who worked in an area of geology. He wrote about how supply of a resource might be expected to decline with diminishing returns.

Hubbert was not concerned about what effect diminishing returns would have on the economy–presumably because that was not his area of specialization. He avoided the issue by only modeling the special case where no economic impact could be expected–the special case where a perfect substitute could be found and be put in place, in advance of the decline caused by diminishing returns.

Figure 1. Figure from Hubbert's 1956 paper, Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels.

In the example shown above, Hubbert assumes cheap nuclear would take over, before the decline in fossil fuels started. Hubbert even talked about making cheap liquid fuels using the very abundant nuclear resources, so that the system could continue as before.

In this special case, Hubbert suggested that the decline in resources might follow a symmetric curve, slowly declining in a pattern similar to its original rise in consumption, since this is the pattern that often occurs in extracting a resource in nature. Many Peak Oilers seem to believe that this pattern will happen in the more general case, where no perfect substitute is available, as well. A perfect substitute would need to be cheap, abundant, and involve essentially no cost of transition.

In the special case Hubbert modeled, Hubbert indicated that production would start to decline when approximately 50% of reserves had been exhausted. Peak Oilers often used this approach to forecast future production, and the date oil production would “peak.” As technology improved, additional oil became accessible, raising reserves. Also, as prices rose, resources that had never been economically extractible became extractible. Production continued beyond forecast peak dates, again and again.

Peak Oilers got at least part of the story right–the fact that we are in fact reaching diminishing returns with respect to oil. For this they should be commended. What they didn’t figure out is, however, is (1) how the energy-economy system really works, and (2) which pieces of the system can be expected to break first. This issue is not really the Peak Oilers fault–it is the result of starting with a very bad model of the economy and not understanding which pieces of that model needed to be fixed.

How the Economic System Really Works 

We are dealing with a networked economy, one that is self-organized over time. I would represent it as a hollow network, built up of businesses, consumers, and governments.

Figure 2. Dome constructed using Leonardo Sticks

This economic system uses energy of various kinds plus resources of many kinds to make goods and services. There are many parts to the system, including laws, taxes, and international trade. The system gradually changes and expands, with new laws replacing old ones, new customers replacing old ones, and new products replacing old ones. Growth in the number of consumers tends to lead to a need for more goods and services of all kinds.

An important part of the economy is the financial system. It connects one part of the system with another and almost magically signals when shortages are occurring, so that more of a missing product can be made, or substitutes can be developed.

Debt is part of the system as well. With increasing debt, it is possible to make use of profits that will be earned in the future, or income that will be earned in the future, to fund current investments (such as factories) and current purchases (such as cars, homes, and advanced education). This approach works fine if an economy is growing sufficiently. The additional demand created through the use of debt tends to raise the prices of commodities like oil, metals, and water, giving an economic incentive for companies to extract these items and use them in products they make.

The economy really can’t shrink to any significant extent, for several reasons:

  1. With rising population, there is a need for more goods and services. There is also a need for more jobs. A growing networked economy provides increasing numbers of both jobs and goods and services. A shrinking economy leads to lay-offs and fewer goods and services produced. It looks like recession.
  2. The networked economy automatically deletes obsolete products and re-optimizes to produce the goods needed now. For example, buggy whip manufacturers are pretty rare today. Thus, we can’t quickly go back to using horse and buggy, even if should we want to, if oil becomes scarce. There aren’t enough horses and buggies, and there aren’t enough services for cleaning up horse manure.
  3. The use of debt for financing depends on ever-rising future output. If the economy does shrink, or even stops growing as quickly as in the past, there tends to be a problem with debt defaults.
  4. If debt does start shrinking, prices of commodities like oil, gold, and even food tend to drop (similar to the situation we are seeing now). These lower prices discourage  investment in creating these commodities. Ultimately, they lead to lower production and job layoffs. If deflation occurs, debt can become very difficult to repay.

Under what conditions can the economy grow? Clearly adding more people to the economy adds to growth. This can be done by adding more babies who live to maturity. It can also be done by globalization–adding groups of people who had previously only made goods and services for each other in limited quantity. As these groups get connected to the wider economy, their older, simpler ways of doing things tend to be replaced by more productive activities (involving more technology and more use of energy) and greater international trade. Of course, at some point, the number of new people who can be connected to the global economy gets to be pretty small. Growth in the world economy lessens, simply because of lessened ability to add “underdeveloped” countries to the networked economy.

Besides adding more people, it is also possible to make individual citizens “better off” by making workers more efficient at producing goods and services. Most people think of greater productivity as happening through technological changes, but to me, it really represents a combination of technological changes, plus a combination of inexpensive resources of various kinds. This combination often includes low-cost fossil fuels; abundant, cheap water supply; fertile soil; and easy to extract metal ores. Having these available makes possible the development of new tools (like new agricultural equipment, sewing machines, and vehicles), so that workers can become more productive.

Diminishing returns are what tend to “mess up” this per capita growth. With diminishing returns, fossil fuels become more expensive to extract. Water often needs to be obtained by desalination, or by much deeper wells. Soil needs more amendments, to be as fertile as in the past. Metal ores contain less and less ore, so more extraneous material needs to be extracted with the metal, and separated out. If population grows as well, there is a need for more agricultural output per acre, leading to a need for more technologically advanced techniques. Working around diminishing returns tends to make many kinds of goods and services more expensive, relative to wages.

Rising commodity prices would not be a problem, if wages would rise at the same time as the price of goods and services. The problem, though, is that in some sense diminishing returns makes workers less efficient. This happens because of the need to work around problems (such as digging deeper wells and removing more extraneous material from ores). For many years, technological changes may offset the effects of diminishing returns, but at some point, technological gains can no longer keep up. When this happens, instead of wages rising, they tend to stagnate, or even decline. Figure 3 shows that per capita wages have tended to grow in the United States when oil was below about $40 or $50 barrel, but have tended to stagnate when prices are above that level.

