Patzek: CTL coal-to-liquids from FT Synthesis is NOT likely to happen

Posted on July 21, 2014 by

CTL Mordor

This is a liquid fuel crisis – diesel to be exact – to keep tractors, trucks, trains, and ships moving. There’s not enough coal or water to make even a small percent of the FT-CTL diesel fuel we need from coal in Montana or Wyoming, and would turn these beautiful states into Mordor as depicted in Tolkien’s trilogy “Lord of the Rings”).   Alice Friedemann at energyskeptic.com

Patzek, T. W. et al. Sep 2009. Potential for Coal-to-Liquids Conversion in the United States—Fischer–Tropsch Synthesis. Natural Resources Research, Vol. 18, No. 3

America has the world’s largest coal reserves, and the best spot to locate a coal-to-liquids (CTL) plant would be in Montana near one of the largest coal deposits. CTL is seen as a way to replace depleting petroleum reserves, but there are several major drawbacks:

  1. The Fischer-Tropsch (FT) process is only half as efficient as refining crude oil
  2. The resulting CO2 emissions are 20 times (2000%) higher
  3. An enormous amount of water is needed: 1000 kg of coal needs 1000 kg of water
  4. You’d need to use over 40% of the FT fuel energy to sequester the CO2
  5. CTL is a poor use for coal as long as natural gas is cheaper for generating electricity
  6. FT plants and the surrounding mine are very expensive to build
  7. converting petroleum to diesel fuel is 88% energy-efficient, but less than 50% efficient in the FT process (which produces a high-wax crude oil, not diesel fuel)

Only South Africa uses the FT process to make diesel and gasoline from 45 million tons of coal every year. This led to serious environmental problems:

  1. Enormous amounts of land are strip mined and covered with up to 50 million tons of mining waste per year, waste that’s high in sulfur (1-7.8%) and ash (24-63%).
  2. When the waste is burned, the Eastern Transvaal Highveld is doused in acid rain
  3. These plants need 5 barrels of water per barrel of FT oil produced

A small plant making 22,000 BPD of FT fuel would use 20% of the current coal production in Montana. A 300,000 plant large enough to supply the military would need twice as much Montana coal as is being mined now, three times as much Montana water as mines are now using,

The three larger plant designs extend into the realm of surrealism. For example, the 300,000 BPD plant, sufficient to supply most of the U.S. military needs, would consume twice the current coal production in Montana, thrice the current water use by Montana mines, and each year would produce 11 million toxic tons of ash with arsenic, mercury, sulfur, uranium thorium, among other things. Or as Tad Patzek puts it “If Montanans wish to destroy their beautiful state, then large FT plants offer an almost certain fulfilment of this wish….Stored coal ash slurries eventually threaten water supplies, human health, and local ecosystems.”

Electric power generation is the dominant use of coal in the United States, accounting for 92.3% of U.S. coal usage in 2006. Other industrial use accounted for 5.3% and coke accounted for only 2.1% of U.S. coal consumption in 2006.

It’s not clear that we can find enough coal for both CTL and coal generated electricity. Although natural gas plants have been increasing in number because of the temporary fracking boom, and the need to balance the wind load of intermittent power to keep the grid stable, there’s not enough natural gas to replace all coal plants.  Other load-balancing energy resources can’t step in for coal electric generation to free it up for CTL either: most geothermal is in non-coal-burning states with a max of 9,000 MW from known resources and perhaps another 33,000 MW left to be founde.  Nuclear power isn’t going to ramp up quickly for many reasons.

CONCLUSIONS

1. The large volumes of coal required for CTL suggest that the Powder River Basin of Wyoming and Montana is likely to be the coal source.

2. Although U.S. coal reserves are large, recent coal price increases suggest that there is no global coal surplus in the short term.

3. The Powder River coal, cheapest in the United States, would inevitably double or triple in price if there were a high-throughput railroad connection to the Pacific or Atlantic coast.

4. The energy efficiency of an optimal coal-based FT process that produces liquid fuels is 41%. This means that for every 1 unit of fuel energy out, one needs to put 2.4 units of coal energy in.

5. Because of the different energy contents of subbituminous coal and FT fuel, and a low energy efficiency of CTL conversion, roughly 800 kg of the average Powder River Basin coal will be needed to produce 1 barrel of the FT fuel.

6. Per unit energy in a liquid transportation fuel, carbon dioxide emissions from a CT plant are about 20 times higher than those from a petroleum refinery.

7. Subsurface disposal of carbon dioxide produced by the FT plants costs at least 40% of the thermal energy in FT fuel. If this disposal were deeper than assumed here, the current estimate might increase by a factor of up to 4.

8. Montana does not have the approximately 800 kg of clean water necessary to produce each barrel of FT fuel.

9. Natural gas can be compressed and used for transportation fuel with an efficiency of 98%. Therefore, the FT transportation fuel from coal is always uneconomic as long as natural gas competes with coal for power generation. This is true even if the gas-fired plants are more efficient combined cycle designs and the coal plants are conventional.

10. Judging by the recent financing of corn ethanol refineries, the astronomical construction costs of coal-based FT plants might be borne by the U. S. taxpayers through a new subsidy program.

11. The massive societal costs of the subsidies required to render CTL ‘‘economical,’’ and the environmental costs of fuel production would be borne by all Americans and the planet at large, but especially by the people of Montana and the surrounding states, including Canada

 

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What we knew about the energy crisis back in 1977

Posted on July 20, 2014 by

A friend of mine found this yesterday in one of her folders from college.  If seems like even more Americans are ignorant and blindly techno-optimist today than they were 40 years ago.  The last item of how we might proceed offers 4 suggestions, and we appear to have chosen the most repugnant: “Hang the environmentalists and plunder the environment”.  Lamar certainly was prescient…

The energy crisis: Some human considerations. Fall 1977.
From an outline prepared by William Fred Lamar, Jr., for a talk before a National Conference of Rural Electric Cooperative Directors

I. The Energy Crisis is Real

A. There are no easily available sources of fossil energy to supply our expanding needs.

  1. We are rapidly running out of oil and natural gas.
  2. While we have a 200 year supply of coal, there are pollution and other environmental (greenhouse) problems we have not solved.
  3. We have not come up with satisfactory and safe means for using nuclear reactors on a large scale.
  4. Our resources of geothermal, wind, and tidal energy either are limited or have limited applicability.
  5. Solar power is probably a generation away from application to our current needs.

B. According to a recent Gallup poll 50% of all Americans do not believe we have an energy problem, and/or believe that we have the technology available to meet our present and future energy needs.

II. A Description of the Problem

A. We are in danger of exhausting our economically recoverable oil resources

B. We are currently using non-renewable resources for the wrong ends.

  1. Most of our oil and natural gas is used for transportation and low temperature space heating, where other sources of energy would suffice
  2. At this time there is no substitute for the petrochemically related hydro-carbon molecule in: a. the production of agricultural fertilizers and chemicals, b. the production of drugs, c. the production of plastics, wash and wear fabrics, paint polymers,

III. Suffering caused by the Energy Crunch

A. On an international scale, the suffering will not be equitable

1. The major powers will probably be able to survive much as they are, but with some inconvenience

2. The economies of western Europe and Japan may be destroyed by the $30/bbl of oil predicted by the end of the 1980’s

3. Such an increase in oil price will mean total disaster for the developing nations who are:

a. dependent on petrochemically produced fertilizers to maintain the green revolution
b. petroleum products to begin the production of energy for industrial production and transportation

B. The suffering will not be equitably distributed within the United States

1. the rich will get by
2. The middle class will lose its long vacations, second cars, and possibly its free-standing homes
3. The poor and those on fixed incomes will face a bleak future as transportation and fuel costs increase fourfold, and as food costs double

IV. Some Issues that the American People will have to face in working through the Energy Crisis

A. Credibility

1. Currently 50% of the population and many of our leaders still believe that there is no crisis, or that the crisis is a manipulative activity of the energy producers

2. Some crazy things will happen to rate structures

a. artificially priced commodities (oil and natural gas) will either soar in price, be drastically rationed, or be rapidly depleted
b. A radical increase in price will suddenly make some petroleum reserves available (economically feasible to exploit), e.g. shale oil, tertiary pumping of abandoned wells, oil from coal, oil from “deep sea” wells
c. people may be asked to pay more if they conserve energy than if they waste it, e.g. experience of Union Electric Co of St. Louis in 1973
d. The use of solar assisted heating systems (installed at great expense of $6-10,000 may not result in a lowering of the consumer’s electric bill, e.g. University of North Dakota engineering survey of solar assisted electric heating costs

B. Equity

1. Energy allocation

a. in the event of energy rationing, how shall the rationing be accomplished?

1. Shall all be asked to take a uniform cut?
2. Shall certain groups be exempted from rationing?
3. Shall rationing be accomplished by an “economic model” (let people use what they can pay for)?

2. Expense of Energy

a. as energy costs rise, shall we
1. deny energy to the poor
2. guarantee lifeline rates
3. provide energy stamps backed by a regressive income tax
4. require all persons to live in apartments or condominiums which use 1/3 heat of freestanding home
5. place a severe tax on homes with unused space (rooms above the minimum of 2 per family member), and a prohibitory tax on second homes

b. Basic question—is a minimal entitlement to energy an “inalienable right”? What is minimal?

C. Social Dislocation in a time of crisis

1. Since the close of World War II the American people have created a world of unbelievable luxury and ease based upon the false belief in an unending supply of cheap petro-energy

2. How shall we face the possible dislocation caused by:
a. A move away from the automobile economy which employs 16% of all Americans
b. the inability of our economy to support the energy consumption (for space heating) of freestanding homes, and the energy consumption (for transportation) of the commuters who live in these homes
c. currently our entire economy is based upon an assumption of transience:
1. gasoline powered mobility for people
2. throw-away or convenience items for all
3. with planned obsolescence, rather than quality as the goal of production
d. A radical move toward stewardship of our resources, toward quality craftsmanship, and toward foot-powered mobility could make 1933 look like a very good year

D. Energy Production

1. As the gap between our energy needs (desires) and the available level of energy production that is not hazardous to the environment becomes more acute, shall we:

a. practice radical conservation—at the possible cost of a world depression
b. mount a research program equal to that of the Moon landing or the Manhattan project—at the cost of decreasing other governmental problems
c. follow Edward Teller’s recommendation and move instantly to the mass production of thorium fission reactors so that oil and natural gas may be saved to provide precious fertilizer for the third world
d. hang the environmentalists and plunder the environment

 

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American Physical Society: has the Battery Bubble Burst?

Posted on July 15, 2014 by

Aug/Sep 2012. Has the Battery Bubble Burst?

Fred Schlachter. American Physical Society. APS News Vol 21, number 8. Phys.org

Three years ago at a symposium on lithium-air batteries at IBM Almaden there was great optimism. The symposium “Scalable Energy Storage: Beyond Lithium Ion” had as a working message: “There are no fundamental scientific obstacles to creating batteries with ten times the energy content–for a given weight–of the best current batteries.”

Optimism had all but vanished this year at the fifth conference in the scalable-energy-storage series in Berkeley, California.

“Although new electric vehicles with advanced lithium ion batteries are being introduced, further breakthroughs in scalable energy storage, beyond current state-of-the-art lithium ion batteries, are necessary before the full benefits of vehicle electrification can be realized.”

The mood was cautious, as it is clear that lithium-ion batteries are maturing slowly, and that their limited energy density and high cost will preclude producing all-electric cars to replace the primary American family car in the foreseeable future.

“The future is cloudy” is how Venkat Srinivasan, who heads the battery research program at Berkeley Lab, summarized the conference.

Electric cars have a long history. They were popular at the dawn of the automobile age, with 28% of the automobiles produced in the United States in 1900 powered by electricity. The early popularity of electric cars faded, however, as Henry Ford introduced mass-produced cars powered with internal-combustion engines in 1908.

Gasoline was quickly recognized as nature’s ideal fuel for cars: it has a very high energy density by both weight and volume–around 500 times that of a lead-acid battery–and it was plentiful, inexpensive, and seemingly unlimited in supply. By the 1920s electric cars were no longer commercially viable and disappeared from the scene. They did not reappear until late in the 20th century as gasoline became expensive, supplies no longer seemed unlimited, and concerns over the possible effect of combustion of fossil fuels on global climate reached public awareness.

Electric cars are returning with the advent of battery chemistries that are more efficient than the lead-acid batteries of old. A new generation of electric cars has come in the form of hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs), plug-in hybrid vehicles (PHEVs), and fully electric or battery electric vehicles (BEVs). Most of the latest generation of electric vehicles are powered by lithium-ion batteries, using technology pioneered for laptop computers and mobile phones.

Powering cars with electricity rather than with gasoline offers the dual advantages of eventually eliminating our dependence on imported fossil fuels and operating cars with renewable energy resources. Eliminating dependence on petroleum imported from often-unfriendly countries will greatly improve our energy security, while powering cars from a green grid with solar and wind resources will significantly reduce the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere.

The major barrier to replacing the primary American family car with electric vehicles is battery performance. The most significant issue is energy storage density by both weight and volume. Present technology requires an electric car to have a large and heavy battery, while providing less range than a car powered by gasoline.

Batteries are expensive, resulting in electric cars typically being much more expensive than similar-sized cars powered by gasoline. There is a sensible cost limit when the cost of an electric car and electricity consumed over the life of the car considerably exceeds the cost of a car with an internal combustion engine including gasoline over the life of the car.

Safety is an issue much discussed in the press. Although there are more than 200,000 fires per year in gasoline-fueled cars in America, there is widespread fear of electricity. Batteries in cars powered by electricity will surely burn in some accident scenarios; the fire risk will probably be similar to gasoline-powered cars.

Stored energy in fuel is considerable: gasoline is the champion at 47.5 MJ/kg and 34.6 MJ/liter; the gasoline in a fully fueled car has the same energy content as a thousand sticks of dynamite. A lithium-ion battery pack has about 0.3 MJ/kg and about 0.4 MJ/liter (Chevy VOLT).

Gasoline thus has about 100 times the energy density of a lithium-ion battery.

This difference in energy density is partially mitigated by the very high efficiency of an electric motor in converting energy stored in the battery to making the car move: it is typically 60-80% efficient. The efficiency of an internal combustion engine in converting the energy stored in gasoline to making the car move is typically 15% (EPA 2012). With the ratio about 5, a battery with an energy storage density 1/5 of that of gasoline would have the same range as a gasoline-powered car. We are not even close to this at present.

Powering a car with electricity is considerably more efficient than powering a car with gasoline in terms of primary-energy consumption. While the efficiency of energy use of an electric car is very high, most power plants producing electricity are only about 30% efficient in converting primary energy to electricity delivered to the user. Conversion of petroleum to gasoline is highly efficient. This results in electricity having a factor of 1.6 improvement in use of primary energy relative to gasoline, and is an important point in its favor.

A 2008 APS report on energy efficiency examined statistics on how many miles Americans drive per day. The conclusion of that study was that a full fleet of PHEVs with a 40-mile electric range could reduce gasoline consumption by more than 60%. Thus America may not need a full fleet of BEVs to achieve a very considerable reduction in gasoline use.

The compelling question is whether electric cars can provide the convenience, cost, and range necessary to replace their gasoline-powered counterparts as the primary standard American family car. And this hinges almost entirely on the state of battery development, coupled with issues of making the grid green and providing widespread infrastructure for recharging electric vehicles.

