Peak Everything, Overshoot, & Collapse

Can you grow enough fruit and vegetables to be self-sufficient?

Posted on August 18, 2020 by energyskeptic

Preface. If you want to try to feed yourself, buy John Jeavons excellent book “How to Grow More Vegetables, Ninth Edition: (and Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops) Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land with Less Water Than You Can Imagine”. If you’re really serious, go to http://www.growbiointensive.org/ to find out where you can take a course. When I took it in 2004 Jeavons told us that in our area of Northern California, we could probably get by on half an acre per person because our benign climate allows three crops a year. But we don’t get enough rain to do that, so massive water storage is required as well.

Cities will someday be a bad place to be as energy grows scarce and supply lines break down because trucks don’t have diesel fuel. This is why the younger you are the more you should consider moving to an agricultural area where your muscle power, your own yard, and local food can keep you fed after oil decline.

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

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Wong, J. 2020. Can you really grow enough fruit and veg to be self-sufficient? Newscientist.com.

There’s been a surge in people wanting to grow fruit and vegetables, but the path to self-sufficiency isn’t as easy as some may have you think.

how realistic are the promises that such efforts will help you along your way to self-sufficiency? Let’s do the maths.

If your goal is to feed yourself, it would be hard to find a better crop than potatoes. In terms of calories per unit of land, they are easily the most productive crop that can be grown, at least in the UK. Potatoes grow best in cool, well-drained, loose soil that is about 45° to 55°F (7° to 13°C) with full sun of at least 6 hours of sunlight each day.

Churning out yields of approximately 8.8 pounds on 1.2 square yards (4 kilos per square meter) on farms with these ideal conditions can produce more than three times the calories of wheat. Spuds also happen to be one of the crops with the most balanced nutrition, meaning humans can survive for at least a year eating very little else, according to the International Potato Center in Peru.

Based on an average intake of 2250 calories a day (2000 women, 2500 men), you’ll need to grow 821,250 calories a year. That’s around a tonne of spuds, requiring 2860 square feet / 318 square yards / 0.066 acre / 266 square meters of land. Now multiply by the number of people in your household.

Perhaps by self-sufficiency they don’t mean calorie-wise, but just in terms of fruit and veg requirements? Working on World Health Organization guidelines stating that adults need at least 14 ounces (five 80-gram servings) of fresh produce a day to maintain health would mean each of us requires 320 pounds (146 kilograms) every year. While vegetable yields vary, for a family of four, this would mean a minimum of 292 square metres for lower weight crops like lettuce (.072 acre / 350 square yards) and about 100 square yards (84 square meters / 0.02 acre) for heavier ones like apples.

But let’s not forget, these crops are highly seasonal, and storing them to last the whole year will be tough. Even with some of the world’s best experts at post-harvest storage and vast climate-controlled warehouses, millions of tonnes of food is lost by industrial agriculture each year. A rack in your garage or a fancy chest freezer simply can’t compete.

Is growing your own great exercise, a chance to get fresh air and a welcome distraction in these uncertain times? A resounding yes. Does it teach invaluable lessons about where our food comes from, while giving an edible bonus? 100 per cent. But is it likely to provide beginners with even a passing semblance of self-sufficiency, as the headlines promise? I’m afraid not. So enjoy your garden (if you have one) for all the benefits it provides.

Posted in Farming & Ranching | Tagged agriculture | 4 Comments

The Golden Age of Russian Oil Nears an End

Posted on August 15, 2020 by energyskeptic

Preface. One huge factor in Russia’s future oil decline not mentioned below is how incredibly corrupt and inefficient Russia’s oil and gas companies are, as Rachel Maddow describes in her book “Blowout”. A few quotes:

The Russian oil and gas industry Putin controlled was known for its “tumbledown” machinery and technological deficiencies, coasting on the assets inherited from the Soviet Union. Virtually all of Russian oil comes from fields that were already known in Soviet times. There have been very few new discoveries that are producing today. The drama of this situation is that the inheritance is now starting to run down. What’s left is offshore arctic and tight shale, both difficult and expensive to get.

Russia isn’t capable of doing offshore drilling operations in the frozen north, with little in the way of useful drilling rigs or equipment of any kind–not even basics like subsea wellheads. In 2012, having made Russia’s economy and its power in the world almost entirely dependent on oil and gas, Putin faced a serious conundrum: his ability to maintain Russia’s place as an “energy superpower” depended almost entirely on availing himself of the expertise and technology of major Western oil companies, because Russian oil companies were gangster economy creations, and not one of them was technically or even financially competent.

Gazprom wasn’t able to keep up with all the new European demand, because its production capabilities sucked. The company hadn’t invested in new technologies, because as a state-sanctioned monopoly propped up by the Russian government and therefore free from competition, it really hadn’t needed to. Dig deep enough in the company accounting ledgers and you’d find that Gazprom lost about $40 billion a year to corruption and waste. That’s a loss nearly equal to its annual profits.

Gazprom lost money in other ways, buying a TV station for example. Why? Well, why not? Gazprom was better understood not as an energy company but as a big battering ram President Putin used to get stuff he wanted. So inefficient, money-bleeding, crappy Gazprom owned a television station and a bunch of other media properties, but only because Putin had arranged it in order to silence one of the few remaining critical voices in the Russian press. Vladimir used his security forces to arrest and to intimidate the critic who owned the media company, and then he used Gazprom as the piggy bank to buy the company at a steep jailhouse discount. Independent television journalism in Russia was thus dealt another blow, and Putin would instead have another reliable mouthpiece for the Kremlin’s party line.

Nord Stream was a pipeline project that was built from both sides at once—from Russia and from Germany. Same pipeline, same materials, same building standards. But the Russian side of the construction project (led by the Rotenberg brothers of St. Petersburg, and remember them) cost three times as much, per mile of pipeline, as the German side did. That money was not going into the pension and health fund of the Russian pipe fitters’ union; it went into the pockets of Putin and his pals. The founder of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, James Grant, sized up Gazprom and rated it, simply, “the worst managed company on the planet.”

Putin had been gangstering up the Russian oil industry for years. Eschewing competition that might encourage innovation and meritocratic success, Putin instead just smashed and grabbed any homegrown enterprises that proved resourceful or entrepreneurial or attractive to legitimate investors-goodbye, Yukos. He harassed foreign interlopers, too.