Figure 3. Average wages in 2012$ compared to Brent oil price, also in 2012$. Average wages are total wages based on BEA data adjusted by the CPI-Urban, divided total population. Thus, they reflect changes in the proportion of population employed as well as wage levels.

What Effects Should We Be Expecting from Diminishing Returns With Respect to Oil Supply?

There are several expected effects of diminishing returns:

  1. Rising cost of extraction for oil and for other commodities subject to diminishing returns.
  2. Stagnating or falling wages of all except the most elite workers.
  3. Ultra low interest rates to try to make goods more affordable for workers stressed by stagnating wages and high prices.
  4. Rising governmental debt, in an attempt to stimulate the economy and in order to provide programs for the many workers without good-paying jobs.
  5. Increasing concern about debt defaults, as the amount of debt outstanding becomes increasingly absurd relative to wages of workers, and as all of the stimulus debt runs its course, in countries such as China.
  6. A two-way problem with the price of oil. On one side is recession, when oil prices rise to unaffordable levels. Economist James Hamilton has shown that 10 out of 11 post-World War II recession were associated with oil price spikes. He has also shown that there is good reason to expect that the Great Recession was related to the run-up in oil prices prior to 2007. I have written a related paper–Oil Supply Limits and the Continuing Financial Crisis.
  7. The second problem with the price of oil is the reverse–price of oil too low relative to the cost of extraction, because wages are not high enough to permit workers to afford the full cost of goods made with high-priced oil. This is really a problem with inadequate affordability (called inadequate demand by economists).
  8. Eventual collapse of whole system.

There have been many studies of collapses of past economies. These collapses tended to occur when the economies hit diminishing returns after a long period of growth. The problems were often similar to ones we are seeing today: stagnating wages of common workers and growing debt. There were more and more demands on governments to fix the problems of workers, but governments found it increasingly difficult to collect enough taxes for all the needed programs.

Eventually, the economic systems have tended to collapse, over a period of years. The shape of resource use in collapses was definitely not symmetric. Figure 4 shows my view of the typical shape of the collapses in non-fossil fuel economies, based on the work of Peter Turchin and Surgey Nefedof.

Figure 4. Shape of typical Secular Cycle, based on work of Peter Turkin and Sergey Nefedov in Secular Cycles.

In my view, the date of the drop in oil supply will be determined by what appear to on-lookers to be financial problems. One possible cause is that the oil price will be too low for producers (a condition that is occurring now). Governments will find it unpopular to raise oil prices, but at the same time, will be powerless to stop the adverse impacts the fall in price has on world oil supply.

Falling oil prices have especially adverse effects on oil exporters, because they depend on revenues from oil to fund their programs. We are already seeing this now, with the increased warfare in the Middle East, Russia’s increased belligerence, and the problems of Venezuela. These issues will tend to reduce globalization, leading to less world growth, and a greater tendency for the world economy to shrink.

Unfortunately, there are no obvious ways of fixing our problems. High-priced substitutes for oil (that is, substitutes costing more than $40 or $50 barrel) are likely to have as adverse an impact on the economy as high-priced oil. The idea that energy prices can rise and the economy can adapt to them is based on wishful thinking.

Our networked economy cannot shrink; it tends to break instead.

Even well-intentioned attempts to reduce oil usage are likely to backfire because they tend to reduce oil prices and have other unintended effects. Furthermore, a use of oil that one person would consider frivolous (such as a vacation in Greece) represents a needed job to another person.

Should Peak Oilers Be Blamed for Missing the “Real” Oil Limits Story?

No! Peak oilers have made an important contribution, in calling the general problem of diminishing returns in oil supply to our attention. One of their big difficulties was that they started out working with a story of the economy that was very distorted. They understood how to fix parts of the story, but fixing the whole story was beyond their ability. The following chart shows a summary of some ways their views and my views differ:

Figure 5. Author's summary of some differences in views.

One of the areas that Peak Oilers tended to miss was the fact that an oil substitute needs to be a perfect substitute–that is, be available in huge quantity, cheaply, without major substitution costs–in order not to adversely affect the economy and in order to permit the slow decline rate suggested by Hubbert’s models. Otherwise, the problems with diminishing returns remain, leading to declining wages and rising costs of making goods and services.

One temptation for Peak Oilers has been to jump on the academic bandwagon, looking for substitutes for oil. As long as Peak Oilers don’t make too many demands on substitutes–only EROEI comparisons–wind and solar PV look like they have promise.

But once a person realizes that our true need is to keep a networked economy growing, it becomes clear that such “solutions” are woefully inadequate.

We need a way of overcoming diminishing returns to keep the whole system operating. In other words, we need a way to make wages rise and the price of finished goods fall relative to wages; there is no chance that wind and solar PV are going to do this for us.

We have a much more basic problem than “new renewables” can solve.

If we can’t figure out a solution, our economy is likely to reach what looks like financial collapse in the near term. Of course, the real reason is diminishing returns from oil, and from other resources as well.

Posted in Gail Tverberg | Comments Off on Wall Street Journal Gets it Wrong on “why peak oil predictions haven’t come true”

Almost half of Rail Freight is Energy, increasingly Crude Oil

Posted on October 8, 2014 by

RR crude oil carriedSource: American Association of Railroads.

46% of all tonnage hauled by freight trains is Energy:

In 2014, crude oil will likely be 650,000 carloads — 2% of all carloads, 2.2% of tonnage.  In addition 2.6% of rail tonnage was refined petroleum & coke.

In 2013, coal was 5,950,000 carloads of coal (693.8 million tons), 20.6% of all carloads, 39.5% of rail tonnage, 20% of rail revenue.

In 2012, ethanol was 306,000 carloads, 1% of all carloads, 1.5% of rail tonnage 

It’s probably more than half if you count commodities derived from petroleum.  In 2002, the last time the U.S. Dept of Transportation (RITA) published “Table 12 – U.S. Rail Total Carload and Intermodal Commodity Shipments”, 2% of rail tonnage was fertilizer, 2% plastics and rubber, and some fraction of the 1% chemical products tonnage comes from the petrochemical industry (i.e. agrochemicals, methanol, etc).  In 2002, 47% of rail tonnage was coal, coal and petroleum products, fuel oils, gasoline and aviation turbine fuel, and crude petroleum.