The answer today is mixed:

  • HEVs are already popular, even though they represent only a small fraction of cars on the road today. The present generation of batteries is adequate for HEVs, and range is not an issue, as 100 percent of the energy to power the car comes from gasoline. Purchase cost is higher than for a conventional car; the advantage is a 40 percent or more improvement in fuel economy (EPA 2012).
  • PHEVs are now coming onto the market (Fig. 1). Electric range is limited, and batteries presently available are only marginally adequate. Total range is not an issue as gasoline is stored onboard as a “range extender.”
  • BEVs coming onto the market are expensive and the range is too small for many American drivers, at least as the primary family vehicle. Batteries with a much higher energy storage density and a lower cost are needed for BEVs to become popular outside a limited market of upscale urban dwellers as a second car to be used for local transportation, where home recharging is feasible, and where charging time is not an issue.

Battery requirements are different for HEVs, PHEVs, and BEVs. A battery for an HEV does not need to store much energy, but needs to be able to store energy quickly from regenerative braking. Because it operates over a limited charge/discharge range, its lifetime can be very long. A PHEV battery must have much greater energy-storage capacity to achieve a reasonable electric range and will operate with a considerably greater charge/discharge range, which limits the cycle life of the battery. The battery for a BEV must supply all the energy to power the car over its full range–say 150-300 km–and must use most of its charge/discharge range. These requirements mean the battery for a BEV will be large, heavy, expensive, and have a limited cycle life. Replacing a battery for a BEV could entail a cost exceeding ten thousand dollars, which, divided by miles driven, will likely exceed by a large amount the cost of electricity to power the car.

The Berkeley 2012 symposium focused on 2 alternative chemistries:  lithium/oxygen (lithium/air) and lithium/sulfur. Both theoretically offer much higher energy density than is possible even at the theoretical limit of lithium-ion-battery development. However, the technical difficulties in making a practical battery with good recharging capability using either of these chemistries are considerable.

There are major research issues concerning all aspects of a battery: the cathode, the anode, and the electrolyte, as well as materials interfaces and potential manufacturing issues. A Li/air (Li/O2) battery requires cooled compressed air without water vapor or CO2, which would greatly complicate a Li/air battery system. A Li/air battery would be both larger and heavier than a Li-ion battery, making prospects for automobile use unlikely in the near term. However, a leading battery-development group at IBM wrote in a 2010 article on lithium-air batteries; “Automotive propulsion batteries are just beginning the transition from nickel metal hydride to Li-ion batteries, after nearly 35 years of research and development on the latter. The transition to Li-air batteries (if successful) should be viewed in terms of a similar development cycle.” Perhaps we need to be patient.

Many approaches are being followed to develop and improve battery performance, including studies using nanotubes, nanowires, nanospheres, and other nanomaterials. However, none of the researchers reported progress to the point where a practical battery using Li/air or Li/S could be envisioned.

Thomas Greszler, manager of the cell design group at General Motors Electrochemical Energy Research Lab, was pessimistic about the prospects for new battery chemistries: “We are not investing in lithium-air and lithium-sulfur battery technology because we do not think from an automotive standpoint that it provides a substantial benefit for the foreseeable future.”

A significant infrastructure challenge is the network that will need to be constructed for recharging the battery of a BEV. There are more than 120,000 gasoline filling stations in the United States. With the range of a present-day BEV being less than a third of that of a gasoline-powered car, a very large number of recharging stations will be required, in addition to home charging, which may be feasible only for those who live in private homes or apartment buildings with dedicated parking.

Charging an electric car takes hours, and even a fast charge will take longer than most people will be willing to wait. And charging should be done at night, when electricity generation and grid capacity are most available.

Battery research is being funded at a modest level, as there is a false perception among the public and policymakers that present battery performance is adequate for widespread acceptance of battery-electric vehicles. The national focus has been on renewable sources of energy. The United States will not become independent of foreign oil and combustion of fossil fuels until new battery technologies are developed. This will require a concerted national effort in science and technology at a considerable cost.

Fred Schlachter recently retired as a physicist at the Advanced Light Source, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is co-author of the 2008 APS report Energy Future: Think Efficiency, for which he wrote the chapter on transportation.

“Moore’s Law” for Batteries?

Isn’t there some kind of “Moore’s Law” for batteries? Why is progress on improving battery capacity so slow compared to increases in computer-processing capacity? The essential answer is that electrons do not take up space in a processor, so their size does not limit processing capacity; limits are given by lithographic constraints. Ions in a battery, however, do take up space, and potentials are dictated by the thermodynamics of the relevant chemical reactions, so there only can be significant improvements in battery capacity by changing to a different chemistry.

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Charles Hugh Smith: How To Find Shelter From The Coming Storms?

Posted on July 11, 2014 by

How To Find Shelter From The Coming Storms?

by Charles Hugh Smith

Some basic suggestions for those who are seeking shelter from the coming storms of global financial crisis and recession.

Reader Andy recently wrote: “I look forward to your blog each day but am still waiting for your ideas for surviving the coming crisis.” Andy reports that he and his wife have small government and private pensions, are debt-free and have simplified their lifestyle to survive the eventual depreciation of their pensions. They currently split their time between a low-cost site in North America and Mexico. They are considering moving with the goal of establishing roots in a small community of life-minded people.

Though I have covered my own ideas in detail in my various books (Survival+: Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation, An Unconventional Guide to Investing in Troubled Times, Why Things Are Falling Apart and What We Can Do About It and Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy, I am happy to toss a few basic strategies into the ring for your consideration.

Let’s start by applauding Andy for getting so much right.

1. Don’t count on pensions maintaining their current purchasing power as the promises issued in previous eras are not sustainable going forward. I’ve addressed the reasons for this ad nauseam, but we can summarize the whole mess in four basic points:

A. Demographics. Two workers cannot support one retiree’s pensions and healthcare costs (skyrocketing everywhere as costly treatments expand along with the cohort of Baby Boomer retirees). The U.S. is already at a ratio of two full-time workers to one retiree, and this is during a “recovery.” the ratio in some European nations is heading toward 1.5-to-1 and the next global financial meltdown hasn’t even begun.

B. The exhaustion of the debt-based consumption model. The only way you can sustain a debt-based model of ever-expanding consumption is to drop interest rates to zero. But alas, lenders go broke at 0%, so either the system implodes as debtors default or lenders go bankrupt. Take your pick, the end-game of financial crisis and collapse is the same in either case.

C. Printing money out of thin air does not increase wealth, it only increases claims on existing wealth. An honest government will eventually default on its unsustainable promises; a dishonest government (the default setting everywhere) will print money to fund the promises until its currency loses purchasing power as a result of either inflation or some other flavor of currency crisis.

In other words, the dishonest government will still issue pension checks for $2,000 a month but a cup of coffee will cost $500–if anyone will take the currency at all.

D. Pensions funds are assuming absurdly unrealistic returns on their investments. Many large public pension plans are assuming long-term yields of 7.5% even as the yield on “safe” government bonds has declined to 3% or 4%. As a result, the pension fund managers have taken on staggering amounts of systemic risk as they reach for higher yields.

When the whole rotten house of cards (shadow banking, subprime everything, etc.) collapses in a stinking heap, the yields will be negative. As John Hussman has noted, asset bubbles simply bring forward all the returns from future years. Once the bubble pops, yields are substandard/negative for years or even decades.

Pension funds that earn negative yields for a few years will soon burn through their remaining capital paying out unrealistic pensions.

2. Lowering the cost of one’s lifestyle. It’s much easier to cut expenses than it is to earn more money or squeeze more yield out of capital.

3. Establishing roots in a community of like-minded people. Though it’s rarely mentioned in a culture obsessed with financial security, day-to-day security is based more on community than on central-state-issued cash–though this is often lost on those who have surrendered all sense of community in their dependency on the state.

The core of community is reciprocity: before you take, you first have to give or share. Free-riders are soon identified and shunned.

My suggestions are derived from this week’s entries on the inevitable popping of credit bubbles, the unenviable role of tax donkeys in funding corrupt state Castes and the Great Game of Elites acquiring essential resources with unlimited credit issued by central banks, leaving the 99% debt-serfs and/or tax donkeys with neither the income nor the credit to compete with Elites for real resources.

4. Lessen your dependence on anything that requires debt and assets bubbles for its survival. Whatever depends on expanding debt and asset bubbles for its survival will go away when credit/asset bubbles pop, which they always do, despite adamant claims that “this time it’s different.” It never is.

5. Control as many real resources as you can. These include water rights, energy-producing or conserving assets (solar arrays, geothermal heating/cooling systems, etc.), farmland, orchards and gardens, rental housing, and tools that you know how to use to make/repair essential assets such as transport, housing, equipment, etc.

6. It’s easier to conserve/not use something than it is to acquire it or pay for it. As resources rise in price, those who consume little will be far less impacted than those whose lifestyles requires massive consumption of gasoline, heating oil, electricity, water, etc. It’s as simple as this: don’t waste food, or anything else.

7. The easiest way to conserve energy and time is to live close to your work and to essential services/transport hubs. Those who reside in liveable city neighborhoods and towns with public transport and multiple modes of transport who can walk/bike to work, farmers markets, cafes, etc. will need far less fossil fuel than those commuting to everything via vehicle.

8. If you can’t find work/establish a livelihood, move to a locale with a better infrastructure of opportunity. I explain this in Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy, but John Kenneth Galbraith made much the same point in his 1979 book The Nature of Mass Poverty.

9. If you buy property, do so in a state with Prop 13-type limits on property tax increases. We have no choice about being tax donkeys, but choose a state where income and consumption (i.e. sales tax) are taxed rather than property tax. You can choose to earn less and buy less, but you can’t choose not to pay rising property taxes.

10. Be useful to others. That way, they’ll want you around and will welcome your presence. There are unlimited ways to be helpful/useful.

11. Trust the network, not the state or corporation. Centralized systems such as the government and global corporations are either bankrupt and don’t yet know it or are bankrupt and are well aware of it but loathe to let the rest of the world catch on.

12. Be trustworthy. Don’t be morally corrupt or work for corrupt/self-serving institutions. Many initially idealistic people think they can retain their integrity while working for morally bankrupt, self-serving bureaucracies, agencies and corporations; they are all eventually brought down to the level of the institution.

Lagniappe suggestion: lead by example. “Setting an example is not the main means of influencing others; it is the only means.” Albert Einstein

Charles Hugh Smith from Of Two Minds

http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly14/shelter-storm7-14.html

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David Fleming. 2007. The Lean Guide to Nuclear Energy. A Life-Cycle in Trouble

Posted on July 11, 2014 by

This is an easy to read 56-page primer on how nuclear reactors work, how ore is mined, nuclear fuel created, why there’s likely to be a supply crunch, and much more. I’ve extracted a small part of this article  and often rephrased some of it. Fleming doesn’t have many (high-quality) citations, so I’ve left out most of what he wrote since I’m not sure if he’s right about various matters (see the discussion at the end of this 2008 theoilddrum article by Fleming)

David Fleming . 2007. The Lean Guide to Nuclear Energy. A Life-Cycle in Trouble. www.theleaneconomyconnection.net  

Nuclear Waste

Nuclear power is a source of high-level waste which has to be sequestered. Every stage in the process produces waste, including the mining and leaching processes, the milling, the enrichment and the decommissioning. It is very expensive.

Deep reductions in travel and transport can be expected to come about rapidly and brutally as the oil market breaks down [from declining oil production, making disposal of the wastes less likely].

Nuclear energy relies on the existence of a fully powered-up grid system into which it can feed its output of electricity – but the grid itself is mainly powered by the electricity from mainly coal and gas-fueled power stations, so if coal or gas supplies were to be interrupted, the grid would (at least partially) close down, along with the nuclear reactors that feed into it;

Nuclear energy inevitably brings a sense of reassurance that, in the end, the technical fix will save us.  Which it can’t [since electricity doesn’t solve the liquid fuels crisis at hand, since mining and long-haul trucks, tractors, harvesters, and billions of other diesel powered equipment can’t be run on fuel cells or batteries].

The nuclear industry should focus on finding solutions to the whole of its waste problem before it becomes too late to do so. And hold it right there, because this is perhaps the moment to think about what “too late” might mean. Despite the emphasis placed on oil depletion in this booklet, it is climate change that may well set the final date for completion of the massive and non-negotiable task of dealing with nuclear waste. Many reactors are in low-lying areas in the path of rising seas; and many of the storage ponds, crowded with high-level waste, are close by. Estimated dates for steep rises in sea levels are constantly being brought forward (as of 2014 the latest projection is 1 meter by 2100 made much worse by storm surges best case, worst case is Antarctic or Greenland ice sheets slip off the land into the ocean).

With an angry climate, and whole populations on the move, it will be hard to find the energy, the funds, the skills and the orderly planning needed for a massive program of waste disposal – or even moving waste out of the way of rising tides. When outages in gas supplies lead to break down in electricity supplies, the electrical-powered cooling systems that cool high-level waste will stop working.

It will also be hard to stop ragged armies, scrambling for somewhere to live, looting spent fuel rods from unguarded dumps, attaching them to conventional explosives, and being prepared to use them. All this will have to be dealt-with, and at speed. There may be no time to wait for reactor cores and high-level wastes to cool down.

The task of making those wastes safe should be an unconditional priority, equal to that of confronting climate change itself. The default-strategy of seeding the world with radioactive time-bombs which will pollute the oceans and detonate at random intervals for thousands of years into the future, whether there are any human beings around to care about it or not, should be recognized as off any scale calibrated in terms other than dementia. Nuclear power is an energy source that causes trouble far beyond the scale of the energy it produces. It is a distraction from the need to face up to the coming energy gap.

How reactors work

Nuclear fission uses Uranium-235, an isotope of uranium that splits in half when struck by a neutron, producing more neutrons resulting in a chain reaction that produces lots of energy. The process is controlled by a moderator consisting of water or graphite, which speeds the reaction up, and by neutron-absorbing boron control rods, which slow it down. Eventually the uranium gets clogged with radioactive impurities such as the barium and krypton from uranium-235 decays, “transuranic” elements such as americium and neptunium, and much of the uranium-235 itself gets used up. It takes a year or two for this to happen, and then the fuel elements have to be removed, and fresh ones inserted. The spent fuel elements are very hot and radioactive (stand nearby for a second and you’re dead). In Europe the spent fuel is sometimes recycled (reprocessed), to extract the remaining uranium and plutonium and use them again, although you don’t get as much fuel back as you started with, the bulk of impurities still has to be disposed of, and other scientists believe this has a negative EROEI. Very few nations have anywhere safe to put it to keep future generations from harming themselves over the next billion years (the half-life of U-238, one of the main items of waste, is about 4.5 billion years).

The steps to get electricity from uranium

1. Mine and mill ore. Although uranium is found all over the world, only a few places have enough concentrated uranium ores (.01-.2%) to mine: Australia, Kazakhstan, Canada, South Africa, Namibia, Brazil, Russia, the USA, and Uzbekistan in mines up to 800 feet deep. Mines are injected and drenched in in tons of sulfuric acid, nitric acid, ammonia, and other chemicals and pumped up again after 3-25 years, yielding about a quarter of the uranium from the treated rocks and depositing unknown amounts of radioactive and toxic metals into the local environment. You need to grind up 1,000 tons of .1% ore to get 1 ton of yellow oxide and 999 tons of waste, both of which are radioactive from uranium-238 and 13 decay products. The waste takes up much more space after it has been mined, where wind and water can take radioactive waste far away. Properly cleaning it up would take 4 times the energy to mine the ore, so it seldom happens.

2. Preparing the fuel. The uranium oxide must now be enriched to concentrate U-235 to 3.5%, resulting in even more nasty, toxic, scary waste that isn’t properly disposed of. One of the wastes from this process is plutonium, which can be used to make nuclear bombs.