Russian oil decline in the news:

2021-11-24 oilprice.com Russia’s Oil Reserves Are Becoming Increasingly Hard To Recover

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Stratfor. 2020. The Golden Age of Russian Oil Nears an End.

Highlights

In the next 10-20 years, Russian oil will become more expensive as extraction from less accessible basins becomes necessary to maintain current export levels.
Internal inefficiencies within Russia’s oil sector, as well as the remote locations of remaining reserves and potential shifts in future oil demand, add up to a murky future for the country’s energy-reliant economy.
Moscow may adjust its budget to ensure plummeting oil prices don’t cut into its government spending, but proper economic diversification away from energy remains a complex and unlikely process.
Russia prices will continue to rise as total output becomes more reliant on difficult extraction further away from population centers (Moscow, for example, is closer to London than it is to the oil reserves locked underneath East Siberia).

Russia’s easily accessible oil reserves have long been the cornerstone of its economy. But these conventional fields are depleting, leading to the need to invest and expand into more untapped sources. This transformation will not be easy or cheap, as various factors have led to a poorly optimized oil sector that’s ill-equipped to soften the blow of rising costs. The key to maintaining a strong energy market, and securing the capital needed to develop new and expensive fields, will instead rest on whether Moscow can secure its foothold in China’s increasingly oil-hungry market. In any case, Russia may have little choice but to accept that its glory days of oil dominance and high profit margins are nearing an end.

Russia’s days of cheap and easy-to-access oil are numbered. As active reserves shrink, energy producers will eventually be forced to shift extraction to lower-margin, higher-cost areas. These compounding hardships will not be limited to the oil industry, however, as the coupling of energy rents and government expenditure will radiate the damage throughout Russian society.

In the mid-2000s, West Siberian conventional fields revitalized the Russian economy, producing vast sums of low-cost oil at a time of rapidly rising global demand. But 15 years on, many of these fields have since plateaued or begun to decline. New fields have the potential to largely offset this decline, but developing these areas come with higher upfront costs and will also eventually progress to a stage of declining production sometime in the 2030s.

To maintain supply, Russian oil producers will thus be forced to explore new avenues of “unconventional” production in the years ahead, generally situated in the following two categories:

Hard-to-recover reserves in the Caspian, Black and White sea regions, as well as deep drilling in the Arctic (currently curbed by sanctions) and East Siberian fields. Accessing these reserves, however, require considerable upfront investment or hefty tax incentives.
Shale reserves are perhaps more prevalent in Russia than anywhere in the world, with key areas being the Bazhenov and Domanik formations. But Russia’s lack of tools to efficiently extract the resource due to sanctions, combined with poor inter-industry competition, has led to a measly output of 15,000 barrels of tight oil per day at a steep price tag.

Russia is pessimistic about its future. In a draft of its 2035 Energy Strategy, the best case scenario has oil production remaining unchanged, with pessimistic reports projecting a 12-40 percent plunge in production.

Shale oil is already three times as expensive as conventional oil.

Failure to Optimize Production

Russia’s current energy sector is also ill-equipped to soften the blow of rising costs due to the following key factors:

Russia’s inefficient and poorly integrated refinery network has led to higher demand from key markets for bulk crude in lieu of more profitable finished products. For environmental and efficiency reasons, Europe prefers to refine oil exports themselves. But the continental market’s preference for Russian crude instead of finished products has likely strained the longevity of West Siberian fields. In recent years, Russia has exported crude volumes on par with Saudi Arabia, despite possessing a third as many known reserves in less accessible basins. The inability to lengthen this supply has expedited the need to enter harder-to-access areas. While neither Russia’s style of export or price-taking has been too pernicious when production is cheap, rising costs will magnify these weaknesses.
A lack of globally respected financial institutions has robbed Russia of the economic alpha gained from national marketplaces, exacerbating its reliance on Brent pricing and dollar-denominated oil.
International sanctions have prevented the sale of advanced oil extraction equipment (99% which Russia imports), limiting Russia’s ability to take full advantage of offshore reserves or shale deposits. While backdoors to sanctions exist, Russia remains intensely reliant on international support to prop up advanced extraction. Western restrictions will thus continue to hamper Russia’s ability to crack the true potential of its remaining assets.
The lack of competition in Russia’s oligopoly oil market has edged out small-scale innovation: Large producers have already licensed nearly all (95.7%) of the country’s proven reserves, and 88 percent of its estimated reserves.

Far out #3: Sugar power

Posted on August 9, 2020 by energyskeptic

Preface. No, you object, sugar in the gas tank will destroy the engine. Not true. Snopes.com says that won’t happen because sugar doesn’t dissolve in automotive fuel or caramelize, and so it does not turn into the debilitating gunk this well-known revenge calls for. Also, the sugar can’t reach the engine because of protective filters, though it can clog the fuel filter or fuel injector, which would stop the car. The “breakthrough” below is for a sugar fuel cell, so no worries at all.

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Riordan, T. June 21, 2004. A Sweet Way to Fuel Cars. For a group of researchers at Sandia National Labs, sugar in the gas tank isn’t such a bad idea. New York Times.

You may not be able to refuel your car with corn syrup or charge your computer by plugging it into a bottle of Coca-Cola anytime soon. But to Stanley H. Kravitz and a group of researchers at Sandia National Laboratories, sugar looks like the new oil.

Dr. Kravitz and his colleagues have begun to apply for patents covering ways to convert glucose, a basic form of sugar, into energy.

Glucose seems an obvious potential source for fuel. Unlike hydrogen, for example, it is renewable, cheap and abundant.

”The problem with hydrogen is that it isn’t just found in the air or lying around,” Dr. Kravitz said. ”You have to do something quite energy-intensive to break apart some molecule in order to get hydrogen.” So why aren’t other researchers trying to power their fuel cells with glucose rather than hydrogen? Glucose molecules, it turns out, are not easily persuaded to give up their energy.

Over time, naturally occurring enzymes have turned mammals into glucose-burning machines. The human body, for example, metabolizes glucose in a delicately choreographed dance. Twelve different enzymes partner in succession with the glucose molecule, each enzyme sending two electrons spinning offstage into cellular power sources and thereby fueling the body. (If the body does not need this energy when it is made, the body stores it as fat.)

One approach that Sandia researchers are taking is to genetically engineer enzymes that mimic those in the human body. ”If evolution figured it out, we should be able to figure it out,” Dr. Kravitz said.

Another approach is nonbiological, using metals like platinum to liberate electrons.