Alice Friedemann October 8, 2014.

Nixon, R. Oct 8, 2014. As Trains Move Oil Bonanza, Delays Mount for Other Goods and Passengers. New York Times.

An energy boom that has created a sharp increase in rail freight traffic nationwide is causing major delays for vital consumer and industrial goods, including chemicals,  coal, and grain shipments for farmers, likely to grow worse since record harvests of corn, soybeans, and wheat are expected this year.

On the long-distance routes, aging tracks and a shortage of train cars, locomotives and crews have also caused delays.

Rail accounts for 40% of all goods moved in the country as measured in ton-miles (multiply cargo weight by distance shipped). Trucks are second at 28%.

Frittelli, J., et al. May 5, 2014. U.S. Rail Transportation of Crude Oil: Background and Issues for Congress. Congressoinal Research Service.

According to rail industry officials, U.S. freight railroads are estimated to have carried 434,000 carloads of crude oil in 2013 (roughly equivalent to 300 million barrels), compared to 9,500 carloads in 2008. In 2014, 650,000 carloads of crude oil are expected to be carried. Crude imports by rail from Canada have increased more than 20-fold since 2011.

The Assoc of American RR says that “crude oil accounted for 1.6 percent of total Class I originated carloads in the first half of 2014.

Assuming, for simplicity, that each rail tank car holds about 30,000 gallons (714 barrels) of crude oil, the 229,798 carloads of crude oil originated by U.S. Class I railroads in the first half of 2014 was equivalent to 900,000 barrels per day moving by rail. According to EIA data, total U.S. domestic crude oil production in the first half of 2014 was 8.2 million barrels per day, so the rail share was around 11 percent of the total.”

The volume of crude oil carried by rail increased 423% between 2011 and 2012, and the volume moving by barge, on inland waterways as well as along intracoastal routes, increased by 53%. The volume of crude oil shipped by truck rose 38% between 2011 and 2012.

Rail transportation cost is perhaps $5 to $10 per barrel higher than pipeline costs.

Given the uncertainty about the future value of the oil and the longevity of the deposits, it is not certain that investors will undertake construction of pipelines from the Bakken fields to the East Coast. In that case, large volumes of crude could be transported by rail well into the future.

Rail has also been critical to development of Canadian oil sands. Although the vast majority of crude oil imports from Canada are delivered via existing pipeline, imports by rail are estimated to have increased from 1.6 million barrels in 2011 to 40 million barrels in 2013.

A significant fall-off in railroad coal movements has increased railroads’ capacity to transport oil over some routes. In 2013, railroads carried about 395,000 more tank cars of crude than in 2005, but about 1.3 million fewer cars of coal. To put the increase in crude traffic in perspective, crude oil represented less than 1% of total rail carloads in 2012. In the first three quarters of 2013, crude carloads increased to 1.4% of total rail car loadings. While, on a national scale, increased rail car loadings of crude oil represent a relatively small percentage of total traffic, significant increases in traffic in a specific area can cause bottlenecks that can reverberate across the entire rail network.

The STB held a hearing in April 2014 to hear complaints from non-oil shippers concerning poor rail service in the upper Midwest due to oil traffic and the severe winter weather.   The STB ordered BNSF and CP railroads to report how they intended to ensure delivery of fertilizer to farmers in spring 2014. At the hearing, BNSF (the railroad most directly serving the Bakken region) noted that its car loadings in North Dakota had more than doubled from 2009 to 2013, and that in October 2013, crude oil and agricultural car loadings surged by more than it could manage.

One hindrance to the expansion of crude-by-rail has been the lack of tank cars and loading and unloading infrastructure. Much of this investment is being made by the oil industry or by rail equipment leasing companies, not railroads. As of April 2014, manufacturers had 50,000 crude oil tank cars on order, on top of an existing fleet of 43,000. (This is in addition to 30,000 tank cars that carry ethanol and 27,000 that carry other flammable liquids.

Tank trucks operating on U.S. roadways have been an important link in moving crude oil from domestic drilling sites to pipelines and rail terminals. A typical tank truck can hold 200 to 250 barrels of crude oil. Trucks readily serve the need for gathering product, as the hydraulic fracturing method of drilling employed in tight oil production involves multiple drilling sites in an area and the location of active wells is constantly in flux. A large volume of crude oil is being transported by truck between production areas and refineries in Texas because of the close proximity of the two.

While there are about 57,000 miles of crude oil pipeline in the United States, there are nearly 140,000 miles of railroad

The U.S. Dept of Transportation, Bureau of Transportation Statistics only goes up to 2009 in Table 1-61: Crude Oil and Petroleum Products Transported in the United States by Mode

2009 Combined crude and petroleum products by ton-mile, percent carried by:  Pipelines (70.2), ships and barges (23.1), trucks (4.2), railroads (2.6)

Pick Your Poison For Crude — Pipeline, Rail, Truck Or Boat
by James Conca   April 26, 2014  Forbes

In the U.S., 70% of crude oil and petroleum products are shipped by pipeline. 23% of oil shipments are on tankers and barges over water. Trucking only accounts for 4% of shipments, and rail for a mere 3%.

Amid a North American energy boom and a lack of pipeline capacity, crude oil shipping on rail is suddenly increasing. The trains are getting bigger and towing more and more tanker cars.

With the number of refineries decreasing, and capacity concentrating in fewer places, crude usually has to be moved some distance. There are 4 ways to move it over long distances: by pipeline, by boat, by truck, or by rail.

It’s cheaper and quicker to transport by pipeline than by rail or by truck. The difference in cost is about $50 billion a year for shipping via the Keystone pipeline versus rail.