3. Generation. The fuel can now be used to produce heat to raise the steam to generate electricity. When the fuel rods are spent they must cool off to allow the isotopes to decay from 10 to 100 years before they can be disposed of elsewhere. The ponds need a reliable electricity supply to keep them stirred and topped up with water to stop the radioactive fuel elements drying out and catching fire. Then robots need to pack the wastes into lead, steel, and pure electrolytic copper, and put into giant geological repositories considered to be stable. There will never be an ideal way to store waste which will be radioactive for a thousand centuries or more and, whatever option is chosen, it will require a lot of energy.

Human Error. The consequences of a serious accident would make nuclear power an un-insurable risk. The nuclear industry has good safety systems but is not immune to accidents. The work is routine, requiring workers to cope with long periods of tedium punctuated by the unexpected, along with “normality-creep” as anomalies become familiar. The hazards were noted in the mid-1990s by a senior nuclear engineer working for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission: “I believe in nuclear power but after seeing the NRC in action, I’m convinced a serious accident is not just likely, but inevitable… They’re asleep at the wheel.” The Nuclear Regulatory Commission estimates the probability of meltdown in the U.S. over 20 years is 15 to 45%. The risk never goes away.

4. Reactors last 30-40 years [but are being renewed for another 20 anyhow] but produce electricity at full power for no more than 24 years. During their lifetimes, reactors have to be maintained and (at least once) thoroughly refurbished; eventually, corrosion and intense radioactivity make them impossible to repair. At that point they must be taken apart and disposed of, resulting in at least a thousand cubic meters of high-level waste. After a cooling-off period which may be as much as 50-100 years, the reactor has to be dismantled and cut into small pieces to be packed in containers for final disposal. The total energy required for decommissioning has been estimated at approximately 50 percent more than the energy used in the original construction.

Greenhouse gases

Every stage in the life-cycle of nuclear fission uses energy, and most of this energy is derived from fossil fuels. Since we’re waiting for high-level waste to cool off before dismantling plants, the emissions look better now than they will in the future. And as ores get less concentrated, the carbon dioxide from mining will consume more fossil fuels and emit even more greenhouse gases.

Nuclear power may have a negative EROEI & Peak Uranium

Deposits are often at great depth, requiring the removal of massive overburden, or the development of very deep underground mines, require more energy to mine the resource than is required by the shallower mines now being exploited.

Water problems can reduce EROEI. You can have too little water (it is needed as part of the process of deriving uranium oxide from the ore) or too much (it can cause flooding). Some of the more promising mines have big water problems.

How much uranium with a positive EROEI is left? The Energy Watch group predicts Peak Uranium between 2020-2035. Michael Dittmar at the Institute of Particle Physics predicts Peak Uranium will happen in 2015. The 2005 OECD Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) suggested a 70 year supply at the current price.

Every year 65,000 tons of uranium are consumed in reactors worldwide. About 40,000 tons are supplied from uranium mines (which are declining in output), 10,000 tons comes from Russian nuclear weapons (contract for this expires in 2013), and 15,000 tons comes from inventories which won’t last much longer.

So the only hope to keep enough uranium in production for existing reactors is more mining. Several medium-sized producers have maintained or increased output the past few years in Kazakhstan, Namibia, Niger, Russia, America and Canada.

But the biggest hope for more uranium is from the Cigar Lake mine, but after catastrophic flooding in 2006, and again in 2008, it wasn’t until spring of 2014 that the mine finally started processing uranium ore. The other big hope was the Olympic Dam in Australia, which has the largest known single deposit of uranium in the world (but it’s very low-grade, with an average of .03%, and only economic because uranium is a byproduct of gold, silver, and copper mining.

Fleming predicts that before 2019 some nuclear reactors will have to shut down due to a lack of fuel.

Fleming goes to great lengths to explain why nuclear power won’t end up having a positive net energy in the future, mainly due to the tremendous amount of energy that will be needed to safely store the wastes that have been building up since the industry started back in the 1950s. (I believe it is highly unlikely we will ever store any of this waste because as oil declines, which 99% of transportation is fueled by, people will want to use oil to grow and transport food, pump drinking water, treat sewage, and so on — safely storing nuclear waste will be at the bottom of the list. This is an outrageous crime: we will poison millions of generations of our descendants, and add to the growing pile of dangers that might drive us extinct).

Fleming demolishes Lovelocks’ proposal to use nuclear power to get ourselves out of the energy and climate change mess. First he shows why Lovelock’s idea of getting uranium from granite won’t work – it’s such a low concentration (.0004%) and for a 1 GW plant, you’d need 100 million tons of granite ore requiring 650 petajoules to extract, yet the energy delivered from the uranium would only be 26 petajoules. The same negative energy return true of uranium from sea water.

Lovelock also urges that we have a readily-available stock of fuel in the plutonium that has been accumulated from the reactors that are shortly to be decommissioned. But this won’t work for many reasons, including that it’s never been attempted in reactors like those we have now. If Lovelock means for us to use a breeder reactor, that has huge problems as well (including that we don’t know how to do this safely yet). There are 3 fast-breeder reactors in the world: Beloyarsk-3 in Russia, Monju in Japan and Phénix in France; Monju and Phénix have long been out of operation; Beloyarsk is still operating, but it has never bred. Getting the plutonium to breed involves 3 processes that, like breeder reactors, have never been done at a commercial scale. You end up with many nasty radioactive mixtures that clog up and corrode equipment.   Even if you could figure out how to do build breeder reactors in 30 years and built 80 in 2045, it would take another 40 years for each breeder to produce enough plutonium to replace itself and start up another nuclear plant. By 2085 we will be deep into oil depletion, yet only have 160 breeder reactors. And that is all we will have, because the uranium-235 reactors we have now will be out of fuel by then.

It’s impossible to prevent accidents at a breeder reactor

A meltdown is nothing compared to the explosion of a breeder reactor, which is basically a large nuclear bomb in a major accident. If you designed a system that couldn’t fail, it would be so expensive you’d have to build an enormous breeder reactor to justify the cost, but such a large reactor would have such a huge dome that there is no material to give it enough structural strength to survive a major accident. You could try to make the defense system even more complex, but then the defense system would be more problem-prone than the breeder reactor itself. A study for the nuclear industry in Japan concludes: “A successful commercial breeder reactor must have 3 attributes: it must breed, it must be economical, and it must be safe. Although any one or two of these attributes can be achieved in isolation by proper design, the laws of physics apparently make it impossible to achieve all three simultaneously, no matter how clever the design.”

Phosphates

(A truly ridiculous idea — see Peak Phosphorous).  Phosphate reserves are likely to last at most for 70 years and they are essential for growing food. They’re also a poor source because they have very low concentrations of uranium. Extracting uranium is difficult, and results in greenhouse gases — the solvents used include toxic organophosphate compounds that result in organofluorophosphorus and greenhouse gases in the form of fluorohydrocarbons.

—————

David Fleming has an MA (History) from Oxford, an MBA from Cranfield and an MSc and PhD (Economics) from Birkbeck College, University of London. He has worked in industry, the financial services and environmental consultancy, and is a former Chairman of the Soil Association. He designed the system of Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQs), (aka Domestic Tradable Quotas and Personal Carbon Allowances), in 1996, and his booklet about them, Energy and the Common Purpose, now in its third edition in this series, was first published 2005. His Lean Logic: The Book of Environmental Manners is forthcoming.

 

Posted in Nuclear Power Energy | 2 Comments

Michael Klare: Twenty-First-Century Energy Wars

Posted on July 9, 2014 by

Twenty-First-Century Energy Wars by Michael Klare, originally published by Tomdispatch

Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, South Sudan, Ukraine, the East and South China Seas: wherever you look, the world is aflame with new or intensifying conflicts.  At first glance, these upheavals appear to be independent events, driven by their own unique and idiosyncratic circumstances.  But look more closely and they share several key characteristics — notably, a witch’s brew of ethnic, religious, and national antagonisms that have been stirred to the boiling point by a fixation on energy.

In each of these conflicts, the fighting is driven in large part by the eruption of long-standing historic antagonisms among neighboring (often intermingled) tribes, sects, and peoples.  In Iraq and Syria, it is a clash among Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, Turkmen, and others; in Nigeria, among Muslims, Christians, and assorted tribal groupings; in South Sudan, between the Dinka and Nuer; in Ukraine, between Ukrainian loyalists and Russian-speakers aligned with Moscow; in the East and South China Sea, among the Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Filipinos, and others.  It would be easy to attribute all this to age-old hatreds, as suggested by many analysts; but while such hostilities do help drive these conflicts, they are fueled by a most modern impulse as well: the desire to control valuable oil and natural gas assets.  Make no mistake about it, these are twenty-first-century energy wars.

It should surprise no one that energy plays such a significant role in these conflicts.  Oil and gas are, after all, the world’s most important and valuable commodities and constitute a major source of income for the governments and corporations that control their production and distribution.  Indeed, the governments of Iraq, Nigeria, Russia, South Sudan, and Syria derive the great bulk of their revenues from oil sales, while the major energy firms (many state-owned) exercise immense power in these and the other countries involved.  Whoever controls these states, or the oil- and gas-producing areas within them, also controls the collection and allocation of crucial revenues.  Despite the patina of historical enmities, many of these conflicts, then, are really struggles for control over the principal source of national income.

Moreover, we live in an energy-centric world where control over oil and gas resources (and their means of delivery) translates into geopolitical clout for some and economic vulnerability for others.  Because so many countries are dependent on energy imports, nations with surpluses to export — including Iraq, Nigeria, Russia, and South Sudan — often exercise disproportionate influence on the world stage.  What happens in these countries sometimes matters as much to the rest of us as to the people living in them, and so the risk of external involvement in their conflicts — whether in the form of direct intervention, arms transfers, the sending in of military advisers, or economic assistance — is greater than almost anywhere else.

The struggle over energy resources has been a conspicuous factor in many recent conflicts, including the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988, the Gulf War of 1990-1991, and the Sudanese Civil War of 1983-2005.  On first glance, the fossil-fuel factor in the most recent outbreaks of tension and fighting may seem less evident.  But look more closely and you’ll see that each of these conflicts is, at heart, an energy war.

Iraq, Syria, and ISIS

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the Sunni extremist group that controls large chunks of western Syria and northern Iraq, is a well-armed militia intent on creating an Islamic caliphate in the areas it controls.  In some respects, it is a fanatical, sectarian religious organization, seeking to reproduce the pure, uncorrupted piety of the early Islamic era.  At the same time, it is engaged in a conventional nation-building project, seeking to create a fully functioning state with all its attributes.

As the United States learned to its dismay in Iraq and Afghanistan, nation-building is expensive: institutions must be created and financed, armies recruited and paid, weapons and fuel procured, and infrastructure maintained.  Without oil (or some other lucrative source of income), ISIS could never hope to accomplish its ambitious goals.  However, as it now occupies key oil-producing areas of Syria and oil-refining facilities in Iraq, it is in a unique position to do so.  Oil, then, is absolutely essential to the organization’s grand strategy.

Syria was never a major oil producer, but its prewar production of some 400,000 barrels per day did provide the regime of Bashar al-Assad with a major source of income.  Now, most of the country’s oil fields are under the control of rebel groups, including ISIS, the al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front, and local Kurdish militias.  Although production from the fields has dropped significantly, enough is being extracted and sold through various clandestine channels to provide the rebels with income and operating funds.  “Syria is an oil country and has resources, but in the past they were all stolen by the regime,” said Abu Nizar, an anti-government activist.  “Now they are being stolen by those who are profiting from the revolution.”

At first, many rebel groups were involved in these extractive activities, but since January, when it assumed control of Raqqa, the capital of the province of that name, ISIS has been the dominant player in the oil fields.  In addition, it has seized fields in neighboring Deir al-Zour Province along the Iraq border.  Indeed, many of the U.S.-supplied weapons it acquired from the fleeing Iraqi army after its recent drive into Mosul and other northern Iraqi cities have been moved into Deir al-Zour to help in the organization’s campaign to take full control of the region.  In Iraq, ISIS is fighting to gain control over Iraq’s largest refinery at Baiji in the central part of the country.

It appears that ISIS sells oil from the fields it controls to shadowy middlemen who in turn arrange for its transport — mostly by tanker trucks — to buyers in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey.  These sales are said to provide the organization with the funds needed to pay its troops and acquire its vast stockpiles of arms and ammunition.  Many observers also claim that ISIS is selling oil to the Assad regime in return for immunity from government air strikes of the sort being launched against other rebel groups.  “Many locals in Raqqa accuse ISIS of collaborating with the Syrian regime,” a Kurdish journalist, Sirwan Kajjo, reported in early June.  “Locals say that while other rebel groups in Raqqa have been under attack by regime air strikes on a regular basis, ISIS headquarters have not once been attacked.”

However the present fighting in northern Iraq plays out, it is obvious that there, too, oil is a central factor.  ISIS seeks both to deny petroleum supplies and oil revenue to the Baghdad government and to bolster its own coffers, enhancing its capacity for nation-building and further military advances.  At the same time, the Kurds and various Sunni tribes — some allied with ISIS — want control over oil fields located in the areas under their control and a greater share of the nation’s oil wealth.

Ukraine, the Crimea, and Russia

The present crisis in Ukraine began in November 2013 when President Viktor Yanukovych repudiated an agreement for closer economic and political ties with the European Union (EU), opting instead for closer ties with Russia.  That act touched off fierce anti-government protests in Kiev and eventually led to Yanukovych’s flight from the capital.  With Moscow’s principal ally pushed from the scene and pro-EU forces in control of the capital, Russian President Vladimir Putin moved to seize control of the Crimea and foment a separatist drive in eastern Ukraine.  For both sides, the resulting struggle has been about political legitimacy and national identity — but as in other recent conflicts, it has also been about energy.

Ukraine is not itself a significant energy producer.  It is, however, a major transit route for the delivery of Russian natural gas to Europe.  According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), Europe obtained 30% of its gas from Russia in 2013 — most of it from the state-controlled gas giant Gazprom — and approximately half of this was transported by pipelines crossing Ukraine.  As a result, that country plays a critical role in the complex energy relationship between Europe and Russia, one that has proved incredibly lucrative for the shadowy elites and oligarchswho control the flow of gas, whille at the same time provoking intense controversy. Disputes over the price Ukraine pays for its own imports of Russian gas twice provoked a cutoff in deliveries by Gazprom, leading to diminished supplies in Europe as well.

Given this background, it is not surprising that a key objective of the “association agreement” between the EU and Ukraine that was repudiated by Yanukovych (and has now been signed by the new Ukrainian government) calls for the extension of EU energy rules to Ukraine’s energy system — essentially eliminating the cozy deals between Ukrainian elites and Gazprom.  By entering into the agreement, EU officials claim, Ukraine will begin “a process of approximating its energy legislation to the EU norms and standards, thus facilitating internal market reforms.”

Russian leaders have many reasons to despise the association agreement.  For one thing, it will move Ukraine, a country on its border, into a closer political and economic embrace with the West.  Of special concern, however, are the provisions about energy, given Russia’s economic reliance on gas sales to Europe — not to mention the threat they pose to the personal fortunes of well-connected Russian elites.  In late2013 Yanukovych came under immense pressure from Vladimir Putin to turn his back on the EU and agree instead to an economic union with Russia and Belarus, an arrangement that would have protected the privileged status of elites in both countries.  However, by moving in this direction, Yanukovych put a bright spotlight on the crony politics that had long plaguedUkraine’s energy system, thereby triggering protests in Kiev’s Independence Square (the Maidan) — that led to his downfall.