Early potential applications of glucose fuel cells would require only small amounts of energy. For example, security systems to detect movement or the presence of chemicals could use sensors that would be plugged into trees, siphoning glucose from sap for energy.

Sandia researchers are ”making electricity for electricity’s sake — as a power source.”

Dr. Kravitz and fellow Sandia researchers are developing an array of tiny glass needles, as slim and sharp as a mosquito’s proboscis, that could, for example, be imperceptibly ”plugged in” to a soldier’s arm and used to convert glucose from the human body into energy.

”Suppose you could make a patch that went on the arm and had little micro needles that didn’t hurt,” Dr. Kravitz said. ”Now the soldier just needs to eat an Oreo cookie to keep his radio going.”

So this research could solve both the world’s energy problem and the obesity epidemic simultaneously? ”That’s sort of a wild and crazy idea,” Dr. Kravitz said. ”But then again, maybe not.”

”The efficiency stinks right now,” Dr. Kravitz acknowledged, noting that so far Sandia researchers were able to produce power in the milliwatt range, enough to power a tiny light-emitting diode — while a car would require kilowatts of power.

”We’ve increased the efficiency by a factor of a thousand in a period of three years,” he said. ”But we need to go up by a factor of a million.”

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Yet another researcher proposes to hydrogen from a water sugar mixture at 86 Degrees F with a mix of natural enzymes in just 5 to 10 years, which was said back in 2008, so like most promised breakthroughs, don’t hold your breath (Velasquez-Manoff 2008).

References

Velasquez-Manoff. 2008. Sugar-powered cars. Christian Science Monitor

Posted in Far Out | Tagged sugar | Comments Off

Limits to growth: Oil & Gas Fracking sand

Posted on August 6, 2020 by energyskeptic

Preface. Below is an excerpt about fracking sand from Beiser’s 2018 book “The World in a Grain. The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization”.

In 2022 fracking sand has gotten so expensive it’s a factor in why production isn’t increasing: 2022-3-23 Sand for fracking is now 3 times as expensive as it was last year, and it’s one of several reasons US oil production isn’t increasing. Fracking sand now costs between $40 and $45 per ton, nearly 185% higher than last year. While some of the frac sand used by drillers in Texas and New Mexico is sourced locally, a lot is actually shipped in from Wisconsin via rail. In either case, shortages of labor and transportation capacity have been complicating drillers’ efforts

Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Women in ecology Podcasts: WGBH, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity, Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Vince Beiser. 2018. The World in a Grain. The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization. Riverhead Books.

Fracking sand

The fracking boom in the United States has created a voracious hunger for
what’s known as “frac sand. It happens that there are huge deposits of just
that kind of sand in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Result: the fracking rush in
North Dakota has sparked a frac sand rush in the Upper Midwest. Thousands of acres of fields and forests have been stripped away so that miners can get their hands on those rare grains.

Thanks to the fracking boom, which kicked into high gear in 2008, the United States has overtaken Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the world’s biggest oil and gas producer. None of this could happen without sand. America’s fracking fields are the latest front to which we have deployed armies of sand to maintain our lifestyle.

By shooting a highly pressurized mix of water, chemicals, and sand into a well bore, drillers shatter the surrounding shale, spider-webbing it with tiny cracks through which the hydrocarbons can flow. They need the sand to keep the cracks open, holding fast against the pressure of the surrounding rock that wants to close them back up.

Every one of those wells needs sand, and lots of it. A single well can use as much as 25,000 tons—enough to fill more than two hundred railroad cars. But like members of a specialized combat unit, frac sand grains need to meet a list of highly specific physical requirements. They must be hard enough to withstand all that pressure, which means they must be at least 95 percent quartz.4 That eliminates most common construction sand, shrinking the pool to the silica sands used for glassmaking. But frac sand must also have the right shape: small enough to fit snugly into the frack cracks and rounded enough to let the hydrocarbons slide easily around them.

Most quartz grains, you’ll recall, are angular; there aren’t many places where you can find grains with such high purity and low angularity. The quartz sands under the ground of western and central Wisconsin have just that rare combination. These are ancient grains that were eroded, transported, then buried and uplifted again. Generally speaking, the older a grain is, the more rounded it is, thanks to however many extra million years of having its angles and edges worn down. Wisconsin also happens to have an excellent rail network and relatively lax environmental regulations. And so the fracking boom has sparked a frac-sand boom in the Badger State. Thousands of acres of the state’s farmland and forest are being torn up to get at the precious silica below.

In 2010, there were ten frac sand mines and processing plants in Wisconsin; four years later, that number had shot up to 135.6 The state produced around 25 million tons of frac sand in 2014, worth nearly $2 billion.

Production is likely to continue growing, since oil and gas operators have learned that increasing the amount of sand they shoot into a well increases the yield of oil or gas. New frac sand mines are also being opened in Texas as producers seek sources closer to the oil fields.

Nationwide, the legions of silica sand used for fracking have grown tenfold since 2003.7 They now dwarf those used for glassmaking and all other purposes, including silicon chips. By 2016, total silica sand production stood at nearly 92 million tons per year, almost three-quarters of which was used for fracking. Only 7 percent went to the glass industry.

The first step, he explained, is for excavating machines to scrape off the “overburden”—the plants, trees, topsoil, and unwanted miscellaneous rock lying on top of the sandstone that is their target. One reason Wisconsin silica sand is so desirable is because it lies very close to the surface, requiring relatively little digging to get at it.10 The topsoil is piled somewhere out of the way; it will be needed to help reclaim the land once the mine is tapped out, as required by law.

Once the sandstone is exposed, blasting experts drill a grid of holes into it, pack them with explosives, and simply blow a chunk of the hillside to smithereens. The sandstone shatters and collapses in a heap of . . . well, sand and stones. Front-end loaders dump the raw sand into trucks. After the “raw pile” is cleared away, excavators tear off another swatch of overburden and the process starts again, the hill disappearing slice by slice.