A rail tank car carries about 30,000 gallons (÷ 42 gallons/barrel = about 700 barrels). A train of 100 cars carries about 3 million gallons (70,000 barrels) and takes over 3 days to travel from Alberta to the Gulf Coast, about a million gallons per day. The Keystone will carry about 35 million gallons per day (830,000 barrels).

The Congressional Research Service estimates that transporting crude oil by pipeline is cheaper than rail, about $5/barrel versus $10 to $15/barrel (NYTimes.com). But rail is more flexible and has 140,000 miles of track in the United States compared to 57,000 miles of crude oil pipelines. Building rail terminals to handle loading and unloading is a lot cheaper, and less of a hassle, than building and permitting pipelines.

Rail. If crude oil shipping on rail is becoming a preferred mode for oil producers in our North American energy boom, this trend is very disturbing. In 2011, crude rail capacity between southern Alberta and the northern U.S. Great Plains tripled to about 300,000 barrels per day, about a third of the Keystone XL capacity. U.S. railroads delivered 7 million barrels of crude in 2008, 46 million in 2011, 163 million in 2012, and 262 million in 2013 (almost as much as that anticipated by the Keystone XL alone). To replace the Keystone XL with rail shipments would mean another doubling of rail capacity, but that would be just another couple of years given this trend.

The Association of American Railroads points out that over 11 billion gallons of crude were shipped in 2013.

Truck. The issue with trucking is that it takes lots and lots of trucks to move billions of gallons of crude since a single tank trailer only holds about 9,000 gallons or 200 barrels, a little under a third of a rail car. Our present fleet only handles 4% of our needs, so shipping by truck instead of the Keystone XL would take another 1.5 million tanker trucks.

Refineries

Crude is a nasty material, very destructive when it spills into the environment, and very toxic when it contacts humans or animals. It’s not even useful for energy, or anything else, until it’s chemically processed, or refined, into suitable products like naphtha, gasoline, heating oil, kerosene, asphaltics, mineral spirits, natural gas liquids, and a host of others.
U.S. Refinery Capacity by PADD (Petroleum Administration for Defense Districts) in 2012.

U.S. Refinery Capacity by PADD (Petroleum Administration for Defense Districts) in 2012. Source: Congressional Research Service; Energy Information Administration

Every crude oil has different properties, such as sulfur content (sweet to sour) or density (light to heavy), and requires a specific chemical processing facility to handle it (Permian Basin Oil&Gas). Different crudes produce different amounts and types of products, sometimes leading to a glut in one or more of them, like too much natural gas liquids that drops their price dramatically, or not enough heating oil that raises their price.

As an example, the second largest refinery in the United States, Marathon Oil’s GaryVille Louisiana facility, can handle over 520,000 barrels a day (bpd) of heavy sour crude from places like Mexico and Canada but can’t handle sweet domestic crude from New Mexico.

Thus the reason for the Keystone Pipeline or increased rail transport – to get heavy tar sand crude to refineries along the Gulf Coast than can handle it.

The last entirely new petroleum refinery in the United States opened in 1976 (Congressional Research Service). Since then, the number of refineries has steadily declined while refining capacity has concentrated in ever-larger facilities. 25% of U.S. capacity is found in only eleven refineries. Recently, Shell’s Baytown refinery in Texas, the largest in the nation, was expanded to 600,000 bpd. Most of the big refineries can handle heavy crude, but many smaller refineries can process only light to intermediate crude oil, most of which originates within the U.S.

33 states have refineries, and most refineries can handle tens-of-thousands to hundreds-of-thousands of barrels per day, but the largest capacity sits around the Gulf Coast and in California where the oil boom in America began. However, in the 1990s after production of sweet domestic crude had significantly declined from mid-century highs, the big companies like Exxon, Shell, CITCO and Valero spent billions upon billion of dollars to retool their refineries to handle foreign heavy crudes.

What is important to note, however, is that regardless of the long-hauling mode, most petroleum eventually gets onto a truck for the short moves.

Ship

Ship transport is possible along coastal waters and along large rivers and is the method that is used for almost all foreign imports except from Canada.

 

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Conservation? Maybe not: Jevon’s Paradox & the Rebound Effect

Posted on October 7, 2014 by

Conservation? Maybe not: Jevon’s Paradox & the Rebound Effect

by Alice Friedemann, October 7, 2014

The rebound effect makes it much more difficult to solve our energy problems, because the full energy savings aren’t realized, and the energy savings can even be negative — see Jevons paradox (a.k.a. ‘back-fire’).

It’s simple to understand – if gasoline goes from $4 to $5 a gallon so I sell my 15 mpg car for a 45 mpg one, but drive it further, faster, and more often now that it’s cheaper, my 200% increase in fuel efficiency could be mostly wiped out.

This can be quantified:  if a 5% improvement in vehicle fuel efficiency results in only a 1% drop in fuel use, the rebound effect would be 80%  ((5-1)/5 = 80%).

The only way to stop energy decline from crashing civilization is to stay under the depletion curve, and that means cutting fossil fuel consumption in transportation (When Trucks Stop). If oil depletes at 5%, consumption has to drop 5% for any meaningful benefit to society, and a lot more than that if we want to stretch supplies out a bit longer for the truly essential diesel railroad, train, tractor, and infrastructure repairing vehicles.

Shellenberger, M. Oct 8, 2014. The Problem With Energy Efficiency. New York Times.

In announcing the award [for a more efficient form of lighting — the LED], the academy said, “Replacing light bulbs and fluorescent tubes with LEDs will lead to a drastic reduction of electricity requirements for lighting.” The president of the Institute of Physics noted: “With 20 percent of the world’s electricity used for lighting, it’s been calculated that optimal use of LED lighting could reduce this to 4 percent.”

But it would be a mistake to assume that LEDs will significantly reduce overall energy consumption.

The growing evidence that low-cost efficiency often leads to faster energy growth was recently considered by both the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the International Energy Agency (IEA). They concluded that energy savings associated with new, more energy efficient technologies were likely to result in significant “rebounds,” or increases, in energy consumption. This means that very significant percentages of energy savings will be lost to increased energy consumption.