Once the protests began, a cascade of events led to the current standoff, with the Crimea in Russian hands, large parts of the east under the control of pro-Russian separatists, and the rump western areas moving ever closer to the EU.  In this ongoing struggle, identity politics has come to play a prominent role, with leaders on all sides appealing to national and ethnic loyalties.  Energy, nevertheless, remains a major factor in the equation.  Gazprom has repeatedly raised the price it charges Ukraine for its imports of natural gas, and on June 16th cut off its supply entirely, claiming non-payment for past deliveries.  A day later, an explosion damaged one of the main pipelines carrying Russian gas to Ukraine — an event still being investigated.  Negotiations over the gas price remain a major issue in the ongoing negotiations between Ukraine’s newly elected president, Petro Poroshenko, and Vladimir Putin.

Energy also played a key role in Russia’s determination to take the Crimea by military means.  By annexing that region, Russia virtually doubled the offshore territory it controls in the Black Sea, which is thought to house billions of barrels of oil and vast reserves of natural gas.  Prior to the crisis, several Western oil firms, including ExxonMobil, were negotiating with Ukraine for access to those reserves.  Now, they will be negotiating with Moscow.  “It’s a big deal,” said Carol Saivetz, a Eurasian expert at MIT.  “It deprives Ukraine of the possibility of developing these resources and gives them to Russia.”

Nigeria and South Sudan

The conflicts in South Sudan and Nigeria are distinctive in many respects, yet both share a key common factor: widespread anger and distrust towards government officials who have become wealthy, corrupt, and autocratic thanks to access to abundant oil revenues.

In Nigeria, the insurgent group Boko Haram is fighting to overthrow the existing political system and establish a puritanical, Muslim-ruled state.  Although most Nigerians decry the group’s violent methods (including the kidnapping of hundreds of teenage girls from a state-run school), it has drawn strength from disgust in the poverty-stricken northern part of the country with the corruption-riddledcentral government in distant Abuja, the capital.

Nigeria is the largest oil producer in Africa, pumping out some 2.5 million barrels per day.  With oil selling at around $100 per barrel, this represents a potentially staggering source of wealth for the nation, even after the private companies involved in the day-to-day extractive operations take their share.  Were these revenues — estimated in the tens of billions of dollars per year — used to spur development and improve the lot of the population, Nigeria could be a great beacon of hope for Africa.  Instead, much of the money disappears into the pockets (and foreign bank accounts) of Nigeria’s well-connected elites.

In February, the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Lamido Sanusi, told a parliamentary investigating committee that the state-owned Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) had failed to transfer some $20 billion in proceeds from oil sales to the national treasury, as required by law.  It had all evidently been diverted to private accounts.  “A substantial amount of money has gone,” he told the New York Times.  “I wasn’t just talking about numbers.  I showed it was a scam.”

For many Nigerians — a majority of whom subsist on less than $2 per day — the corruption in Abuja, when combined with the wanton brutality of the government’s security forces, is a source of abiding anger and resentment, generating recruits for insurgent groups like Boko Haram and winning them begrudging admiration.  “They know well the frustration that would drive someone to take up arms against the state,” said National Geographic reporter James Verini of people he interviewed in battle-scarred areas of northern Nigeria.  At this stage, the government has displayed zero capacity to overcome the insurgency, while its ineptitude and heavy-handed military tactics have only further alienated ordinary Nigerians.

The conflict in South Sudan has different roots, but shares a common link to energy.  Indeed, the very formation of South Sudan is a product of oil politics.  A civil war in Sudan that lasted from 1955 to 1972 only ended when the Muslim-dominated government in the north agreed to grant more autonomy to the peoples of the southern part of the country, largely practitioners of traditional African religions or Christianity.  However, when oil was discovered in the south, the rulers of northern Sudan repudiated many of their earlier promises and sought to gain control over the oil fields, sparking a second civil war, which lasted from 1983 to 2005.  An estimated two million people lost their lives in this round of fighting.  In the end, the south was granted full autonomy and the right to vote on secession.  Following a January 2011 referendum in which 98.8% of southerners voted to secede, the country became independent on that July 9th.

The new state had barely been established, however, when conflict with the north over its oil resumed.  While South Sudan has a plethora of oil, the only pipeline allowing the country to export its energy stretches across North Sudan to the Red Sea.  This ensured that the south would be dependent on the north for the major source of government revenues.  Furious at the loss of the fields, the northerners charged excessively high rates for transporting the oil, precipitating a cutoff in oil deliveries by the south and sporadic violence along the two countries’ still-disputed border.  Finally, in August 2012, the two sides agreed to a formula for sharing the wealth and the flow of oil resumed. Fighting has, however, continued in certain border areas controlled by the north but populated by groups linked to the south.

With the flow of oil income assured, the leader of South Sudan, President Salva Kiir, sought to consolidate his control over the country and all those oil revenues.  Claiming an imminent coup attempt by his rivals, led by Vice President Riek Machar, he disbanded his multiethnic government on July 24, 2013, and began arresting allies of Machar.  The resulting power struggle quickly turned into an ethnic civil war, with the kin of President Kiir, a Dinka, battling members of the Nuer group, of which Machar is a member.  Despite several attempts to negotiate a cease-fire, fighting has been under way since December, with thousands of people killed and hundreds of thousands forced to flee their homes.

As in Syria and Iraq, much of the fighting in South Sudan has centered around the vital oil fields, with both sides determined to control them and collect the revenues they generate.  As of March, while still under government control, the Paloch field in Upper Nile State was producing some 150,000 barrels a day, worth about $15 million to the government and participating oil companies.  The rebel forces, led by former Vice President Machar, are trying to seize those fields to deny this revenue to the government.  “The presence of forces loyal to Salva Kiir in Paloch, to buy more arms to kill our people… is not acceptable to us,” Machar said in April.  “We want to take control of the oil field.  It’s our oil.”  As of now, the field remains in government hands, with rebel forces reportedly making gains in the vicinity.

The South China Sea

In both the East China and South China seas, China and its neighbors claim assorted atolls and islands that sit astride vast undersea oil and gas reserves.  The waters of both have been the site of recurring naval clashes over the past few years, with the South China Sea recently grabbing the spotlight. 

An energy-rich offshoot of the western Pacific, that sea, long a focus of contention, is rimmed by China, Vietnam, the island of Borneo, and the Philippine Islands.  Tensions peaked in May when the Chinese deployed their largest deep-water drilling rig, the HD-981, in waters claimed by Vietnam.  Once in the drilling area, about 120 nautical miles off the coast of Vietnam, the Chinese surrounded the HD-981 with a large flotilla of navy and coast guard ships.  When Vietnamese coast guard vessels attempted to penetrate this defensive ring in an effort to drive off the rig, they were rammed by Chinese ships and pummeled by water cannon.  No lives have yet been lost in these encounters, but anti-Chinese rioting in Vietnam in response to the sea-borne encroachment left several dead and the clashes at sea are expected to continue for several months until the Chinese move the rig to another (possibly equally contested) location.

The riots and clashes sparked by the deployment of HD-981 have been driven in large part by nationalism and resentment over past humiliations.  The Chinese, insisting that various tiny islands in the South China Sea were once ruled by their country, still seek to overcome the territorial losses and humiliations they suffered at the hands the Western powers and Imperial Japan.  The Vietnamese, long accustomed to Chinese invasions, seek to protect what they view as their sovereign territory.  For common citizens in both countries, demonstrating resolve in the dispute is a matter of national pride.

But to view the Chinese drive in the South China Sea as a simple matter of nationalistic impulses would be a mistake.  The owner of HD-981, the China National Offshore Oil Company (CNOOC), has conducted extensive seismic testing in the disputed area and evidently believes there is a large reservoir of energy there.  “The South China Sea is estimated to have 23 billion tonsto 30 billion tons of oil and 16 trillion cubic meters of natural gas, accounting for one-third of China’s total oil and gas resources,” the Chinese news agency Xinhua noted.  Moreover, China announced in June that it was deploying a second drilling rig to the contested waters of the South China Sea, this time at the mouth of the Gulf of Tonkin.

As the world’s biggest consumer of energy, China is desperate to acquire fresh fossil fuel supplies wherever it can.  Although its leaders are prepared to make increasingly large purchases of African, Russian, and Middle Eastern oil and gas to satisfy the nation’s growing energy requirements, they not surprisingly prefer to develop and exploit domestic supplies.  For them, the South China Sea is not a “foreign” source of energy but a Chinese one, and they appear determined to use whatever means necessary to secure it.  Because other countries, including Vietnam and the Philippines, also seek to exploit these oil and gas reserves, further clashes, at increasing levels of violence, seem almost inevitable.

No End to Fighting

As these conflicts and others like them suggest, fighting for control over key energy assets or the distribution of oil revenues is a critical factor in most contemporary warfare.  While ethnic and religious divisions may provide the political and ideological fuel for these battles, it is the potential for mammoth oil profits that keeps the struggles alive.  Without the promise of such resources, many of these conflicts would eventually die out for lack of funds to buy arms and pay troops.  So long as the oil keeps flowing, however, the belligerents have both the means and incentive to keep fighting.

In a fossil-fuel world, control over oil and gas reserves is an essential component of national power.  “Oil fuels more than automobiles and airplanes,” Robert Ebel of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told a State Department audience in 2002.  “Oil fuels military power, national treasuries, and international politics.”  Far more than an ordinary trade commodity, “it is a determinant of well being, of national security, and international power for those who possess this vital resource, and the converse for those who do not.”

If anything, that’s even truer today, and as energy wars expand, the truth of this will only become more evident.  In our present world, if you see a conflict developing, look for the energy.  It’ll be there somewhere on this fossil-fueled planet of ours.

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David Korowicz: Catastrophic shocks through complex socio-economic systems

Posted on July 6, 2014 by

David Korowicz. 2013. Catastrophic Shocks through Complex Socio-Economic Systems.

The globalized economy has become more complex (connectivity, interdependence, and speed), delocalized, with increasing concentration within critical systems. This has made us all more vulnerable to systemic shocks. This paper provides an overview of the effect of a major pandemic on the operation of complex socio-economic systems using some simple models. It discusses the links between initial pandemic absenteeism and supply-chain contagion, and the evolution and rate of shock propagation. It discusses systemic collapse and the difficulties of re-booting socio-economic systems.

1. A New Age of Risk

Consider the following scenarios:

  • A highly contagious pandemic outbreak in South-East Asia (of comparable or greater human impact than the 1918 influenza outbreak) .
  • A disorderly break-up of the Eurozone and global financial system implosion.
  • A “perfect storm” during a time of major global financial instability – there are terrorist attacks on North African oil installations (partially driven by social unrest arising from record food prices) & a category 5 hurricane hits a major population/ industrial/ oil producing regions of the US east coast.

These are all examples of potential global shocks, that is hazards that could drive fast and severe cascading impacts mediated through global systems. Global systems include telecommunications networks; financial and banking networks; trade networks; and critical infrastructure networks. These systems are themselves highly interdependent and together form part of the globalized economy.

One of the primary issues for this paper are, given any significant hazard, how does the impact spread through the globalized economy and in what way are we vulnerable to the failure of interconnected systems. To answer this we need to understand how complex societies are connected and how they have changed over time. The globalized economy is an example of a complex adaptive system that dynamically links people, goods, factories, services, institutions and commodities across the globe.

The state is characterized by exponential growth in Gross World Product of about 3.5% per annum over nearly 200 years within a range of several percentage points. This had correlated with emergent and self-organizing growth in socio-economic complexity which is reflected in the growth of the:

  • Number of interacting parts (nodes): This includes exponential population growth; the 50,000+ different items available in Wal-Mart; the 6 billion+ digitally connected devices; the number of cars, factories, power plants, mines and so on.
  • Number of linkages (edges): This includes the 3 billion passengers traveling between 4000 airports on over 50 million flights each year; the 60,000 cargo ships moving between 5000 ports with about a million ship movements a year; the average number of media channels (internet sites, TV channels, twitter feeds) per person times the population; and the billions of daily financial transactions.
  • Levels of interdependence between nodes: The growing number of inputs necessary to make a good, service, livelihood, infrastructural output or the function of society as a whole.
  • The speed of processes (or time compression) :This includes the increasing speed of financial transactions; transportation; digital signaling; and Just-In-Time logistics. If we consider the globalized economy as a form of singular organism, we can understand this process as an increasing metabolic rate.
  • Efficiency: increasing competition and global trade arbitrage driving down inventories; and globalized economies of scale.
  • Concentration: The emergence of ʻhubsʼ within the globalized economy- a small number of very highly connected nodes whose function (or loss of function) have a disproportionate role in the operation of the globalized economy . For example, banks are not connected at random to other banks, rather a very small number of large banks are highly connected with lots of other banks, who have few connections to each other. These arrangements are sometimes known as scale-free networks. We can also see concentration in critical infrastructure, and trade networks.
  • De-localization: The conditions of personal welfare; business or service output; or countryʼs economic output is smeared over the whole globalized economy. The corollary is that if there is a major failure of the systems integration in the globalized economy, a localized community may have extreme difficulties meeting its basic needs.

Economic and complexity growth have in many ways reduced risk. Localized agricultural failure once risked famine in isolated subsistence communities, but now such risk is spread globally. It has made critical infrastructure such as sewage treatment and clean water available and affordable. Global financial markets enable an array of risks, from home insurance and pensions to default risk and export credit insurance, to be dispersed and potential volatility reduced. Indeed, what is remarkable is just how reliable our complex society is given the number of time sensitive inter-connections.

Another way of saying all this is that our society is very resilient, within certain bounds, to a huge range interruptions in the flow of goods and services. Within those bounds our society is self-stabilizing. For example supply-chain shocks from the Japanese tsunami in 2011, the eruption of the Icelandic Eyjafjallajokull volcano in 2010 or the UK fuel blockades in 2000 all had severe localized effects in addition to shutting down some factories across the world as supply-chains were interrupted. However the impacts did not spread and amplify, and normal functioning of the local economy quickly resumed.

But we know from many complex systems in nature and society that a system can rapidly shift from one state to another as a threshold is crossed (Scheffer 2009). One way a state shift can occur is when a shock drives the system out of its stability bounds. The form of those stability bounds can increase or decrease resilience to shocks depending upon whether the system is already stressed prior to the shock.

The commonalities of global integration mean that diverse hazards may lead to common shock consequences. The systems that transmit shocks are also the systems we depend upon for our welfare and the operation of businesses, institutions and society, so to borrow Marshal McLuhanʼs phrase, the medium is the message. One of the primary consequences of a generic shock is an interruption in the flow of goods and services in the economy. This has diverse and profound implications – including food security crises, business shut-downs, critical infrastructure risks and social crises. This can in turn quickly destroy forward looking confidence in an economy with major consequences for financial and monetary stability which depend ultimately on the collateral of real economic production. More generally it can entail multi-network and de-localized cascading failure leading to a collapse in societal complexity.

Previously the dynamics of such a scenario was studied when the initial shock was caused by a systemic banking collapse and monetary shock. This coupled the exchange of goods and services causing financial system supply-chain cross contagion and a re-enforcing cascade of de-localizing multi-system risk (Korowicz 2012). In this paper a similar methodology is used to look at the socio-economic implications of a major pandemic.

2. Socio-economic Impact of a Major Pandemic

We are interested in the socio-economic implications of a major influenza pandemic whose initial impact would be direct absenteeism from illness and death, and absenteeism for family and prophylactic reasons. The pandemic wave (we will only consider one) lasts 10-15 weeks. We assume this causes an absenteeism rate of 20% or 40% over the peak period of 2-4 weeks, and a rate above 20% for 4-8 weeks when the peak is 40%. This represents our initial impact. Our question is then what happens next.