Down on the mine floor, the trucks haul the sand a few hundred yards to another pile, from where it’s fed into a complicated behemoth of a machine, a forty-foot-high Frankenstein of pipes, tanks, ladders, catwalks, and conveyor belts. A series of belts haul the sand up some thirty feet to a sorting screen, where jets spray it with water to turn it into a slurry. This sand-water mixture is then pumped onto a series of vibrating metal screens, which separate out first the miscellaneous rocks, then the oversize grains, shuffling these unwanted bits into a waste pile. Once everything bigger than .8 millimeters has been screened out, the remaining slurry is pumped up through corrugated pipe into a kind of upside-down pyramid called a hydrosizer. One hundred jets blast down into the cone, creating a carefully calibrated rising current that carries the lighter grains up and over the top into a trough, while the heavier ones sink to the bottom. By controlling the strength of the jets, you control the size of the grains that sink.

That sand is then run through a series of four attrition tanks—basically giant washing machines that spin the slurry, making the grains grind against one another, washing off silt or other impurities that might coat them. Last stop is a dewatering screen, a mesh of tiny slots measuring .01 millimeters, big enough for water to get through but not sand.

The sand is taken next to the drying plant, a vast warehouse-style building a few hundred yards away. Trucks load the washed sand into a metal hopper that feeds it onto another series of rising conveyor belts that carry it up to a doorway in the dryer plant, some twenty feet above the ground. Inside is a cavernous space, untouched by natural light, filled with another set of machines. The sand gets one more sifting, to filter out any stray rocks that might have gotten in on the journey from the pile, and then is fed through a long cylindrical tank.

A series of ducts underneath the tank blows hot air upward, drying the sand, while smokestack-like chimneys whisk away stray silica dust. “That’s the bad shit,” says Losinski. “That’s the stuff you don’t want to breathe.” Crystalline silica dust is sharp and jagged, especially when it’s freshly formed—like that found at sand mines and processing sites—and it can wreak havoc on the lungs. It’s been known for decades that too much exposure can cause silicosis, an especially severe lung disease.

A final relay of vibrating screens separates the sand into three size grades. Those are then hauled up a hundred feet in bucket elevators, vertical conveyor belts fitted with dozens of fiberglass buckets, and dumped into one of the 3,000-ton silos atop which Losinski and I stood. Trucks drive right up to the silos, fill up, and haul the product to the nearest rail station in Winona, Minnesota. From there, it’s off to the fracking fields.

There are a number of potentially serious risks to be concerned about. The first is water. The mines need lots of it to create their slurry and to wash the sand; a single mine can run through as much as 2 million gallons per day. The miners get a lot of it from high-capacity wells, which pump more than 70 gallons a minute from underground aquifers. “There’s a lot of concern about whether that will affect groundwater and trout streams fed by these headwaters

There’s also the question of what to do with wastewater that has been used to wash and process the sand. Typically the wastewater gets pumped into settling ponds; this is where the flocculants Pat Popple worries about are added in. Flocculants help remove particles suspended in the water, which is good. But they also contain acrylamide, a neurotoxin and carcinogen, which is bad.

That compound could potentially leach from the ponds into groundwater or surface water, warns a 2014 report

Posted in Limits To Growth, Oil & Gas Fracked, Peak Sand | Tagged fracked natural gas, fracked oil, sand | 1 Comment

Heavy-duty hydrogen fuel cell trucks a waste of energy and money

Posted on July 30, 2020 by energyskeptic

FCEV Heavy truck: PEM hydrogen fuel cell on-board reforming. U.S. Department of Energy Vehicle Technologies Program, Estimated for 2020. Source (DOE 2011).

Figure 1. FCEV Heavy truck: PEM hydrogen fuel cell on-board reforming. U.S. Department of Energy Vehicle Technologies Program, Estimated for 2020. Source (DOE 2011).

Preface. There are 3 articles that I summarize below:

ARB. November 2015. Medium- and heavy-duty fuel cell electric vehicles. Air Resources Board, California Environmental Protection Agency.
NRC. 2003. Energy and Transportation: Challenges for the Chemical Sciences in the 21st Century. National Research Council
NACFE. 2020. Making sense of heavy-duty hydrogen fuel cell tractors. North American council for freight efficiency. It has additional information in hydrogen fuel cell (FCEV) trucks.

Figure 1 reveals why hydrogen fuel cell trucks are incredibly inefficient. Turning hydrogen back into electricity with a fuel cell is only 24.7 % efficient (.84 * .67 * .54 * .84 * .97) as shown in figure 1. There are multiple stages where energy is lost due to inefficiencies at each step: Natural gas upstream and liquefaction, hydrogen on-board reforming, fuel cell efficiency, electric motor and drive-train losses, and aerodynamic/rolling resistance.

Since fuel cell electric trucks are terrible at acceleration, they always have a second propulsion system, usually a battery, making them orders of magnitude more expensive than an equivalent diesel truck, $1,300,000 versus $100,000 respectively.

Hydrogen is not a renewable, since 96 to 99% of hydrogen is made from natural gas using natural gas, but at least it can be made cheaply around the clock that way.

Hydrogen generated with solar power could only be made 10 to 25% of the time (the capacity factor) when the sun is up, and electrolysis of water is so expensive it is only made for applications that require extremely pure hydrogen, mainly NASA. The amount of space rebuildable contraptions like solar and wind take up is a problem as well. To use wind power to produce 700 Terrawatt hours of hydrogen would require wind turbines taking up 40,154 square miles (Ford 2020).

Hydrogen pipelines are too expensive to build at length, since they are corroded and embrittled by hydrogen. Yet delivery would require a $250,000 canister truck weighing 88,000 pounds (40,000 kg) delivering a paltry 880 (400 kg) of fuel, enough for 60 cars and just a few trucks. A diesel truck can carry 10,000 gallons of gas, enough to fill 800 cars. The hydrogen delivery truck cannibalize much of its energy: over a distance of 150 miles, it will burn the equivalent of 20% of the usable energy in the hydrogen it is delivering (Romm 2005).

Trucks don’t use hydrogen tanks because they take up 10% of payload weight (DOE 2011), or fuel cells, because the best only last 2500 hours but need to keep on going at least 14,560 hours in long-haul trucks and 10,400 in distribution trucks (den Boer 2013).

For a full discussion of why hydrogen will not solve our problems, see Hydrogen: The dumbest & most impossible renewable and other related articles listed at the end.