The I.E.A. and I.P.C.C. estimate that the rebound could be over 50 percent globally. Recent estimates and case studies have suggested that in many energy-intensive sectors of developing economies, energy-saving technologies may backfire, meaning that increased energy consumption associated with lower energy costs because of higher efficiency may in fact result in higher energy consumption than there would have been without those technologies.

 

 

 

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Super Rust Corrodes hundreds of ships and could sink the oil industry

Posted on October 4, 2014 by

Blame it on super-rust, a virulent form of corrosion that has destroyed hundreds of ships and could sink the oil industry.

By Richard Martin, June 2002. Wired Magazine.

Key points (see the full article at http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/10.06/superrust.html):

Ships that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build are rusting and falling apart, spilling millions of gallons of oil every year, many of them oil tankers. From 1995 and 2001, 2856 oil tankers broke apart at sea or barely escaped that fate, according to the International Association of Independent Tanker Owners. The main cause was collision, but nearly as many suffered from excessive corrosion.

The latest generation of oil tankers are more vulnerable to rust due to the mandate that all tankers operating in the US have double hulls by 2015. This innovation has inadvertently propelled corrosion to unheard-of levels. A 2000 Intertanko report concluded that excessive rust is afflicting double hulls within two years of launch. In double hulls, accelerated corrosion is engineered right into the ships themselves. The extra layer of steel gives rust many more square feet of surface area to attack, much of it hidden in cramped, inaccessible crawl spaces. What’s more, these crawl spaces form an insulating layer that keeps the internal temperature much higher than it would be in a single-hull tanker. Corrosion rates tend to double with each 20-degree Fahrenheit increase.

Manufacturing efficiencies have reduced the thickness of hulls and decks so now many shipbuilders trade corrosion-resistance for lower cost. Every ounce of steel saved in the construction of a ship translates into greater profits for the builder and reduced fuel bills for the owner. Between 1970 and 1990, the amount of steel used to construct a tanker declined by almost one-fifth. Modern tanker walls are only 14 to 16 millimeters thick, compared with 25 millimeters a generation ago. Assuming a microbial corrosion rate of 1.5 millimeters a year, rusted-out pits would reach halfway through those hulls in five years.

Lack of Maintenance

Rust attacks steel from the moment the metal encounters moisture. To keep that from happening, shipowners paint steel surfaces with corrosion-resistant coatings and are supposed to reapply them, but first-class ship maintenance has become increasingly rare in recent decades, as ships trade hands several times and new owners care more about maximizing their investment than maintenance.  When a ship is cited for corrosion, maintenance can be avoided by shifting to another flag.

How Rusting Happens

Rust arises from an intricate subatomic dance in which water’s oxygen and hydrogen atoms snatch electrons from atoms of iron. Because saltwater conducts electricity better than freshwater, the iron in steel oxidizes more quickly in seawater – up to 0.10 millimeter per year.

The way corrosion attacks the interior of a tanker, however, is more insidious. It can be seen most vividly in the cargo tanks, which line up along the ship’s backbone beneath the deck, and in the ballast tanks that cushion the cargo tanks along their outer edges. In these areas, steel deteriorates at five, ten, even thirty times the nominal rate. In the ballast tanks, which are normally filled with seawater when the cargo tanks are empty, water conducts electrons between plates on either side, and between separate areas of a single plate – that is, the tanks become huge, if weak, batteries. The increased electrical activity hastens the metal’s degradation.

At the top of the cargo tanks, the vapor space between the oil’s surface and the underside of the deck traps highly acidic gases – products of the reaction between petroleum, oxygen, and water – that condense against the metal. The deck flexes at sea, causing degraded steel to flake off the ceilings of the tanks, exposing more bare steel for the acid to attack.

At the bottoms of the tanks, in the water that settles under the oil, corrosive bacteria thrive. Consuming hydrocarbons, microbes like Desulfovibrio desulferican produce acids that dissolve the tanks’ floors and lower sides at rates as high as 2 millimeters per year. Some microorganisms even feed on the coatings that protect the tanks from rust. Essentially, a tanker is a gigantic floating petri dish for a peculiarly vicious sort of steel-eating sludge – the ultimate metallivore.

Enforcement is hard

In addition to switching to another nation, the tanker industry is overrun with so many holding companies, limited-liability partnerships, and owners-of-record that even determining who bears ultimate responsibility for a ship can be difficult.

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Moving oil by ship or barge to refineries

Posted on October 2, 2014 by

Frittelli, J., et al. May 5, 2014. U.S. Rail Transportation of Crude Oil: Background and Issues for Congress. Congressional Research Service.

Barge

One river barge can hold 10,000 to 30,000 barrels of oil. Two to three river barges are typically tied together in a single tow that carries 20,000 to 90,000 barrels, about the same load as a unit train. Coastal tank barges designed for open seas, known as articulated tug-barges, or ATBs, 22 can hold 50,000 to 185,000 barrels, although newer ATBs can carry as much as 340,000 barrels, comparable to the capacity of coastal tankers. ATBs are slower, less fuel-efficient, and more restricted by sea conditions, but nevertheless may have an economic advantage over tankers because Coast Guard crewing regulations allow them to sail with one-third to half the crew required on a tanker. Crude oil tankers used to move Alaska oil to West Coast refineries have capacities of 800,000 to over 1 million barrels.