Some key personnel that might not show up for work are in health care, shipping / train / truck drivers, (and I’ve read elsewhere that the electric grid might fail if key workers don’t show up because they’re afraid of catching something at work, and that would bring ALL systems down).

how a health service would manage a pandemic when its own operation is compromised

3. Vulnerability Revealed

One way to understand complex socio-economic systems is to study occasions when there has been some systemic failure. In September 2000 truckers in the United Kingdom, angry at rising diesel duties, blockaded refineries and fuel distribution outlets. Consequences:

a)      The petrol stations reliance on Just-In-Time re-supply meant the impact was rapid. Within 2 days about half of the petrol stations had run out of fuel and supplies to industry and utilities had begun to be severely affected.

b)     People couldn’t get to work and businesses could not be re-supplied.

c)      Supermarkets had begun to run out of food

d)     Large parts of the manufacturing sector were about to shut down

e)      Hospitals began to offer emergency only care

f)       Automatic cash machines could not be re-supplied

g)      The postal service was severely affected.

h)      There was panic buying at supermarkets and petrol stations.

i)        It was estimated that after the first day an average 10% of national output was lost. Surprisingly, at the height of the disruption, commercial truck traffic on the UK road network was only 10-12% below average values. There were clear indications that had the fuel blockades gone on just a few days longer large parts of UK manufacturing including the automotive, defense and steel industries would have had to shut down.

Failure of production or supply from one area can shut down factories on the other side of the world within days of the initial interruption as was seen in the 2010 Icelandic volcano eruption in 2010 and the 2011 Japanese tsunami and Thai flooding.

A report from the think-tank Chatham House on the impacts of the Icelandic volcano and subsequent interviews with businesses about its impact and their preparedness came to the general conclusion: “One week seems to be the maximum tolerance of a Just-In-Time economy”…..before major shut-downs in business and industries would occur, and things would not just return to normal afterwards. … many businesses said that had the disruption continued just a few days longer, it would have taken at least a month for companies to recover” And a quote from a desk study on the impact of a one week long absence of (just) trucks in the UK economy, things would not just return to normal (McKinnon 2006): “..After a week, the country would be plunged into a deep social and economic crisis. It would take several weeks for most production and distribution systems to recover”

The studies do not consider what would happen if the primary disruption were to continue for many weeks.

4. Interdependence, Liebigʼs law, and Cascading

One of the defining features of rising complexity is growing interdependence. Now, the output of a person, service provider, factory, piece of critical infrastructure, etc., depends upon ever more inputs, be they tools, intermediate products, consumables, specialist skills and knowledge or collective societal infrastructures. And those outputs in turn become further inputs through the dispersed networks of the globalized economy.

Some of the least substitutable critical inputs are labeled hubs. Hubs are things like electricity, fuel, water, and financial system functionality – things generally referred to as critical infrastructure. They are societal services and functions upon which all society depends.

A simple but important principle, Liebig ʼs Law of the Minimum, says that the production is constrained by the scarcest critical input. So even if you have ample supplies of all but one critical input, your production fails. That is, production fails on the weakest link.

This explains why the most exposed businesses to supply-chain failure are the most complex businesses. First they have some of the most inputs (making a car can mean assembling up to 15,000 components). Second, they have more inputs are very complex and specialized, and so cannot be easily substituted. Alternative production lines might not be available or take months to re-engineer or specialist skills may be in limited supply. Thus, auto and electronics manufacturers were some of the most affected by the Icelandic volcano, the Japanese tsunami and the Thai flooding in 2011. What Liebig ʼs law shows is that you do not need to lose everything to stop a business, service or function or society – just the right bit. This helps to explain why a loss of only 10-12% of commercial vehicles had such a big impact during the fuel blockades in the U.K. As our economies have become more complex we have been adding more inputs into our lives, goods and services, and the functioning of our societies. More of these are critical with low substitutability.

Let us now apply Liebig’s law to pandemic absenteeism. The people affected by a pandemic are part of the supply of inputs to any systems function. There may be many people contributing to one output of a business, service or function. We assume that most employees are either unnecessary for the period of the pandemic, can telecommute, or are easily substituted. But there is a smaller number of sub-functional roles occupied most likely by those with specialist skills who are critical with low substitutability. If any one of them is unavailable, the sub-functional role fails and with that, the output of the whole organization/ function.

With the loss of this output good or service (especially if it is critical with low substitutability) other businesses and services may be affected potentially causing cascading affects through complex socioeconomic networks as a whole.

5. Time and Cascading Failure

There is always a level of absenteeism and a percentage of goods and services that can’t be delivered for whatever reason. The reason you don’t have supply-chain contagion spreading with every problem is that complex societies are efficient at finding alternative suppliers, and some inventories are carried to help when there is a hiatus. Also, most factories don’t produce very critical things or there is lots of substitutability. One won’t miss a brand of toothpaste in the supermarket when there are 20 brands available.

To initiate a cascading failure:

1)      It has to be large scale, i.e. from a major hub failure or large enough absenteeism.

2)      The function needs to be central, like the electric grid, financial system, or pandemic that keeps people from going to work. All of these are critically connected to other parts of a socio-economic network. Thus the effects of a pandemic or hub failure in a weakly connected country, Mali say, would be unlikely to spread supply-chain failure widely. Thus we can conclude that there might be point above which supply-chain contagion takes off, and below which the society is still operational and recovery can occur. This point depends upon the initial pandemic absenteeism rate and the societies complexity at the epicenter of the pandemic.

A simple model of supply-chain failure can be based upon the idea that the more supply-chains are disrupted or infected, the greater the chance that further supply-chains will be infected

6. External Cross-Network Contagion

Imagine a pandemic outbreak occurs in South-East Asia. The main vectors through which a shock could propagate outside the region are pandemic contagion, financial system contagion, and supply-chain contagion.

We would expect the shock to spread at different rates (banking shock could travel faster than supply-chain contagion because the operational speed of the financial system is greater than the inventory turn-over time).

Some countries’ role in trade is far more important to the globalized economy than others. The more important the initially impacted region is, the greater is the likelihood of spreading supply-chain contagion globally. Kali measured countries’ influence on global trade, not only by trade volumes, but the influence a country has on the global trading system. They used an Importance Index to rank their influence. For example, they find that Thailand, which was at the center of the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis ranked 22nd in terms of global trade share, but 11th on their level of importance. In another study, Garas used an epidemic model to look at the potential any country had to spread a crisis. One of their data sets is based upon international trade in 2007. It uses a measure of centrality to identify countries with the power to spread a crisis via their level of trade integration. Like the previous paper, the centrality in the network does not necessarily correspond to those countries with the highest trade volumes. There are 12 inner core countries, which are listed in no particular order are: China, Russia, Japan, Spain, UK, Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Belgium-Luxembourg, USA, and France.

Hidalgo used international trade data to look at two things – the diversity of products a country produces, and the exclusivity of what they produce. An exclusive product is something made by few other countries. Most countries in the world are non- diversified and make standard products. The most complex countries are diversified and make more exclusive products. More exclusive products have less substitutability.

Financial system contagion outside the initially impacted region could be through banking networks, the bond market, the shadow banking system, currency volatility and confidence. Again the structure of financial networks and the centrality of the region with respect to financial assets and liabilities would determine the extent of any shock.

More broadly, if an economy was shattered, and its forward looking viability looked both precarious and uncertain one would expect a collapse in the value of a country’s currency. Rather than helping exports (which would be very little because the economy’s productive capacity had collapsed), it would hinder imports of emergency supplies and make debt in external currencies much more difficult to service. The economic damage and reduced economic prospects may then cause tightened credit conditions, spiraling bond yields and systemic bank failure.

There are also issues that are most pertinent for more complex societies. We imagine that after a pandemic wave people are again available for work. But people cannot however become productive immediately because other inputs are also needed. But those inputs are stalled because they rely upon other inputs and so on. More broadly we may define Recursion failure as: “the inability of a complex economy to easily resume production and trade after a significant collapse because in a complex and interdependent economy, production and trade must resume in order for production and trade to resume”.

Further, even if a government wanted to rebuild, it may be too complex to orchestrate resumption from the top down. This is because the economy has evolved by self-organization. Nobody ever put its elements together in the first place. And even if it could be done, the systems of command, control and supply that might do it would be the very systems that had been undermined. Over time entropy would become an issue as engines rust, reagents become contaminated and expected maintenance and repairs left undone. This would all add to the cost and inputs needed for resumption.

The longer a socio-economic system spends in the critical regime, the more likely it is to undergo a complete systemic collapse and loss of basic function. In addition, the longer it spends in this state, the more difficult it may be to ever return to its pre-pandemic state. This is a complex society’s equivalent of a heart attack. When a person has a heart attack, there is a brief period during which CPR can revive the person. But beyond a certain point when there has been cascading failure in co-dependent life support systems, the person cannot be revived. This means that the socioeconomic system could be changed irretrievably and the job of society and government would be to both manage the crisis and plot a fundamentally different path.

To make the systems we depend upon more resilient ideally we would want more redundancy within critical systems and weaker coupling between them.

Localization and de-complexification of basic needs (food, water, waste etc) would provide some societal resilience if systems resilience was lost. We would have more buffering at all levels, that is, larger inventories throughout society. All this is the very opposite of the direction of economic forces.

The reason we have such tight inventories, tight coupling, and concentration in critical infrastructure is they bring efficiency and competitive advantage. But when something goes wrong, this makes recovery harder. For example, during super-storm Sandy, fuel shortages were exacerbated by low inventories that were the direct result of cost cutting arising from the financial crisis.

We are locked into socio-economic processes that are at an increasingly complex that make us ever more vulnerable. Increasing vulnerability coupled with increasing hazard mean that the risk of a major socio-economic collapse is rising.

Because a permanent state shift could occur, planning needs to consider how to deal with non-reversion to pre-shock conditions.

Posted in David Korowicz, Stages of | 1 Comment

From Wood (10,000 BC to 1750) to coal (1750-1920) to Oil, Natural Gas, & Electricity to What?

Posted on July 2, 2014 by

Cutler J. Cleveland . Energy Quality, Net Energy, and the Coming Energy Transition.  Department of Geography and Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, Boston University

The level of health, food security and especially material standard of living that exists today throughout the world is made possible by the expansive use of fossil fuels. While many take this affluence for granted, a long run view illustrates that the fossil fuel era is relatively new and will last for a relatively short period of time. For thousands of years prior to the Industrial Revolution, human societies were powered by the products of photosynthesis, principally fuel wood and charcoal. Widespread use of coal did not develop until the 18th century, oil and gas not until the late 19th century.

In 1800, the nation was fueled by animal feed, which powered the draft animals on farms, and wood — used for domestic heating and cooking and by early industry.

Wood and animal feed rapidly disappeared when coal became the dominant fuel, the latter due to the introduction of the first tractor in 1911.

The Industrial Revolution transformed the nation’s energy picture, substituting coal for wood on a massive scale.

By the time of World War I, coal accounted for nearly 75% of energy use. But coal’s place as the dominant fuel was fleeting as well.

Oil and natural gas quickly replaced coal, just as coal had replaced wood.

By the 1960s, oil and gas together accounted for more than 70% of total energy use; coal had dropped to less than 20%. Primary electricity has played a small but steadily growing role. Primary electricity refers to electricity generated by hydroelectric, nuclear, geothermal, solar, and other so-called “primary sources. The increase in the share of primary electricity towards the end of the period is due to the rise in nuclear generating capacity.

This long run view of energy raises an important question: what guided these transitions in the past, and to what extent can such information inform us about the impending transition from fossil to renewable fuels?

The transition from one major energy system to the next is driven by a combination of energetic, economic, technological and institutional factors. The energy-related forces stem from the tremendous economic and social opportunities that new fuels, and their associated energy converters, offered compared to earlier ones.

Energy plays a critical role in nature.

All organisms must use energy to perform a number of life-sustaining tasks such as growth, reproduction, and defense from predators. The most fundamental task of all is using energy to obtain more energy from the environment. When energy is used to do useful work, energy is degraded from a useful, high quality state to a less useful low quality state. This means that all systems must continuously replace that energy they use, and to do so takes energy.

This fundamental reality means that Energy Returned on Invested (EROI) and net energy are used to explain the foraging behavior of organisms, the distribution and abundance of organisms and the structure and functioning of ecosystems

For the overwhelming majority of their existence, humans obtained energy from the environment by hunting and gathering.

The EROI for food capture is the caloric value of the food capture to the expenditure of energy in the capture or gathering process.

Natural ecosystems produce enough edible food energy to support hunter-gatherers at densities no greater than one person per square kilometer. Traditional agricultural societies support hundreds of people square kilometer, enabling permanent settlements to grow in size and number. The greater surplus released labor from the land, creating the potential for people to move to urban areas and work in manufacturing and industry.

The economic usefulness of an energy converter is determined in part by its power, the rate at which it converts energy to do useful work.

Humans and draft animals convert energy to work at low power outputs. The energetic limits of people and draft animals set very definite economic and social limits.

The Industrial Revolution erased these limits with the introduction of the steam engine, which had a power output that dwarfed that of muscle power.

The higher power output of the steam engine enabled it to deliver a much large energy surplus than human labor or draft animals.

Given the economic advantage offered by heat engines powered by fossil fuels, it is no surprise that labor and draft animals we rapidly replaced by heat engines once they became available.

The United States’ economy illustrates this transition. In 1850, more than 90% of the work done in the economy was accomplished by human labor and draft animals.

Over the next half-century, engines powered by wood and then coal rapidly displaced the animate converters.

By the 1950s, labor and animals had almost been completely displaced. Of the economic changes driven by the new fuels and machines, one of the most dramatic was the effect on labor productivity. In agriculture, for example, the productivity of labor increased more than 100-fold relative to rates possible prior to the Industrial Revolution. This increase in labor productivity reduced the need for farm labor and workers moved to industrial jobs.

How strong is the connection between energy use and economic growth?

One hypothesis is that the link is weak.  This is because it’s assumed that as fossil fuels become scarcer, their price will rise, which in turn will trigger technological changes and substitutions that improve energy efficiency. Indeed, many believe that the price shocks in 1973-74 and 1979-80 led to the adoption of many new energy efficient technologies. Second, the shift to a service-oriented, dot-com economy will de-couple energy use from economic activity. A dollar’s worth of steel requires 93,000 Btu to produce in the United States; a dollar’s worth of financial services uses 9,500 Btu. Thus, it stands to reason that a shift towards less-energy intensive activities will reduce the need for energy.

A second hypothesis is that the connection between energy use and economic output is strong.   The heat equivalent of a fuel is just one of the attributes of the fuel and ignores the context in which the fuel is used, and thus cannot explain, for example, why a thermal equivalent of oil is more useful in many tasks than is a heat equivalent of coal.

Because of the variation in attributes among energy types, the various fuels and electricity are less than perfectly substitutable in production or consumption. For example, a Btu of coal is not perfectly substitutable with a Btu of electricity; since the electricity is cleaner, lighter, and of higher quality, most people are willing to pay a premium price per Btu of electricity.

Consider incoming solar energy. The land area of the lower 48 United States intercepts 500 times of the nation’s annual energy use. But that energy is spread over nearly 3 million square miles of land, so that the energy absorbed per unit area is very small. Plants, on average, capture only about 0.1% of the solar energy reaching the Earth. This means that the actual plant biomass production in the United States is very small (compared to the overall incoming solar energy).