The few FCEV that exist are heavily subsidized by agencies like the California Air Resources Board Hybrid & Zero emission truck voucher incentive program (HVIP) of up to $288,000 per truck (CASEY 2023)

Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com author of “Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy”, 2021, Springer; “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report

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**ARB. November 2015. Medium- and heavy-duty fuel cell electric vehicles. Air Resources Board, California Environmental Protection Agency.**

Medium- and heavy-duty Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles (FCEV) are far from being commercial due to many barriers:

Vehicle cost (bus): $1,300,000
Vehicle cost (truck): even higher due to heavier payloads
Cost of hydrogen fuel
Cost of fuel cell power plant. At $3,000/kW for a 150 kW fuel cell system, the power plant cost is $450,000
Cost of 40-50 kg fuel tank, frame, and mounting system is $100,000
Service station costs of $5,000,000 and O&M costs of $200,000/year
Distribution of hydrogen fuel (corrodes pipes, distributed by diesel-burning trucks now)
More frequent fueling (the fueling infrastructure for FCEV medium and heavy-duty trucks is not known since there aren’t any commercial MD/HD trucks yet)
Lack of hydrogen service stations
Significantly higher costs for FCEV than diesel trucks
Hydrogen tanks weigh a lot
Hydrogen tanks take up a lot of space
Tank weight and size reduce range
Hydrogen is more expensive than diesel fuel
The only public hydrogen stations in California are for light duty cars. Because of the high pressure at which they dispense hydrogen, as well as different fueling protocols and nozzles, they are not compatible for use with current fueling protocols for medium- or heavy-duty vehicles.
FCEV can’t handle acceleration well so there is always a 2^nd propulsion system like batteries, which adds to their cost
Tanks can go on the roof of buses, but trucks do not have enough space for a tank (though there is room for the fuel cell which is roughly equal to a conventional diesel engine with a similar power rating)
Only PEM fuel cells with low operating temperatures, high power density, and so on are suitable, but they are too fragile to endure the rough ride of a truck
FCEV use too much platinum metal group elements which are limited and expensive

What is an FCEV? A FCEV is a vehicle with a fuel cell system that generates electricity to propel the vehicle and to power auxiliary equipment. Hydrogen fuel is consumed in the fuel cell stack to produce electricity, heat, and water vapor—no harmful pollutants are emitted from the vehicle. FCEVs are typically configured in a series hybrid design where the fuel cell is paired with a battery storage system. Together, the fuel cell and battery systems work to meet performance, range, efficiency, and other vehicle manufacturer goals. FCEVs have higher efficiencies, quieter operation, comparable range between fill-up, and similar performance to conventional vehicles.

Most suitable applications. Vehicles that are centrally fueled, operated, and maintained, returning to the same base at the end of the day.

NRC. 2003. Energy and Transportation: Challenges for the Chemical Sciences in the 21st Century. National Research Council

Excerpts about hydrogen fuel cells:

The most important part of a fuel cell is the membrane, which must be an ion conductor, an electronic insulator, an impermeable gas barrier and also possess good mechanical strength. However, the key issues in making a practical fuel cell are non-electrochemical. These include the acts of delivering the gases to the fuel cell membrane, removing the water, removing the heat from around the system, and controlling humidity and pressurization of gases. There are still many challenges for electrochemists, chemists, and chemical engineers. For example, a membrane that is more tolerant of environmental conditions for gases of varying pressures will allow for the elimination of various system components, which can be very expensive due to their use of stainless steel. The technical challenge is in fabricating a membrane to be thin enough so that the hydrogen side of the gas supply does not need to be humidified. However, as membranes get thinner, reliability over long periods of time becomes an issue due to faradaic losses. If the membrane is too thick, additional components must be added to humidify the hydrogen.

In a vehicle fuel cell stack, which has over 400 cells in series, the situation is even more complicated. Well over 90% of fuel cell industry funds are not spent on the membrane but on moving these gases in and out of the fuel cell stack, managing the system, and creating the environment where the membrane can do its job. Fuel cell research, however, is mainly performed in a lab where gases are supplied at exactly the right humidity, pressures, and so on. The actual commercial problem, development of a fuel-cell-powered vehicle that has a life of 15 years and 150,000 miles under terrible external environmental conditions, has not been approached.

Tolerances are also not well understood. A fuel cell stack with over 400 cells operating in this environment contains sealant, which is literally miles long. Seals will start to fail after the fuel cell is bumped and jostled on the highway and while temperature shifts between hot and cold, and the cell is turned off and on. With zero tolerance for safety failures, hydrogen leaks cannot occur with these vehicles. Additionally, every cell has to be identical or the system cannot be managed. Unfortunately, that kind of tolerance control is not yet available.

An ideal fuel cell system will have minimal components outside of the stack and will operate using ambient, unhumidified hydrogen. Although fuel cells are very efficient, they do not release much heat through the exhaust. Even though they generate less heat than an internal combustion engine, the system requires the addition of cooling components due to the generated heat in the cooling stack. However, if this stack can generate less heat, then radiators, pumps, and coolant will not be required.

The standard for a modern vehicle requires it to start within 2 seconds at worst. A fuel cell starts well within 1 second. However, fuel cells, including hydrogen fuel cells, do not operate well at subfreezing temperatures. This is because fuel cells are basically a liquid interface device and need liquid-phase water to operate. Running the system under the conditions of a highway environment is possible, but the current cost is too great for commercialization.

Practical use of hydrogen in vehicles may never happen until there is a better method to store hydrogen, especially since onboard reforming of hydrogen at a reasonable cost may not be a possibility.

The use of hydrogen requires additional infrastructure for production and transportation. One method is to use electrical energy to produce hydrogen, but power grids are very inefficient. Another is the use of a natural gas pipeline, which is also wasteful since it involves the liquefying and re-evaporation of gases.

End note: Sir William Robert Grove invented the hydrogen fuel cell or “gas battery” in the 1840s. The first practical fuel cells were not built until the Gemini and Apollo space programs in the 1960s and are still used in space today. The difference between building a successful fuel cell and a commercially successful fuel cell, however, is the same difference between putting a man on the moon and putting 10,000 men on the moon every day at an affordable price. We’re running out of time to invent a good hydrogen fuel cell, they’ve been around 180 years, and peak oil may have occurred in 2018 (Patterson 2019).

NACFE. 2020. Making sense of heavy-duty hydrogen fuel cell tractors. North American council for freight efficiency.

A few bits and pieces from this document.

Currently there are less than 8,573 hydrogen fuel cars, 48 buses, and 20 prototype trucks, most of them in California, where there are 15 retail hydrogen stations.

Estimates of an electric future with both battery electric and fuel cell vehicles will need anywhere from 2X to 8X the amount of electric energy produced today. Similarly, little of today’s hydrogen production is used for transportation. The production of both electricity and hydrogen will need to aggressively increase; and in lockstep, the demand for both will need to dramatically increase.