An advantage of tankers over railroads is the greater amount of oil they can carry in a single voyage, which better matches the daily consumption rate of refineries. With the median capacity for U.S. refineries at about 160,000 barrels per day, a coastal tanker can carry a two-day supply of oil. In addition, while railroads must build and maintain tracks and pay property taxes on their rights-of-way, the ocean is free, and harbor channels are largely provided by the federal government. For these reasons, tankers can be much cheaper than railroads in moving oil, even though the railroad route may be much more direct. For instance, the distance between the Bakken region in North Dakota and refineries in the Northeast is approximately 1,800 miles, and the cost of railroad transport is $14 per barrel. 23 The distance from Texas ports near the Eagle Ford region to the same refineries is about 2,100 miles, and tanker rates are $5 to $6 per barrel. 24 Similarly, the overland distance from the Eagle Ford region to Los Angeles-area refineries is about 1,400 miles, and the estimated cost of railroad transport is $15 per barrel, while the water route through the Panama Canal is 5,200 miles and is estimated to cost $10 per barrel. 25

Although seemingly a circuitous route compared to rail, it is not inconceivable that tankers could play a role in moving Bakken oil to East or West Coast refineries. Significant amounts of Bakken oil are moved to Gulf Coast terminals by pipeline, railroad, barge, or combinations of these modes for refining within that region. From a Gulf Coast port, tankers could transport the oil to either East or West Coast refineries. Via existing rail and pipeline connections to Great Lakes ports, tankers could also move Bakken oil from there to Northeast refineries.

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Thorium in the news

Posted on October 1, 2014 by

[ When trucks stop running, civilization as we know it ends.  Nuclear electricity — or anything that generates electricity — doesn’t matter a rat’s ass if trucks can’t be electrified to run on batteries or overhead wires — especially tractors that plant and harvest billions of acres of farmland and the heavy-duty trucks that move all goods for every home and business on four million miles of the U.S. alone.  Breaking supply chains have been the downfall of civilizations in the past.

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report ]

Rees, I. June 2011. Don’t believe the spin on thorium being a greener nuclear option.  The Guardian.

India hopes to reduce climate change with thorium, a naturally occurring radioactive element, four times more abundant than uranium in the earth’s crust.

The pro-thorium lobby claim a single tonne of thorium burned in a molten salt reactor (MSR) – typically a liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) – which has liquid rather than solid fuel, can produce one gigawatt of energy. A traditional pressurised water reactor (PWR) would need to burn 250 tonnes of uranium to produce the same amount of energy.

They also produce less waste, have no weapons-grade by-products, can consume legacy plutonium stockpiles and are meltdown-proof – if the hype is to be believed.

India certainly has faith, with a burgeoning population, chronic electricity shortage, few friends on the global nuclear stage (it hasn’t signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty) and the world’s largest reserves of thorium. ‘Green’ nuclear could help defuse opposition at home (the approval of two new traditional nuclear power reactors on its west coast led to fierce protests recently) and allow it to push ahead unhindered with its stated aim of generating 270GW of energy from nuclear by 2050.

China, Russia, France and the US are also pursuing the technology, while India’s department of atomic energy and the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council are jointly funding five UK research programmes into it.

There is a significant sticking point to the promotion of thorium as the ‘great green hope’ of clean energy production: it remains unproven on a commercial scale. While it has been around since the 1950s (and an experimental 10MW LFTR did run for five years during the 1960s at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the US, though using uranium and plutonium as fuel) it is still a next generation nuclear technology – theoretical.

China did announce this year that it intended to develop a thorium MSR, but nuclear radiologist Peter Karamoskos, of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), says the world shouldn’t hold its breath.

‘Without exception, [thorium reactors] have never been commercially viable, nor do any of the intended new designs even remotely seem to be viable. Like all nuclear power production they rely on extensive taxpayer subsidies; the only difference is that with thorium and other breeder reactors these are of an order of magnitude greater, which is why no government has ever continued their funding.’

China’s development will persist until it experiences the ongoing major technical hurdles the rest of the nuclear club have discovered, he says.

Others see thorium as a smokescreen to perpetuate the status quo: the world’s only operating thorium reactor – India’s Kakrapar-1 – is actually a converted PWR, for example. ‘This could be seen to excuse the continued use of PWRs until thorium is [widely] available,’ points out Peter Rowberry of No Money for Nuclear (NM4N) and Communities Against Nuclear Expansion (CANE).

In his reading, thorium is merely a way of deflecting attention and criticism from the dangers of the uranium fuel cycle and excusing the pumping of more money into the industry. Advertisement

And yet the nuclear industry itself is also sceptical, with none of the big players backing what should be – in PR terms and in a post-Fukushima world – its radioactive holy grail: safe reactors producing more energy for less and cheaper fuel.

In fact, a 2010 National Nuclear Laboratory (NNL) report (PDF)concluded the thorium fuel cycle ‘does not currently have a role to play in the UK context [and] is likely to have only a limited role internationally for some years ahead’ – in short, it concluded, the claims for thorium were ‘overstated’.

Proponents counter that the NNL paper fails to address the question of MSR technology, evidence of its bias towards an industry wedded to PWRs. Reliant on diverse uranium/plutonium revenue streams – fuel packages and fuel reprocessing, for example – the nuclear energy giants will never give thorium a fair hearing, they say.

But even were its commercial viability established, given 2010’s soaring greenhouse gas levels, thorium is one magic bullet that is years off target. Those who support renewables say they will have come so far in cost and efficiency terms by the time the technology is perfected and upscaled that thorium reactors will already be uneconomic. Indeed, if renewables had a fraction of nuclear’s current subsidies they could already be light years ahead.

All other issues aside, thorium is still nuclear energy, say environmentalists, its reactors disgorging the same toxic byproducts and fissile waste with the same millennial half-lives. Oliver Tickell, author of Kyoto2, says the fission materials produced from thorium are of a different spectrum to those from uranium-235, but ‘include many dangerous-to-health alpha and beta emitters’.

Tickell says thorium reactors would not reduce the volume of waste from uranium reactors. ‘It will create a whole new volume of radioactive waste from previously radio-inert thorium, on top of the waste from uranium reactors. Looked at in these terms, it’s a way of multiplying the volume of radioactive waste humanity can create several times over.’

Putative waste benefits – such as the impressive claims made by former Nasa scientist Kirk Sorensen, one of thorium’s staunchest advocates – have the potential to be outweighed by a proliferating number of MSRs. There are already 442 traditional reactors already in operation globally, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. The by-products of thousands of smaller, ostensibly less wasteful reactors would soon add up.