Power density combines two attributes of energy sources: the rate at which energy can be produced from the source and the geographic area covered by the source. A coal mine in China, for example, can produce upwards of 10,000 watts per square meter of the mine. As the above examples indicate most solar technologies have low power densities compared to fossil fuels.

A low energy and power density means that large amounts of capital, labor, energy and materials must be used to collect, concentrate and deliver solar energy to users.

This makes them more expensive than fossil fuels. The difference between solar and fossil energy is best represented but their energy return on investment (EROI). The EROI for fossil fuels tends to be large while that for solar tends to be low. This is the principal reason that humans aggressively developed fossil fuels in the first place. Fossil fuels have allowed us develop lifestyles that also are very energy intensive. The places that we live, work and shop have very high power densities. Supermarkets, office buildings and private residences in industrial nations demand huge amounts of energy. This very energy-intensive way of living, working, and playing have been made possible by fossil fuels sources that are equally as concentrated. Another quality difference between renewable fuels and fossil fuels is their energy density: the quantity of energy contained per unit mass of a fuel. For example, wood contains 15 Mj per kilogram; oil contains up to 44 Mj per kilogram.

Conclusion

Among the countless technologies humans have developed, only two have increased our power over the environment in an essential way.

Georgescu-Roegen called these Promethean technologies. Promethean I was fire, unique because it was a qualitative conversion of energy (chemical to thermal) and because it generates a chain reaction that sustains so long as sufficient fuel is forthcoming. The mastery of fire enabled man not only to keep warm and cook the food, but, above all to smelt and forge metals, and to bake bricks, ceramics, and lime. No wonder that the ancient Greeks attributed to Prometheus (a demigod, not a mortal) the bringing of fire to us.

Promethean II was the heat engine. Like fire, heat engines achieve a qualitative conversion of energy (heat into mechanical work), and they sustain a chain reaction process by supplying surplus energy. Surplus energy or (net energy) is the gross energy extracted less the energy used in the extraction process itself. The Promethean nature of fossil fuels is due to the much larger surplus they deliver compared to muscle energy from draft animals or human labor.

The energy surplus delivered by fossil fuel technologies is the energetic basis of the Industrial Revolution.

 

Posted in Wood | 2 Comments

Increasing population + declining fossil fuels = less population

Posted on July 1, 2014 by

[ This essay looks at the human footprint on the planet, how it grew so large, the problems it causes, and the consequences.

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:  KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity]

Now that oil, coal, and natural gas are at peak production or will be soon, how can any rational person argue there’s no need for birth control and less immigration with 5 of the 7 billion humans alive due to fossil fuels?

Not only that, we’re driving other species extinct now that we’re using up three-quarters of the Earth’s land:

  • 1%     Urban and infrastructure
  • 11.7%  Cropland
  • 26.8%  Forestry
  • 36%     Livestock grazing. 20% of all animal biomass on the planet (UNFAO 2006).

The 24.5% that we aren’t using is:

  • 12.5%  Rocky, desert, or covered with snow
  • 7.4%    Unproductive arctic and alpine tundra, grasslands
  • 4.6%    pristine forests, including boreal and tropical rainforests
Source: (Erb, 2009 – doesn’t include Greenland or Antarctica)

A Litany of Evils caused by overpopulation and immigration

  • Aquifer depletion, especially northwestern India, northern and western China, northern Mexico, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, and Syria
  • Climate change
  • Climate refugees: New Orleans among the first climate refugees – soon those in London, New York, Washington, Miami, Shanghai, Kolkata, Cairo and Tokyo will join them.
  • Storms from higher surface water temperatures in Central America, the Caribbean, the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the USA, East and Southeast Asia, japan, China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Viet Nam, and Bangladesh.
  • Desertification. Expanding deserts include the Sahara into Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. The Sahelian is moving southward into Nigeria. Deserts are forcing migrations in Iran, Brazil, and Mexico. The expansion of deserts in China has accelerated since 1950. 24,000 villages have been abandoned partially or entirely. The Gobi desert grew as much as half of Pennsylvania in just 5 years and is within 150 miles of Beijing. The 1930s dust bowl forced 2 million people to leave Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas. As the Ogalalla aquifer continues to deplete, the conditions for even larger dust bowls grows more likely.
  • Extinction
  • Invasive species
  • Pollution refugees: Love canal, Times Beach Missouri, Chernobyl area, cancer villages in China, Fukushima
  • Rising oceans
  • Water shortages
  • Toxic pollutants in local environments
  • Wildlands lost, wildlife habitat fragmented, converted to farmland, reservoirs, power lines, roads, mines, logging, overgrazing, bottom trawling, urban sprawl

What’s at stake: 5 billion people dying, starvation, disease, Genocide and madness on the scale of the Nazis, Rwandan Hutu-Tutsi, North Korea, Mao, Stalin, nuclear war, chaos, and endless wars.

Feeding the next 3 billion means cutting down the remaining forests, and unprecedented biodiversity destruction as we take over what few bits of wild remain and replace them with soil-eroding, aquifer guzzling, toxic pesticide polluting crops. Most scientists don’t think we can sustain the 7 billion we have now, ten billion is a sick fantasy.

One reason not even 7 billion can survive much longer is that we’re mining topsoil to grow enormous amounts of food now.  This has always been a factor in the fall of civilizations in the past, it just took them longer to destroy their soil in the past (on average 1500 years) because they didn’t have mega-horsepower tractors to compact and till the soil so it could wash and blow away within 100-200 years.  Soil erosion is happening 17 times faster than new soil is being formed on 90% of farmland (IUGS 2013).  Future generations simply won’t be able to grow as much food.

Population growth relentlessly destroys past environmental victories.

A wild river that was once saved gets dammed. A freeway that was once prevented is built, ripping apart the ecosystem and tight-knit neighborhoods.

A million acres of prime farmland in America is paved over by sprawl every year

2.2 million acres if you include wild land.  Who benefits? Developers and businesses that can pay cheap wages.

Overpopulation was caused by coal, oil, and natural gas

Fossil fuels allowed up to agricultural intensification and equally important — the ability to harvest, preserve, and deliver food before it spoiled in myriad ways:

  1. Iron made with coal rather than charcoal is what launched the industrial revolution and made combustion engines, tractors, vehicles, etc., possible
  2. Trains delivering food to inland areas of famine and later trucks that could deliver food and other essential goods anywhere
  3. Up to five times as much food grown with Haber Bosch nitrogen natural-gas fertilizers
  4. Public Health – clean water and food (i.e. sewage and water treatment, etc., raised average lifespans far more than medicine and continues to do so)
  5. Container ships, above all, made globalization possible (Levinson). America now imports half of its food.

Fossil Fuels have allowed us to go way past carrying capacity

Since the 1980s we’ve been using about 1.5 Earths by burning vast troves of oil, coal, and natural gas. This energy allowed us to go way beyond our carrying capacity by intensifying agriculture and using up resources that would have otherwise been preserved for future generations.

There are many other reasons why population went up

  • Wanting children is a biological drive
  • Abortions and birth control were hard to come by
  • Capitalism depends on endless growth
  • Religious leaders depend on endless growth of worshippers to amass power and wealth
  • Before oil-based weapons systems, the largest army was the most likely victor
  • Political, military, business (especially real estate) leaders want more voters, the largest armies, and more consumers which leads to abortions being banned and birth control hard to come by
  • Humans don’t think very well, see my list of “Over 250 cognitive biases, fallacies and more” at energyskeptic, or read Carol Tavris’s book “Mistakes Were Made But Not by Me: Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, & Hurtful Acts”
  • It is taboo to be realistic. Reality-based talk is labeled pessimism and dismissed. Happy endings to Hollywood movies, lack of critical thinking skills and science in schools, and other cultural factors in America have taken this “must always be optimistic” to such a crazy level that “Positive Thinking” ought to be in the DSM-5. Some good books to read: Ehrenreich’s “Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America” and Kuntsler’s “Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation”
  • The business need to make products break so more products could be sold led to a much earlier peak of resources. Read Slade’s “Made to Break Technology and Obsolescence in America”.
  • Even people who were aware of “The State Of The World” had children, hoping that “The Scientists Would Come Up With Something”.
  • We live in the moment. Today. People have a hard time imagining they’ll be hungry tomorrow after a large meal. Even if you could convince people that times would be hard decades ahead, that would not be a strong enough reason to refrain from having kids.

America could have stayed below 200 million

Several systems ecologists have estimated that the carrying capacity of the United States without fossil fuels is somewhere between 100 and 250 million people.  How do we get from over 317 million to 100 million in less than 20-30 years?  It’s already too late for no immigration or one-child per woman to do the trick, but still, both of these would help a bit.

Limiting our population in America would have a huge impact.

Americans consume 5 times as much as the average person, so 317 million Americans is the same as 1.58 billion Chinese.

Exponential Growth: Sustainability Impossible

Above all, if the concept of exponential growth had been taught in schools, or explained by journalists and environmental groups, Americans would be more willing to have fewer children.

Here’s how Albert Bartlett explains it: “The growth in one doubling time is greater than the total growth during all the preceding doubling times”.  For instance, oil production. Over 100 years world oil production grew 7% per year. That’s 10 doublings which means 1970 oil production was a thousand times more than in 1870. So every decade, more oil was produced than in all preceding decades.

Similarly, with each doubling of population, we cause as much destruction as all of the preceding doublings.

It took 5,000 years for population to double from 1 to 2 million people between 20 and 15 thousand years ago at a rate of almost zero growth. But it only took 37 years to go from 2 to 4 billion between 1930 and 1976. Now, 37 years later, we haven’t quite doubled, but we’re close — 7.13 billion. The rate of population growth has gone down very slightly, but the rate is still exponential, and orders of magnitude larger than the almost zero rate for most of human history.

Global population grew at a 1.6% compound rate from 1970 to 2010. So if  there were 15 million people 13,500 years ago, we’d have over a google of people now at a 1.6% compound rate.  A google has 100 zeros.

Once Upon a Time, people understood population mattered

1963 President Johnson told the United Nations that “five dollars invested in population control is worth 100 dollars invested in economic growth” (Erlich 1970)

1968 President Eisenhower: “once as president, I thought and said that birth control was not the business of our Federal Government. The facts changed my mind…I have come to believe that the populatin explosion is the world’s most critical problem.”

1976 Gallup poll: 84% said they didn’t want more people in the United States (Hays). The population was 200 million back then.

The consequences: If journalists and environmental groups had kept population issues and awareness in print we more than half of the American people wouldn’t have to die of starvation, disease, or war in less than a generation (that’s how Mother Nature solves overpopulation).

The consequences: Sprawl and consequent lower carrying capacity

Sprawl is one of the largest environmental problems in America and world-wide. It increases energy and water consumption, air pollution, and destroys wildlife. In the USA between 1982 and 2001 we lost 34,000,000 acres of forest, cropland, and pasture to development, an area the size of Illinois.

Posted in Peak Food, Population | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Terrorism and the Electric Power Delivery System. National Academy of Sciences.

Posted on July 1, 2014 by

Much of what follows is from the National Academy of Science 2012  (for the Department of Homeland Security): “Terrorism and the Electric Power Delivery System” & 2013 “The Resilience of the Electric Power Delivery System in Response to Terrorism and Natural Disasters”

cyberattack electric grid intruder knowledge

Average intruder knowledge and attack sophistication as a function of time. SOURCE: Presented at the workshop by Patricia Hoffman, Department of Energy, February 27, 2013; from Howard Lipson, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Software Engineering Institute CERT®. Copyright 1998-2011.

Introduction

Electricity is ubiquitous, reliable, and taken for granted . . . until the lights go out. Our modern society is almost totally dependent on electrical systems. Electricity is essential to the U.S. economy and way of life. The National Academy of Engineering called the grid the world’s largest integrated machine and a central part of the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century.

A systematically designed and executed terrorist attack could cause disruptions considerably more widespread and of much longer duration than the largest power system disruptions experienced to date. Since those disruptions have entailed economic impacts approaching 10 billion dollars, it appears possible that terrorist attacks could lead to costs of hundreds of billions of dollars—that is, perhaps as much as a few percent of the U.S. gross domestic product, which is currently about $12.5 trillion. If large, extended outages were to occur during times of extreme weather, they could also result in hundreds or even thousands of deaths due to heat stress or extended exposure to extreme cold.

The reliable operation of the power grid is complex and demanding for two fundamental reasons. First, electricity moves at close to the speed of light (186,000 miles per second, or 297,600 kilometers per second) and is not economically storable in large quantities. Therefore, electricity must be produced the instant it is used. Second, pending the development of affordable control devices, the flow of AC electricity cannot be controlled like a liquid or gas by opening or closing a valve in a pipe, or switched like calls over a long-distance telephone network. Electricity flows freely along all available paths from the generators to the loads in accordance with the laws of physics—dividing among all connected flow paths in the network (U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force, 2004).

A few of the services that fail in a Blackout: Pumping of drinking water, sewage, and irrigation water; the internet, banking, communications, refineries, shipping, and transportation systems; refrigeration, gas station pumps, home and commercial life-support systems (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning), traffic and railroad signals, natural gas and oil (most pipelines use electricity) to power stations, homes, and businesses.

The U.S. power delivery system is extremely complex. It is a network of substations, transmission lines, distribution lines, and less visible automatic and human controls that operate the system, as well as an intricate web of computers and communication systems that tie everything together.

The reliable operation of the power grid is complex and demanding:

  • Electricity moves at close to the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) and is not economically storable in large quantities, so electricity must be produced the instant it is used.
  • Voltage and frequency must be maintained within the extremely narrow range of 59.98 to 60.02 Hz, or power systems and equipment can be damaged, potentially leading to blackouts if the damage spreads widely

A well-executed terrorist attack could cause hundreds of billions of dollars in damage and take out the grid for over a year

Electric systems are not designed to withstand or quickly recover from damage inflicted simultaneously on multiple components. Such an attack could be carried out by knowledgeable attackers with little risk of detection. A large and coordinated attack by terrorists could leave the electric power system in a large region of the country disabled many months or, in absolute worst cases, several years, because substation and generator step-up transformers are vulnerable to attack from within and from outside the substation, are very large, difficult to move, custom-built, and can take over a year to replace. We no longer make them – getting one from another country can take a while because they’re in such high demand across the developing world.

The Grid is an easy target for terrorists. There are 5,800 major power plants connected by 450,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines spanning thousands of miles to unguarded facilities protected only by a chain-link fence. This makes the electric grid hard to protect, and so it can be severely damaged by a small number of well-informed attackers.

Cyber-attack. The grid depends on complex systems of sensors and automated and manual controls, all of which are tied together through communication systems, so instead of a physical assault; terrorists can cause blackouts by spoofing, jamming, or sending improper signals. Hacking and cyber-attacks are becoming increasingly common.

Military Attacks. Commandos with special training could mount a far stronger attack than even the most sophisticated terrorist group. The object would be to create havoc and demoralization before overt hostilities commence. A hostile country might take this approach if it were unable or unwilling to declare war but wanted to take some military action against the United States. The ultimate attack would be an overt military operation. The vulnerability of electric power systems can have serious national security implications. In World War II, Germany’s highly centralized electric system was not attacked until late in the war. German officials commented after the war that ‘‘The war would have finished 2 years earlier if the Allies had bombed our power plants. This experience will not be ignored in any future hostilities. (OTA 1990)

Terrorist attacks in other countries.   The U.S. Department of State lists over 42 international terrorist groups operating around the world today using rocket propelled grenades, mortars, and small arms. It’s hard, if not impossible, to defend substations from explosions, bullets, or other projectiles fired from a distance. Most attacks so far have come from local groups bent on damaging or destabilizing established ruling power structures. Around 2,500 attacks have occurred over the past 10 years, 528 against substations, 2,539 against transmission towers.