Today there are only a handful of prototype fuel cell demonstrator trucks in existence, each built to be successful for certain applications. Since there are only pilot vehicles, mainly in Switzerland, this report can’t say much about how they operate in real life. The costs of hydrogen, vehicles, and hydrogen production all must come down significantly to make hydrogen economically competitive with alternatives.

In order for trucks to use hydrogen, all of the following must be in place: H2 production plants need to be built and produce H with economies of scale 2) There has to be a demand for H (market penetration), 3) A distribution network must exist from production facilities to end users, 4) The delivery technology to quickly deliver high pressure H fuel in volume needs to be developed 5) Storage technology to safely and efficiently store hydrogen for distribution, fueling, and onboard the vehicle in place 6) H technology must be reliable, 7) Cheap electricity is required for electrolysis, 8) Battery cell costs must come down and energy density increase, 8) H must be safe and technicians, drivers, and emergency personnel trained to deal with problems 9) The Green H must be sustainable, available, and affordable

Quickly ramping up both electricity supply and demand, in the matter of a couple decades or less, is challenging. Application of funding can only do so much. Innovations will be required across a range of technologies.

Hydrogen colors

Green: electrolysis of water with electricity from renewable resources. Zero carbon emissions
Turquoise: thermal splitting of natural gas, instead of CO2 solid carbon produced
Pink / purple / red: produced by nuclear power electrolysis
Black / gray: from natural gas using steam-methane reforming
Yellow: electrolysis with grid electricity
Brown: from fossil fuels, usually coal, with gasification
Blue: gray or brown with CO2 sequestered or repurposed
White: byproduct of industrial processes

The truck manufacturing marketplace is entirely about supply and demand. The annual trucking market demand for new vehicles and the annual trucking manufacturing output range from 150,000 to 300,000 vehicles per year. In 2020 there were zero Class 8 fuel cell trucks produced.

In 2030, 30% of new Class 8 vehicles would optimistically be approximately 100,000 vehicles a year. There are an estimated 1.8 million Class 8 trucks hauling freight trailers in the United States today. In total, there may be up to 4 million Class 8 vehicles registered in the United States with the lives of those vehicles ranging from 12 to 20 years or more.

Trucks are long-term capital investment tools. Commercial vehicle populations change slowly. The vehicles have long life spans. It can take 20 years or more for a new technology to completely supplant an existing one through normal market attrition.

Hydrogen fuel cell trucks can be superior to Battery electric trucks if

Zero emission at tailpipe important
Tractor tare weight critical to maximizing payload
Long distance routes over 500 miles common
Winter conditions significant
Green or blue H available
Incentivized Hydrogen use
Less mountainous

As Steve Hanley of CleanTechnica summarized, “Making electricity to electrolyze hydrogen which is then used in fuel cells to power vehicles is not as efficient as making electricity and using it to power vehicles directly in the first place. Every time energy gets converted from one form to another, there are losses. The more transformations there are, the more losses occur.”

How do Heavy-duty Hydrogen Fuel Cell tractors (FCEV) vehicles work?

In all cases, FCEV also need to have batteries.

A battery dominant FCEV uses the fuel cell to charge the onboard batteries. The batteries then directly power the electric motors. As the batteries deplete running the motors, the fuel cell provides some replacement of energy, but the battery dominant system expects that the duty cycle will reduce the state of charge (SOC). Sized correctly for the duty cycle, the vehicle ends it shift before the battery SOC is completely depleted. Complete depletion generally means some low SOC cutoff typically around 20% SOC [3]. The fuel cell then recharges the parked truck prior to its next shift.

A fuel cell dominant vehicle will use both the fuel cell and the battery pack to power the electric motors. The battery pack serves to handle short demand peaks, like accelerations or short hills, while the fuel cell is sized to provide continuous power to the motors for a typical average duty cycle load. There is a balance between planned typical loads and peak loads that dictates how much battery and how much fuel cell is required for the expected duty cycles. Designers need to statistically predict nominal and off-nominal loads to properly size the systems for the end user. A dedicated route with predictable freight loads and repeatable traffic and weather conditions can allow smaller battery packs for a fuel cell dominant system. Variable routing with a wide variety of payloads and complex traffic and weather conditions may require a more battery dominant system with greater battery capacity to compensate for the unpredictable duty cycles. Conversely, this variable route also might be served by having larger fuel cell(s) rather than battery packs

Hydrogen tanks

While spherical hydrogen tanks are the optimum for the weight-to-strength ratio, they do not package well on trucks. Long, constant diameter cylinders with rounded ends are the primary shape to consider. These shapes are very similar to those evolved for CNG-based trucks where they are typically packaged behind the cab in modular units. Placing the tanks behind the cab increases the wheelbase. Placing the tanks in this region also requires maintaining adequate swing and dip clearances to trailers, so trailer gaps need to be maintained.

Ballard said, “Using an estimated specific density of 36kg tank weight per 1kg of hydrogen yielded a tank weight of 3910kg (8,600 lbs.)” in its report on the potential of applying fuel cells to NACFE’s Run on Less Regional demonstration fleet diesel vehicles. The net weight impact was estimated by Ballard “to weigh 7,750 lbs. (3,520kg) more than a diesel truck.” A gauge for estimating relative weight impact of fuel cell tractors is that current CNG trucks are approximately 1,500-2,000 lbs. heavier than their diesel counterparts, the added weight due to the net impact of the tanks, plumbing and frame length versus the parts removed from emission systems. The current prototype battery electric drayage trucks are approximately 7,000 to 10,000 lbs. heavier than diesel, NACFE learned from consultations with a variety of sources operating these early prototype vehicles. Fuel cell tanks will be somewhat heavier than their CNG counterparts in order to deal with the higher pressures.

Carbon fiber has become a material of choice to use in hydrogen tanks for vehicles. Carbon fiber has the strength of steels yet is 10%-30% lighter for the same performance. They can be three to five times more energy intensive to fabricate than conventional steel, according to the DOE group that evaluates and promotes lightweight material manufacturing and use, the Advanced Manufacturing Office (AMO). There are cost increases with using carbon fiber over steel, as lightweight materials generally carry cost premiums since they are more expensive in energy, time and effort to make.