Anti-nuclear campaigner Peter Karamoskos goes further, dismissing a ‘dishonest fantasy’ perpetuated by the pro-nuclear lobby.

Thorium cannot in itself power a reactor; unlike natural uranium, it does not contain enough fissile material to initiate a nuclear chain reaction. As a result it must first be bombarded with neutrons to produce the highly radioactive isotope uranium-233 – ‘so these are really U-233 reactors,’ says Karamoskos.

This isotope is more hazardous than the U-235 used in conventional reactors, he adds, because it produces U-232 as a side effect (half life: 160,000 years), on top of familiar fission by-products such as technetium-99 (half life: up to 300,000 years) and iodine-129 (half life: 15.7 million years).Add in actinides such as protactinium-231 (half life: 33,000 years) and it soon becomes apparent that thorium’s superficial cleanliness will still depend on digging some pretty deep holes to bury the highly radioactive waste. Advertisement

With billions of pounds already spent on nuclear research, reactor construction and decommissioning costs – dwarfing commitments to renewables – and proposed reform of the UK electricity markets apparently hiding subsidies to the nuclear industry, the thorium dream is considered by many to be a dangerous diversion.

Energy consultant and former Friends of the Earth anti-nuclear campaigner Neil Crumpton says the government would be better deferring all decisions about its new nuclear building plans and fuel reprocessing until the early 2020s: ‘By that time much more will be known about Generation IV technologies including LFTRs and their waste-consuming capability.’

In the meantime, says Jean McSorley, senior consultant for Greenpeace’s nuclear campaign, the pressing issue is to reduce energy demand and implement a major renewables programme in the UK and internationally – after all, even conventional nuclear reactors will not deliver what the world needs in terms of safe, affordable electricity, let alone a whole raft of new ones.

‘Even if thorium technology does progress to the point where it might be commercially viable, it will face the same problems as conventional nuclear: it is not renewable or sustainable and cannot effectively connect to smart grids. The technology is not tried and tested, and none of the main players is interested. Thorium reactors are no more than a distraction.’

Bagla, P. November 13, 2015. Thorium seen as nuclear’s new frontier. Science 350:  726-727.

In the 1950s, U.S. nuclear scientists proposed building a fleet of nuclear-powered airplanes. That was probably a bad idea.

Compared with uranium, thorium is 3 to 4 times more abundant than uranium and harder to divert to weapons production, and it yields less radioactive waste. But thorium can’t simply be swapped in for uranium in standard reactors.  Driving the interest in thorium is the latest in a string of accidents involving uranium-fueled power reactors. The meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan in March 2011 prompted many countries to take operating reactors offline and to scale back or scuttle plans to build new ones. India plans to have a thorium power reactor running within 10 years.

Thorium holds little appeal for bomb makers: Daughter isotopes, born as thorium naturally decays, are highly radioactive, emitting gamma rays that would fry weapon electronics and make thorium-derived bombs cumbersome to store. At the same time, thorium-based fuels yield much less high-level radioactive waste than uranium or plutonium, and molten-salt reactors are touted by their backers as meltdown proof.

The catch is that thorium itself is not fissile…. it is like wood too soggy for a fire and must be converted into fissile material by bombarding thorium with neutrons to transmute it into fissile uranium-233.  The disaster-scarred track record of uranium reactors casts a long shadow on thorium, too. Ever since the United States during the Cold War went whole hog into uranium, “the world has been paying a price for the wrong technology choice,” argues Jean-Pierre Revol, president of the international Thorium Energy Committee in Geneva, Switzerland.

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Out of time: 50 years to make a transition, 210 years at the current rate

Posted on September 30, 2014 by

If transportation is to be electrified, then electric generation and the electric grid must be doubled, or even tripled. So by Cobb’s calculation, that would push back the transition time to renewables 420 to 630 years.  Alice Friedemann.

By Kurt Cobb, October 1, 2012. Christian Science Monitor.

The clunky, lagging transition to renewable energy

History suggests that it can take up to 50 years to replace an existing energy infrastructure, and we don’t have that long.

No doubt you’ve heard people speak of an energy transition from a fossil fuel-based society to one based on renewable energy–energy which by its very nature cannot run out. Here’s the short answer to why we need do it fast: climate change and fossil fuel depletion. And, here’s the short answer to why we’re way behind: History suggests that it can take up to 50 years to replace an existing energy infrastructure, and we don’t have that long.

Perhaps the most important thing that people don’t realize about building a renewable energy infrastructure is that most of the energy for building it will have to come from fossil fuels.

Currently, 84 percent of all the energy consumed worldwide is produced using fossil fuels–oil, natural gas and coal. Fossil fuels are therefore providing the lion’s share of power to the factories that make solar cells, wind turbines, geothermal equipment, hydroelectric generators, wave energy converters, and underwater tidal energy turbines.

Right now we are producing at or close to the maximum amount of energy we’ve ever produced from fossil fuels. But the emerging plateau in world oil production, concerns about the sustainability of coal production, and questionable claims about natural gas supplies are warnings that fossil fuels may not remain plentiful long enough to underwrite an uneven and loitering transition to a renewable energy society.

This is what’s been dubbed the rate-of-conversion problem. In a nutshell, is our rate of conversion away from fossil fuels fast enough so as to avoid an unexpected drop in total energy available to society? Will we be far enough along in that conversion when fossil fuel supplies begin to decline so that we won’t be forced into an energy austerity that could undermine the stability of our society?

The answer can’t be known. But the numbers are not reassuring. Based on data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, it would take more than 70 years to replace the world’s current electrical generating capacity with renewables including hydroelectric, wind, solar, tidal, wave, geothermal, biomass and waste at the rate of installation seen from 2005 through 2009, the last years for which such data is available. And, that’s if worldwide generating capacity–which has been expanding at a 4 percent clip per year–is instead held steady.