Who’s going to fix the grid? Half of workers retire in 5 to 10 years

As many as half of the 400,000 electric utility workers will be eligible to retire in the next 5 to 10 years. This loss of critical skills and training new workers is a significant problem for the electric utility industry, and likely to make nation’s electric power system will less reliable and more vulnerable to external threats, including terrorist intrusion and disruption from natural disasters.

One reason there aren’t enough employees is that they were fired due to industry restructuring, pressures from Wall Street and regulators, mergers and acquisitions, and the evolution of wholesale markets.

This substantial downsizing has made electric utility jobs far less secure and therefore stressful. Many utility engineers report a substantial broadening of work assignments without the necessary time to become “experts” in their new areas of responsibility. They cover more functions and technical areas at less depth, now that so many engineers have been fired. This in turn has led to few students wanting to go into power engineering as a career, most universities have dropped power engineering, only 12 colleges have this degree now.

As the workforce declines, a significant loss of institutional knowledge is occurring. This knowledge is often not documented, and frequently it is known only to a very few people. When today’s employees leave the workforce, this knowledge leaves with them.

Workforce vulnerability. After a terrorist action, restoration workers themselves may become targets (i.e. several line crews were shot at after Hurricane Katrina). Workers on poles and towers and in open areas in substations are particularly vulnerable. Further complications arise if terrorist attacks involve chemical, radio nuclear, or biological agents. Should a pandemic occur it will touch every part of the electric system in ways few have considered, because if workers don’t show up to run the grid, many essential services will stop running (see blackout list in introduction and table 8.1 below)

What to Do? Too much money to protect every installation, buy all the spare parts

Much of the document deals with how to solve these issues, how to protect facilities, the desperate need for engineers to replace the 50% of retiring workers, and how to get private businesses, industries, and essential services to buy back-up generation.

The researchers conclude it would cost too much money to protect every installation, and too much money to buy all the spare parts needed.

The threat to any given utility is modest, so to spread the risk, there is a program to get utilities to share in the cost of buying spare parts collectively, especially transformers. But EPRI has had difficulty getting the electric power industry to do this, which the NAS report calls “a classic case of “tragedy of the commons.”

I think the ruthless nature of capitalism will prevent an effective collective spare parts collaboration, because each privately owned entity is selfishly motivated to make profits for its executives and shareholders only. “The Market” will not spend money to protect the public from a year without electricity unless forced to, and I’m not sure how corporations can be forced to do anything now that corporate lobbyists practically run government and can easily stop such legislation. If that sounds radical, read Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress–and a Plan to Stop It by Lawrence Lessig, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power by Joel Bakan, Corporations Are Not People: Why They Have More Rights Than You Do and What You Can Do About It by Jeffrey D. Clements, Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill) by David Cay Johnston, or When Corporations Rule the World by David C Korten.

My Summary of the report

There are many Really Stupid Energy-Electric Grid Interdependencies that will make outages from terrorism, natural disasters, and other causes much worse

Here are some other factors that I think will exacerbate the problems in the future as the system ages and there’s less oil to fix all the growing problems of society:

Natural gas power plants are fed by natural gas pipelines that use electricity to keep the natural gas flowing. So when the electricity goes out, the natural gas will stop flowing to power plants. Terrorists are also likely to take out natural gas transmission lines when they attack the electric system as well. Natural gas pipelines used to use the natural gas flowing through them to power the continued flow of natural gas.

Refineries are fed by oil pipelines that use electricity to keep the oil flowing. So when the electricity goes out, the oil will stop flowing to refineries, and there will be no fuel for ships, trucks, barges, cars, or airplanes.

Gasoline stations need electricity for the pumps. So even if a business or home has had the foresight to buy back-up generators, they won’t be able to get gas or diesel fuel because most gas stations don’t have backup power.

Coal supply chains. Coal travels an average of 848 miles by rail to power plants. Railroads heavily depend on signals, which will be out in an electric blackout. They too are vulnerable to climate change (rising sea level, heat buckled rails, etc.), failing infrastructure, and declining coal supplies. Trains deliver 70% of coal, and a lot of it: over 1 in 5 railcars are carrying coal – over 40% of the weight trains haul. In 2008, 7,710,000 carloads with 878,600,000 tons of coal were delivered by train (AAR).

Microprocessors can’t be made if the electric grid isn’t up or delivers low-quality electricity. The grid can’t function without microprocessors. Over 10% of electric demand is controlled by microprocessors,by 2020 it’ll be over 30% (EPRI, 2003). The electric power system was designed to serve analog electric loads and doesn’t always provide the quality power required by digital manufacturing assembly lines and information systems. A nearly imperceptible 1-second variation in power quality due to transients, harmonics, and voltage surges and sags at a semiconductor-fabrication plant can ruin an entire 30-hour batch of microprocessors and sometimes the manufacturing equipment, and take several days or more for a fabrication plant to recover and resume production again. Any device with a microprocessor is vulnerable to the slightest disruption of electricity. Billions, if not trillions, of microprocessors exist in electronic devices.

I believe that chip fabrication will be one of the first industries to fail, and not just from electric grid outages and/or poor quality electricity. Microprocessors have the longest supply chains, single points of failure in both nations and machinery, require silicon, water and chemicals of up to .9999999% purity, at least 60 minerals (many of them rare), $10 billion dollar clean rooms, and much more. (For details, see my articles The Fragility of Microchips, Microchips and fab plants: a Detailed description, High-tech can’t last: limited minerals and metals, and Motherboards in Computers – too complex to make in the future).

The biggest threat to the electric grid isn’t even mentioned in this report: lack of fossil fuels, uranium, and hydro-power to keep it going

We’re running out of the fossil fuels, uranium, and dams that keep 94.2% of the electric grid running: Coal 37%, Natural gas 30%, Nuclear 19%, Oil 1%, and hydropower (6.2%). We are at (or near) peak coal, peak natural gas, peak uranium, and peak oil.

Most “renewable” power comes from hydro-power, which isn’t really renewable, because dams fail when their short-lived concrete crumbles, and silt up within 50 to 200 years. Within the next 20 years, 85% of U.S. dams that cost taxpayers $2 trillion dollars will have outlived their average 50-year lifespan.

Renewables can’t keep the electric grid running either:

  1. Wind and solar are too sporadic and unpredictable, and their lifespan is only 20-30 years.
  2. According to Steven Chu, former US energy secretary, “Without technological breakthroughs in efficient, large-scale energy storage, it will be difficult to rely on intermittent renewables for much more than 20-30% of electricity.” We’re a long way from figuring out how to make low cost, high energy density, fast response, and safe storage devices.
  3. The grid must stay within an extremely narrow range of 59.98 to 60.02 Hz to prevent blackouts. This limits the use of intermittent renewables like wind and solar, because the more you add, the more unstable the electric grid gets (Halper).
  4. Adding renewables doesn’t reduce the use of fossil fuels, and can do the opposite, because additional natural gas combined cycle plants need to be built to kick in suddenly when the wind dies.

Terrorists: We are fully capable of ruining the electric grid without any help from you

The biggest threat isn’t terrorism (yet), it’s natural disasters, the aging electric power system, too much complexity, and lack of capital and energy to fix the system.

The Electric Power System is falling apart. The American Society of Civil Engineers gives our energy infrastructure a D+. The electric grid and most of our other infrastructure is old and falling apart. Both the average age and lifespan of power transformers is 40 years old, and much of the rest of the grid is at or nearing the need to be replaced, and this will lead to more and more blackouts. In the late 1990s, the restructuring and re-regulation of the U.S. transmission system led to a decrease in investment and now the grid operates at or near its physical limits, resulting in many parts of the bulk high-voltage system being heavily stressed.

Capitalism ensures most of the money needed to fix the grid will go to fat cats instead.  Because of deregulation and over 90% of America’s infrastructure being privately owned, money that ought to have been invested in maintenance and improvements has gone instead to CEO’s, top executives, and shareholders.

Natural Disasters & Climate Change. Hurricanes will be fiercer and more frequent in the future, as will tornadoes, ice storms, extreme droughts and flooding, severe thunderstorms, and the coup de grace – rising sea levels. All of these will take the grid down more often and for longer periods over wider areas.

There are many other ways the grid can come down besides terrorism. Cyber or nuclear war, an Electromagnetic pulse, natural gas shortages, coal shortages, and oil shocks.

Too Complex – Too Many Owners and operators, over 3,000 entities to coordinate, many with conflicting goals and interests. The U.S. electric power industry today is composed of a wide variety of players, entities, and institutions, all of which play different roles, and the actions of individual asset owners and operators affect each other.

Deregulation has made the system unstable. Competition in the wholesale electricity market has increased the operational complexity of the power delivery system. Electricity is being shipped much longer distances over a transmission system designed only to provide limited power and reserve sharing among nearby utilities.

Related Articles:

Cyber attack

Electric Grid

References

AAR. Association of American Railroads. August 2013. Railroads and Coal. Aar.org

EPRI (Electric Power Research Institute). 2003. Electricity Technology Roadmap: Meeting the Critical Challenges of the 21st Century: Summary and Synthesis. Palo Alto, Calif.: EPRI.

Halper, Evan. Dec 2, 2013. Power struggle: Green energy versus a grid that’s not ready. Minders of a fragile national power grid say the rush to renewable energy might actually make it harder to keep the lights on. Los Angeles Times.

LaCommare, K.H., Eto, J.H., 2004. Understanding the cost of power interruptions to U.S. electricity  consumers. Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, LBNL-55718, Berkeley, CA, September. http://eetd.lbl.gov/ea/EMP/EMP-pubs.html

OTA (Office of Technology Assessment). 1990. Physical Vulnerability of Electric System to Natural Disasters and Sabotage. OTA-E-453. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

 

NAS. 2013. The Resilience of the Electric Power Delivery System in Response to Terrorism and Natural Disasters: Summary of a Workshop. National Academy of Sciences.

Substations, especially those with high-voltage transformers, are probably the most vulnerable to terrorist attack because they are essential components of the transmission system and would take a long time to replace. • Control centers coordinate the operation of the grid to maintain reliability of the system. The loss of a control center, which is the brains of the system, can have a substantial impact on the operations of the electric grid. Much of the vulnerability of the control center is related to cybersecurity threats,

David Owens, Edison Electric Institute, noted that while much of the discussion is focused on the bulk power system, the most common challenges are at the distribution level, which can then end up affecting the bulk power system. He reiterated that substations and substation transformers are potential points of vulnerability in the system. According to John Kassakian, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), substation attacks are a problem that can cause tremendous disruption, particularly if key lines are affected as in the case of a switching station. Sarah Mahmood, DHS, noted that the manufacturing lead time for a single, large transformer can be up to 18 months plus another 2-3 months to get it installed and operational. Reducing this downtime is the motivation for DHS’s Recovery Transformer Program (RecX), which is discussed in great detail in Box 2-1. Joseph McClelland, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), noted that additional complications can arise from the specialization of transformers such as changes in energy efficiency, which can impact interchangeability and thereby reduce the number of spare units for a particular location.

 

Ultimately, any of these vulnerabilities could lead to significant outages. Daniel Bienstock, Columbia University, detailed the ways in which one part of the network can have devastating impacts on the rest of the system, stressing segments that may not even be in proximity to each other.

The utilities are relatively well prepared for physical attacks on the grid infrastructure that are dispersed, uncoordinated, and limited according

According to Dr. Kassakian, much more challenging is the case of a widespread coordinated attack. For instance, in the case of the 9/11 World Trade Center attack, there was a significant communications issue, as multiple agencies had different protocols that hindered a coordinated response. Furthermore, such an attack might take place across multiple nodes in the system, which can result in the types of cascading blackouts mentioned previously. Such attacks also typically occur without warning, reducing opportunities for pre-emptive mitigation strategies. Transmission lines are vulnerable to air attack in numerous ways. He also pointed out that an attack on a switching station, which serves as an interconnect between multiple lines, might be just as disruptive as a coordinated attack. One particularly damaging and coordinated attack could utilize the threat of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapon. While there are some parallels to a geomagnetic disturbance such as the one that shut off power throughout the northern reaches of the United States and Canada on March 13, 1989, an EMP device has a far more localized and targeted impact. Massoud Amin, University of Minnesota, and Dr. Kassakian both noted that an EMP weapon, which could be as small as a briefcase, could be used to attack the control systems of the grid at the same time as an attack on the physical infrastructure, thus significantly compounding the effect of the physical attack by disabling some of the inherent balancing mechanisms in the grid. A cyberattack combined with a physical attack on the infrastructure may have a similarly crippling effect,

Nature can launch its own devastating, widespread attack. While utilities may typically be prepared for an “n-1” or “n-2” event, Mr. Whitley noted that Hurricane Sandy was an “n-90” event. Long Island lost all ties to Connecticut and New Jersey, and New York City lost all ties to New Jersey (Figure 2-2). Over 8 GW of generation capacity went offline, both through loss of transmission and, more directly, through flooding, resulting in over 2 million customer outages in the immediate aftermath.

 

The use of a spare recovery transformer was seized upon by many in attendance as a serious option to reduce the vulnerability of the system to failed equipment. While the components of a substation are relatively easily replaced, the difficulty of and lead time necessary for replacing a transformer is a hindrance that can slow down the mitigation response. Anjan Bose, Washington State University, currently on leave and serving on the Department of Energy’s Grid Tech Team, did mention that the recent rebirth of transformer manufacturing in the United States, as described by Mr. Ball, does reduce the amount of downtime a utility might expect for replacement.

BOX 2-1 The Department of Homeland Security Recovery Transformer Program Sarah Mahmood, Department of Homeland Security, described the successful deployment of a recovery transformer outside Houston, Texas. The RecX recovery transformer program is designed to act as a rapidly deployable spare for a 365 kV:138 kV/200 MVA transformer, reducing the amount of time for transport and installation from 2 or 3 months down to about a week. The key design feature is to replace the three-phase transformer with three single-phase transformers. Each is smaller and weighs much less than a full three-phase transformer, allowing it to be delivered by truck rather than train or barge.

Because there is no longer funding for the RecX program, replacements for these larger transformers are not being developed at this time. Until those transformers are designed, the highest capacity part of the transmission system is still vulnerable to long-term outages. There was a further question about the susceptibility of these transformers to attack—while Ms. Mahmood agreed that these transformers are just as susceptible to a physical attack as those they replaced, the RecX transformer is slightly less susceptible to ground-induced currents and, therefore, EMP weapons.

In order to provide more reliable and efficient service, the electric power delivery system is incorporating an ever increasing amount of data transfer, with communications occurring over a wide array of systems. Massoud Amin, University of Minnesota, noted that the systems have become so intertwined that operators may forget where the data is coming from, citing an anecdote of a power plant operator who was receiving all of his commands over the internet. Granger Morgan, CMU, pointed out that while adding more points of intelligent control can add capacity, stability, and flexibility, it also adds more entry points for cyberattack.