Fuel Cell buses

There are 14 operating today, with an average cost of $1,920,000 ($1,270,000 to $2,400,000). They are not yet at the commercial stage, but in the technology demonstration state. Class 8 trucks are significantly more demanding than buses, which will require many years of development to reach the commercial stage. heavy-duty trucks see 80,000 miles to more than 140,000 miles per year pulling heavy loads in all weather and traffic conditions. Where buses have known dedicated routes and conditions, with generally slower speeds and passenger friendly stopping and accelerations, heavy-duty trucks see highway speeds and urban travel with more demanding stops and starts due to their 60,000- to 80,000- lb. vehicle weights. It’s not that automotive and bus technology cannot migrate to trucks, but the systems that do migrate must go through significantly greater validation to achieve reliability, environmental and performance requirements as outlined in NACFE’s Defining Production report [33].

Efficiency: While the vehicle fuel efficiency is an important indicator, a whole system perspective is also needed — what is termed well-to-wheel (WTW) as opposed to tank-to-wheel (TTW) or well-to-tank (WTT)

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Wel-to-wheel-versus-well-to-tank.jpg

Well to wheel (WTS) versus tank-to-wheel (TTW) and well-to-tank (WTT)

WTW quantifies the entire system from extracting oil in the ground, to transporting it to a refinery, to refining it into diesel fuel, to transporting the diesel fuel to a truck stop, storing it and ultimately delivering the fuel into a truck’s fuel tank, and then finally consuming the fuel to move the truck down the road. Efficiencies for the total system are much more challenging to measure because details of all intermediate steps are not always visible and quantifying them through prorating can be complex.

From a public policy perspective, the real killer for H2FC cars is their wind-to-wheel (or solar-to-wheel) inefficiency. Driving a small family car 100km, whether H2FC or BEV, uses 15kWh of motive energy at the wheels. For the BEV, taking into account losses on the grid and in the battery cycle and drive train, that translates into a need to generate 25kWh at the plant where the electricity is generated. The equivalent for the H2FC car, given losses in electrolysis, compression, transport, storage and reconversion of hydrogen, is at least 50kWh. Put simply, hydrogen cars are half as efficient as BEVs – and there is no reason in physics to think that will change. There is reason why [Teslas’s] Elon Musk calls them “fool cell” cars. BEVs are 2X to 3X more efficient than hydrogen fuel cells on a WTW basis

Safety

Hydrogen-based tractors may not be viable for all routes in the U.S. or Canada due to unacceptable levels of risk in locations such as the Eisenhower Tunnel in Colorado or other tunnels and enclosed spaces like warehouses or underground facilities. The challenge is that transporting highly combustible fuels is sometimes restricted on routes. Fuel haulers have additional rules to follow. A hydrogen fuel cell truck is hauling not only a highly combustible fuel, it is hauling a 10,000 psi storage container. A further modern element of concern is intentional use of these vehicles as weapons in terrorism. This risk is likely similar to that faced by fuel haulers, which may necessitate additional driver certification and background checks for hydrogen powered tractors.

Emissions

Adding to the complexity of defining the system is that physically making the vehicle and the infrastructure to support it also factors into the net system emissions. For example, while a wind turbine spinning in Texas is emission free in providing energy, prior to that point, fabricating, shipping and installing the wind turbine blades and parts are not emission free, and typically require fossil fuel energy expenditures to get the raw materials and then to manufacture (under business as usual). These wind turbines are capital investments which wear out in use, and parts must be disposed of, again requiring energy expenditures and having environmental considerations.

Related Articles

Read more posts about hydrogen here, especially Hydrogen: The dumbest & most impossible renewable.

Hydrogen trucks also need finite platinum group elements, precious elements, and rare earth elements. And a battery, but there are many challenges batteries must overcome.

The battery must be charged, the hydrogen electrolyzed, yet it won’t in the long term, because the electric grid can’t stay up without utility scale energy storage of at least a month of electricity to compensate for seasonal deficits (see When Trucks Stop Running Chapter 17 The Electric Blues: Energy Storage for Calm and Cloudy Day). Natural gas fulfills that role now, but it is finite. The electric grid could crash from a weapon or solar flare electromagnetic pulse and be down for a year or more. Electric trucks are impossible. Without trucks, civilization fails. Manufacturing uses over half of all fossil fuels, and depends on the high heat only they can generate (also see Chapter 9 of my book Life After Fossil Fuels).

References

Calstart. 2013. I-710 project zero-emission truck commercialization study. Calstart for Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. 4.7.

Casey T (2023) For Fuel Cell Trucks, Nikola Cooks Up Hydrogen Fueling Station On-The-Go. https://cleantechnica.com/2023/01/28/for-fuel-cell-trucks-nikola-cooks-up-hydrogen-fueling-station-on-the-go/

den Boer, E. et al. 2013. Zero emissions trucks. Delft.

DOE. 2011. Advanced technologies for high efficiency clean vehicles. Vehicle Technologies Program. Washington DC: United States Department of Energy.

Ford, J. 2020. The world must look beyond sun snd wind for hydrogen. We need lots of the gas, and cheaply, if it is to help replace liquid carbon fuels. Financial times

ICCT. July 2013. Zero emissions trucks. An overview of state-of-the-art technologies and their potential. International Council for Clean Transportation.

Patterson, R. 2019. Was 2018 the peak for crude oil production? oilprice.com

Romm, J. J. 2005. The Hype About Hydrogen: Fact and Fiction in the Race to Save the Climate. Island Press.

Posted in Batteries, Electric & Hydrogen trucks impossible, Hydrogen, Trucks: Electric | Tagged electric truck, FCEV, FHCEV, fuel cell, hydrogen, truck | 3 Comments

A billion new autos by 2030 will kill climate change

Posted on July 27, 2020 by energyskeptic

Preface. The article below argues that electric cars aren’t going to replace gas and diesel vehicles enough to lessen greenhouse emissions.

The average electric vehicle requires 30 kilowatt-hours to travel 100 miles — the same amount of electricity an average American home uses each day to run appliances, computers, lights and heating and air conditioning. If electric cars expand, a U.S. Department of Energy study found that increased electrification across all sectors of the economy could boost national consumption of electricity by as much as 38% by 2050, in large part because of electric vehicles (Brown 2020).