This also doesn’t take into account the amount of energy actually produced versus what is called nameplate capacity. Nameplate capacity is what a wind generator could generate if it operated at maximum capacity 100 percent of the time. But in practice, the turbines are only spinning when the wind blows and then not always at the maximum speed. This so-called capacity factor was just 27 percent for wind farms in the United Kingdom from 2007 to 2011. For solar photovoltaic the number was 8.3 percent. Even hydroelectric stations ran at only about 35 percent of capacity. This compares to about 42 percent for conventional coal, 61 percent for natural gas, and 60 percent for nuclear power stations (PDF). The contrast is starker using U.S. numbers: 72 percent for coal and 91 percent for nuclear using 2008 figures, though natural gas was only 11 percent, probably because these were primarily plants that only come on to meet peak demand and so don’t run very often.

What this means is that installing two to three times our current nameplate capacity in the form of renewables may be required to replace existing fossil-fueled plants. So, the transition period would actually turn out to be longer than what I’ve calculated, perhaps 140 to 210 years using 2005 to 2009 installation figures.

Of course, installations of such renewables as wind and solar are accelerating. So, that would tend to shorten this longer transition period–as would leaving existing nuclear power capacity intact. But would we be able to shorten the transition period enough to head off declines in total energy production and prevent additional serious damage to the climate?

Of course, some would say that we need to expand nuclear power generation rapidly to meet these challenges. Whether you support such an expansion or not, there are three key problems. First, building enough nuclear power stations to replace fossil fuel-fired plants would be the largest construction project ever undertaken and require the use of enormous amounts of fossil fuels. Making the necessary concrete alone would be a large new contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. That means that the initial phase of a nuclear transition would actually increase the rate of fossil fuel emissions. The savings on fuel and emissions wouldn’t come until much later.

Second, after the Fukushima disaster, there doesn’t seem to be much appetite for such a buildout. I’ll be very surprised if nuclear power generation even maintains its current level in the next 20 years as Japan and Germany abandon nuclear power. Third, the timeline for such a buildout would be measured in decades, partly because of the sheer logistics involved and partly because of the brake that regulatory approvals put on such projects. Even new, cheaper and easier-to-build designs may not help if they cannot achieve the necessary regulatory approvals promptly. The history of such approvals is not encouraging. The safest thing a nuclear regulatory agency can do is say no.

I haven’t even touched on replacing the fuels which power our transportation system and provide heat for our buildings and industrial processes. Transportation offers an extraordinary challenge since 80 percent of all transportation fuel worldwide is still derived from petroleum. In the United States the number is 93 percent. Despite billions of dollars spent and decades of research, we still have no good substitutes that scale to the size necessary to replace petroleum for transportation fuel.

Biofuels offer little hope. Already the ethanol bubble has burst. Biofuels–today mainly ethanol and biodiesel–compete with food. There is simply not a limitless supply of suitable farmland, and so there will be competition with the demand for food until we find substitutes for the industry’s main feedstocks, namely corn, sugar and soybeans.

Beyond this the problem of scale is simply unsolvable. To supply the entire U.S. car fleet–assuming it could run on ethanol–we’d have to plant 1.8 billion acres in corn for ethanol continuously. There are only about 440 million acres in the United States in cultivation now. And, it’s worth noting that current methods of corn cultivation require the copious use of herbicides and pesticides made from oil; tractors and other vehicles that run on oil to plow, harvest and spray the fields as well as transport the crop; and natural gas-derived nitrogen fertilizers to boost growth and replenish depleted soil. Fossil fuels are currently integral to growing corn, and I cannot see the wisdom of growing organic corn for anything but food.

As for heat for buildings, certainly we could insulate and seal our existing buildings better. And, this points the way to achieving an energy transition within the time we need to achieve it. Since it will probably be impossible to scale renewable energy fast enough to a level sufficient to produce the amount of energy we use today, the one absolute necessity to a successful energy transition is reducing consumption drastically. No politician dares to say anything remotely approaching this. And yet, it would be the cheapest, fastest way to address the twin crises of fossil fuel depletion and climate change.

Now, when I say reduce, I mean on the order of 80 percent over the next 20 to 30 years. For Americans this may seem impossible until they contemplate that the average European lives on half the energy of the average American. So often we hope for technological breakthroughs that will give us all the clean energy we desire. But we ought to focus equally, if not more, on using our prowess to find ways to reduce our energy consumption drastically. This is actually the much easier road. When we are made conscious of our energy use, we can change our behavior quickly to modify it without compromising the quality of our lives. As more homes and businesses are given the means to monitor their energy use, the people in them will change to lower their consumption and costs.

Already we know how to build so-called passive design structures which can lower energy use by 80%. And, we desperately need to figure out how to apply these techniques cheaply and economically to existing homes and businesses. In transportation we need to stop thinking that cars equal transportation and instead realize that cars provide the service of transportation which can be obtained in a number of ways, many of which use much less energy.
We may also need to speed the energy transition in electric power generation using so-called feed-in tariffs. These tariffs–which harness the ingenuity of countless small producers–have enabled Germany to expand solar, wind and other alternatives so that they generate 25 percent of its electricity today. Germany, not a particularly sunny place, is currently the world’s top generator of solar electricity.

Of course, per person energy consumption in poor countries is only a small fraction of that in rich countries. We cannot expect the world’s poor to reduce their energy use by 80 percent. Instead, we must help them to move quickly beyond fossil fuels to renewable energy.

By simultaneously reducing consumption and encouraging a rapid buildout of renewable energy, it is possible that we could mitigate the problem of declining fossil fuel supplies before it becomes so acute that it would cripple that very build out. And, we could address climate change at the same time. Certainly, there are difficult problems to be solved with renewable energy, storage being the key one. Most renewable energy comes in the form of electricity, and since there is often a mismatch between the time we produce that electricity and the time we need it, we will have to master storage.

But we will need a lot less storage if we focus on reducing consumption. This is the one strategy which will allow us to overcome the rate-of-conversion problem and achieve an energy transition in far less time than we have in the past.

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