While the sophistication of cyberattacks is increasing, the level of technical knowledge necessary for the attack is decreasing

the power sector is an increasing target for cyberattacks, both in the United States and abroad. Stressing the ubiquitous nature of cyberattacks, Terry Boston, PJM Interconnection, recalled a common saying: “There are two types of people: those who’ve been attacked, and those who don’t know they’ve been attacked.” With such attacks becoming commonplace, it is crucial to understand where the underlying vulnerabilities lie in the electric power delivery system.

the new world that is emerging—just as critical infrastructure has become increasingly integrated with the electric power system, so too has the grid become more reliant upon the communications network. An increasing number of sensors applied to the grid allows for both improved flexibility and increasing automation. However, Mr. McClelland noted that such an increase in automation increases the number of on-ramps for cyberattacks. And as Mr. Rasche pointed out, this increased integration with the communications infrastructure can leave the grid vulnerable, as layer upon layer of connectedness results in an increasing amount of trust placed in suppliers. The legacy systems common in transmission and distribution systems often communicate via insecure protocols,

One of the biggest challenges in securing this legacy hardware is the fact that these very protocols are created through standards organizations, and such processes are, by design, very slow to change. Therefore, more robust network, system, and security management protocols are necessary for transmission and distribution systems to identify the types of security faults common to antiquated hardware.

Modernized hardware and software do not necessarily offer increased protection, however. As Fred Hintermeister, North American Electricity Reliability Corporation (NERC), pointed out, supply chain security is critical to ensuring that a particular subsystem is secure, regardless of the system or vendor. Dr. Nielsen agreed, expanding on the necessity of knowing who wrote the software for every component of all of your partners’ systems. While this may seem a daunting task, the increasing number of attacks is pushing hard on utilities and their partners to ensure that their systems are secure at every level. NERC is working with a global network of governmental intelligence sources, vulnerability researchers, and others to develop products that specifically address emergent issues, particularly in the area of cybersecurity. A system is only as secure as its weakest link, and it is a crucial part of established NERC procedure to push mitigation measures out to the relevant bulk power system entities in a timely manner so that they may address the full chain of operations.

Risk Assessment and Cybersecurity. Given the prevalence of attacks (Figure 3-3), it is crucial to evaluate how best to maintain system integrity with minimal risk.

The regulatory process itself is not well designed for cybersecurity.

NERC can develop standards for reliability and cybersecurity and submit them to FERC, but because the process is both slow and open, it is not adequate for national security purposes—in effect, both the threat and the mitigation strategy are announced through the regulatory process.

Given the nature of the cyberthreat, there was significant discussion over the potential for catastrophic damage, particularly for causing damage to the physical infrastructure. Dr. Morgan cited recent work at Carnegie Mellon indicating a low probability that a hacker could destabilize the bulk power grid by toggling customer loads via hacked smart meters. However, Mr. McClelland cited both the Aurora test at Idaho National Laboratory and a collaborative project with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to identify critical frequency vulnerabilities for customer load shedding as evidence of the sensitivity of certain aspects of the physical infrastructure to cyberattack.

Most obviously, according to Dr. Amin, wireless and public internet access should be avoided at all costs. Mr. Boston suggested building the system like a nuclear secure lab, where communication is handled as an information diode that does not “shake hands” with the computer, so that information transfer is one-way.

1 A. Narayanan, 2012, The emerging smart grid: Opportunities for increased system reliability and potential security risks, Dissertations, Paper 138, available at http://repository.cmu.edu/dissertations/138.

2 Video available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJyWngDco3g.

3 J. H. Eto, et al, 2010, Use of frequency response metrics to assess the planning and operating requirements for reliable integration of variable renewable generation, LBNL-4142E, December, available at http://certs.lbl.gov/pdf/lbnl-4142e.pdf.

Assessing the vulnerability of a system is difficult, particularly in the case of a zero-day, or previously unknown, vulnerability. How can one measure resilience to an unanticipated event?

 

Large blackouts can be particularly devastating and happen much more frequently than a normal distribution predicts.

the impact of a blackout exponentially increases with the duration of the blackout, and the duration of restoration decreases exponentially with the availability of initial sources of power. For several time-critical loads, quick restoration (minutes rather than hours or even days) is crucial. Blackstart generators, which can be started without any connection to the grid, are a key element in restoring service after a widespread outage. These initial sources of power include pump-storage hydropower, which can take 5-10 minutes to start, to certain types of combustion turbines, which take on the order of hours.

For a limited outage, restoration can be rapid, which will then allow sufficient time for repair to bring the system to full operability, although there may be a challenge for subsurface cables in metropolitan areas. On the other hand, in widespread outages, restoration itself may be a significant barrier, as was the case in the 1965 and 2003 Northeast blackouts. Natural disasters, however, can also lead to significant issues of repair—after Hurricanes Rita and Katrina, full repair of the electric power system took several years

This interconnectedness is one of the major reasons the electrical grid is an attractive target for terrorist attack—namely, other services have become dependent on the electric power system. David Kaufman, FEMA, recognized that impacts of overlapping interdependency could cascade because the supply chain for many industries has become globalized—for example, according to Mr. Kaufman, truck production in Louisiana was shut down by the earthquake in Japan, which halted the supply of a particular mineral needed for metallic paint. Thus, evaluating resilience in response to a power outage goes far beyond the electric power sector.

Services critical to a community are diverse, including elevators, subways, traffic signals, police stations, cell phone towers, grocery stores, ATMs, and gas stations. Joseph McClelland, FERC, pointed out that not only does the electric power system feed into these services, but in some cases it is reliant on these systems as well. For instance, with a shift in generation fuel from coal to natural gas, the energy sector is increasingly reliant on the natural gas pipeline infrastructure; with events like the Telvent compromise in 20123 and the Shamoon cyberattack in 20124 in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, resilience to terrorism and natural disaster for the electric power system involves both upstream and downstream dependencies. The natural gas system may be particularly stressed during the winter when it is being used for heating, making the system especially vulnerable to attack.

Telvent Canada is a company that provides remote administration and monitoring tools for the energy sector. In September 2012, the company discovered that its internal firewall and security system had been breached by a Chinese hacking group. Shamoon is a computer virus capable of transmitting information about the files of the infected computer as well as deleting all data from the hard drive. It was first used on August 15, 2012, by hackers from a group called the Cutting Sword of Justice in an attack on Saudi Arabia’s national oil company, Aramco. It was also suspected in a later cyberattack on a large liquefied natural gas company in Qatar, RasGas.

Much of the information necessary to make good decisions is classified and/or proprietary, but any such decision making needs to be made in the public domain.

Distributed generation, which could pose a challenge for reliability and safety as power flow becomes a two-way street.

Mr. Owens cited net metering as one particular case that does not adequately account for the fact that a customer’s renewable generation from rooftop solar, for example, is not equivalent to power generated by the grid. John Kassakian, MIT, also pointed to renewable portfolio standards as a key cost burden being placed unfairly on utilities through public policy.

1 National Research Council, 2012, Terrorism and the Electric Power Delivery System , The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C.

Miscellaneous

Annual sales in 2006 were $326 billion. Electricity outages in the U.S. cost an estimated $80 billion every year, mostly from small disturbances (LaCommare).

Table 2.1 Major Industry Players in the U.S. Electric Industry

  • Asset Owners: 1) Vertically integrated utilities (owning generation, transmission, and distribution) 2) Generation and transmission utilities 3) Transmission utilities or companies   4) Distribution utilities 5) Generation companies 6) Marketing companies
  • Institutional Structures of Asset Owners: 1) Investor-owned electric utilities (IOUs), 2) Rural electric cooperatives (RECs or Co-ops) 3) Municipal utilities (MUNIs) 4) Federal power agencies
  • Other Asset Operators and Coordinators: 1) North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC), 2) Independent system operators (ISOs)  3) Regional transmission operators (RTOs)   4) Regional reliability organizations (RROs)
  • Government Entities and Regulatory Authorities: 1) State regulatory commissions, 2) Power marketing authorities (PMAs) 3) Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) 4) U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) 5) Energy Information Administration (EIA)   6) Bonneville Power Administration (BPA)   7) Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)   8) V Western Area Power Administration (WAPPA)
  • Industry Associations and Institutions: 1) Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), 2) National Regulatory Research Institute (NRRI)    3) Edison Electric Institute (EEI) 4) National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA)  5) Electric Power Supply Association (EPSA)  6) National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC)    7) Association of State Energy Research and Technology Transfer Institutes (ASERTTI) 8) National Association of State Utility Consumer Advocates (NASUCA)

NERC requires organizations to register as one or more of: Generator owners, Generator operators, Transmission service providers, Transmission owners, Transmission operators, Distribution providers, Load-serving entities, Purchasing-selling entities, Reliability authorities, Planning authorities, Balancing authorities, Interchange authorities, Transmission planners, Resource planners, Standards developers, and/or Compliance monitors.

Table 8.1. Examples of Critical Social Services that depend on Availability of Electric Power

Emergency Services

  • 911 and other dispatch centers
  • Police headquarters and station houses
  • Fire protection services
  • Emergency medical services
  • Hazardous materials Response Teams

Medical Services: Ambulance, Life-critical hospital care, Clinics and Pharmacies, Nursing Homes

Communications and cyber services

  • Radio broadcast media
  • Television broadcast media
  • Cable television
  • Conventional and wireless telephone and data systems
  • Wired data service
  • Computer Services

Water and sewer: Water supply & Sewer systems

Natural gas. Pipes may burst in cold weather if homes/buildings are left without heat.

Food

  • Retail groceries (cash registers, lighting, etc)
  • Wholesale grocery and distribution networks
  • Food production facilities (farms, animal facilities, processing, packaging, etc)
  • Refrigeration: Spoiled food in homes and grocery stores

Financial Cash Machines                 Credit card systems                Banks

Fuel   Bulk fuel delivery                     Local storage infrastructure    Retail gasoline sales

Non-emergency government services

  • Information service offices: Important for distributing emergency information. Risk of chaos if information not available.
  • Operations units
  • Prisons and other detention facilities: Potential risks to prisoners, guards, and public if security systems fail.
  • Schools

Transportation systems

  • Traffic lights
  • Tunnels (esp ventilation)
  • Light rail systems and subways
  • Stranded commuter trains (i.e. outage in Italy 110 trains with 30,000 passengers)
  • Conventional rail systems, including railroad crossings
  • Air traffic control, navigation, landing aids, and airport operations
  • River lock and dam operations
  • Buses
  • Drawbridge operations

Lighting: buildings, residential (risk of fires from candles), commercial and industrial, street

Building operations: elevators, space heating and cooling

Other instabilities.Some states have more stringent environmental regulations than at the federal level, and don’t allow coal generated electricity, making it harder for systems operators to meet reliability objectives. This is made even harder when communities build renewable-energy-based resources like wind for generation, since unreliable renewables are often far from customers, and not able to generate electricity when the need is greatest, increasing the complications of system design, operation, [and the need for natural gas combined cycle plants to make up for the lack of power].

Other Impacts (OTA 1990)

  • Agriculture. There can be significant hazards to livestock and produce during a blackout. Sensitive processes include incubation, milking, pumping, heating, air-conditioning, and refrigeration.
  • Residential. Consumers do not have air-conditioning, heat, hot water, lights, freezers, refrigerators, stoves and microwave ovens, toasters, home computers, elevators etc.
  • Transportation A blackout affects virtually every mode of transportation (box D). Subways, elevators, and escalators stop running, street traffic is snarled without traffic lights. Gasoline pumps do not work, taxis and buses decline over time. Parking lot gates and toll booths will not operate. Trains can function, but it can be hazardous without signal lights. Other transportation effects result from the inability to deliver goods.
  • Looting and fires. Looting and arson can severely strain police and fire-fighting and services. During the New York City blackout there were 1,037 fires (primarily arson)
  • Water supply systems often rely on gravity to move water from reservoirs through the mains and to maintain pressure throughout the system. Some power may be required at pumping stations and reservoirs. Loss of pressure in mains hampers free-fighting and may permit contaminants to seep into the water supply.
  • Electricity is needed in treatment and pumping of sewage. An outage at a treatment plant causes raw sewage to bypass the treatment process and flow into the waterways. Lack of pumping station power prevents sewage flow and ultimately causes a backup at the lowest points of input (usually basements in low-lying areas. Many sewage treatment plants and pumping stations have standby power supplies, but only for short durations. After standby power is exhausted, untreated sewage flows continuously from the treatment plant.
  • Destruction of Four or More Major Transmission Substations. The destruction of more than 3 transmission substations would cause long-term blackouts in many areas of the country. Only a few areas have a good enough geographic balance of load and generation to survive this very severe test.

Costs of blackouts: food spoilage, damage to electronic data, life-support systems inoperable in hospitals, arson and looting (in the 1977 New York City blackout, this accounted for half of the economic costs — $155 million), overtime payments to police and fire personnel, increases in insurance rates, lost productivity at commercial and industrial companies. Many industrial processes are highly sensitive to power disruptions. An interruption of less than 1 second can shut plant equipment down for several hours. Outages can spoil raw materials, work-in-progress, and finished goods. Spoilage is a significant problem in chemical processes, steel manufacture, food products, and other industries (OTA 1990)

Sabotage and Vandalism: Insulators on distribution lines are a frequent target for vandals with guns. To date, no long-term blackouts have been caused in the United States by sabotage. However, this observation is less reassuring than it sounds. Electric power system components have been targets of numerous isolated acts of sabotage in this country. Several incidents have resulted in multimillion-dollar repair bills. In several other countries, sabotage has led to extensive blackouts and considerable economic damage in addition to the cost of repair

United States before 1990: Over the past decade there were few notable acts of sabotage, and apparently none that were intended to cause harm other than to the local utility. The most common cause has been labor disputes. In July 1989, a tower on a 765-kV line owned by the Kentucky Power Co. was bombed, temporarily disabling the line. No arrests have been made. In 1987-88, power line poles and substations were bombed or shot in the Wyoming-Montana border area. Later in 1988, similar attacks were experienced in West Virginia. Such attacks had also occurred in 1985 in West Virginia and Kentucky. All these attacks occurred during coal mine strikes. Two Florida substations were heavily damaged by simultaneous dynamite explosions in 1981 in one of the most expensive incidents. Damages totaled about $3 million, but no significant customer outages resulted. No arrests have been made, but circumstantial evidence points to a contractor labor dispute. Incidents stemming from unknown motives include the cutting of guy wires and subsequent toppling of a tower on the 1,800-MW, 1,000-kV DC intertie in California in 1987. There was negligible impact on the power system, because the load on the line was light at the time and it was scheduled for maintenance the next day, so alternate power routes had already been arranged.

Another incident demonstrates that saboteurs can mount a coordinated operation. In 1986, three 500-kV lines from the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station were grounded simultaneously over a 30-mile stretch. It happened at a time when none of the nuclear reactors was operating, so no disruption occurred. Under different conditions, the reactors would have shut down. No arrests have been made.

El Salvador: Attacks on electric power systems have been most severe in El Salvador. The Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) has repeatedly bombed or fired on transmission towers, substations and hydroelectric power plants. Up to 90 percent of the entire Nation has been blacked out by the FMLN during some sabotage campaigns. The FMLN has even produced a manual detailing how to attack an electric power system. According to official sources, the FMLN has launched over 2,000 attacks on electric systems since 1980. The Sendero Luminosa (Shining Path) revolutionary group has adopted a similar strategy in Peru, frequently leaving Lima, as well as a 600-mile stretch of the country, blacked out or under power rationing for 40 to 50 days (OTA, 1990).

Industries most dependent on electricity (in New Jersey): aluminum, wet corn milling, cement, pipelines (oil, natural gas, water), electrometallurgical products, petroleum refining, platemaking, soybean oil mills, carbon black, smelting and refining of copper, industrial organic and inorganic chemicals, plastics and resins (Greenberg, Met al. 2007. “Short and Intermediate Economic Impacts of a Terrorist Initiated Loss of Electric Power: Case Study of New Jersey.” Energy Policy 35(1):722–733.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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