I would argue that since two-thirds of electricity is still generated with natural gas and coal, emissions will certainly go up. Wind and solar won’t put much of a dent in that 66% fossil usage in the future either, because the best areas for solar and wind power have already been built, and the new transmission lines cost far more than the solar and wind power generated in more distant unexploited areas. Also, when natural gas and coal are burned to generate electricity, two-thirds of the energy contained in them is lost as heat, so only one-third of their energy makes it onto the transmission grid, where another 6 to 10% is lost over the wires, so as little as 23% of the fossil energy reaches your electric socket. Better to just burn the natural gas directly in cars perhaps.

And finally, until we have massive energy stored in batteries and pumped hydropower, we simply have to have natural gas to balance intermittent wind and solar power or they’ll bring the grid down.

Do the math: expensive electric cars that only the top 5% can afford are not replacing natural gas and coal.

***

**Jolly, D. December 7, 2015. Despite Push for Cleaner Cars, Sheer Numbers Could Work Against Climate Benefits. New York Times.**

The number of automobiles on the world’s roads is on pace to double — to more than two billion — by 2030. And more likely than not, most of those cars will be burning carbon-emitting gasoline or diesel fuels.

That is because much of the expansion will be propelled by the rise of the consumer class in industrializing parts of the globe, especially in China and India, as hundreds of millions of new drivers discover the glory of the open road. Those populous and geographically sprawling countries might be hard pressed any time soon to assemble the ubiquitous electricity grid required for recharging electric vehicles; and much of the electricity China and India will produce in coming decades will come from coal-fired power plants that are some of the planet’s biggest emitters of carbon dioxide.

Given the limitations of electric cars so far — including their limited range between charges — many experts predict that most of the billion additional cars predicted to be on the road in 2030 will have internal combustion engines that spew greenhouse gases.

But virtually everyone who studies the issue understands that transportation, which is still 95% reliant on petroleum, is the world’s fastest-growing energy-based contributor to greenhouse gases. About three-quarters of the total comes from motor vehicles.

But optimists argue that even in the case of cars with internal-combustion engines, carbon dioxide emissions can be cut significantly by measures like increasing fuel economy and introducing smart-driving technologies to make cars move about with greater efficiency.

The countries with the most cars today have set aggressive goals for improving fuel mileage. The United States, under President Obama’s fleetwide standards for carmakers, is aiming for an average of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, up from about 30 m.p.g. now. China is aiming for 50.1 miles per gallon, and the European Union 60.6.

Still, the math is daunting. If the number of cars doubles, and the average mileage improves by only 50%, all of the fuel-economy gains would be offset by the emissions from the new vehicles.

And that assumes the auto industry does its part to comply with the new standards and that national regulators diligently enforce them. Recent revelations that Volkswagen, for one, deliberately misled regulators, and that European Union air-quality standards and enforcement have been far from rigorous, do not inspire confidence.

“But the automakers are attacking these standards as we speak, both in Congress and through a review of the program they demanded from the Obama administration,” Mr. Becker said. “Similar attacks are underway in the E.U.”

Congress, in an effort to make the United States more energy independent, passed a law in 2007 mandating a 35 m.p.g. auto-fleet standard by 2020. But before that, there had been no official change to American fuel-economy standards in more than 30 years.

“The U.S. auto industry was successful between 1975 and 2007 in preventing any improvement for mileage standards for CO2 emissions,” Mr. Becker said. “They exploit every loophole in the standards, making more SUVs, pickups and other light duty trucks than cars because trucks have weaker standards than cars, and more large vehicles because large vehicles have weaker standards than smaller vehicles.”

But Mr. Becker, at the Safe Climate Campaign, points out that electric vehicles are only as environmentally friendly as the electricity that recharges them. China, though it is rapidly adopting nuclear power plants, is still heavily reliant on coal-fired electrical plants.

And India, where the biggest growth in automobile ownership is expected to occur as the country industrializes and its population surpasses China’s by 2030, might actually increase its reliance on coal-fired electrical power plants between now and then.

“At the end of the day, when you talk about transport emissions for transport in general, including for freight transport, they increase when the economy is growing,” he said. “So what are we going to say, we’re going to stop the economy to stop emissions?”

References

Brown, A. 2020. Electric cars will challenge state power grids. Boston.com

Posted in Automobiles, Climate Change | 13 Comments

Methane apocalypse? Not likely.

Posted on July 24, 2020 by energyskeptic

Preface. The four articles below explain why methane from permafrost or hydrates are not likely to erupt abruptly and send Earth into a hothouse hell. In addition, here are some posts debunking Guy McPherson who believes the world will end in a methane apocalypse:

Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com author of “Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy”, 2021, Springer; “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report

***

Dyonisius, M. N., et al. 2020. Old carbon reservoirs were not important in the deglacial methane budget. Science 21: 907-910

Researchers studied methane emissions from a period in Earth’s history partly analogous to the warming of Earth today. Their research, published in Science, indicates that even if methane is released from these large natural stores in response to warming, very little actually reaches the atmosphere in large quantities.

This finding suggests that methane emissions from future warming will likely not be as large as some have suggested.

This is due to several natural buffers. In the case of methane hydrates, if the methane is released in the deep ocean, most of it is dissolved and oxidized by ocean microbes before it ever reaches the atmosphere.

If the methane in permafrost forms deep enough in the soil, it may be oxidized by bacteria that eat the methane, or the carbon in the permafrost may never turn into methane and may instead be released as carbon dioxide.

Mooney, C. 2013. How Much Should You Worry About an Arctic Methane Bomb? Mother Jones.

A popular theory of a giant methane burp as the killer is known as the “clathrate gun” hypothesis posits a sudden and massive release of methane hydrates from the land, on ocean shelves, and the depths of the ocean. There are many reasons to question this though:

Majorowicz (2014) found methane hydrate reservoirs would have melted over 100 to 400 thousand years in the hothouse Permian world, long before the first extinction pulse
Hydrates only form in cool oceans, like those of today, and there isn’t much carbon in them, somewhere between 500 and 2500 GtC (Milkov 2004). Yet this is far more than what would have existed in Permian oceans, and just a small fraction of the overall 24,000 to 46,000 GtC Siberian Trap emissions.
Ocean hydrates would have also been far less extensive than they are today because super continent Pangea had far fewer miles of hydrate-containing continental shelves than the shelf length of our multiple continents today (Wignall 2017).
Methane is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but doesn’t last long in the air because it oxidizes to CO2 and water vapor in about 9 years
It is not likely deep water methane hydrates would reach the atmosphere since they’d be oxidized in the water column (Rupple 2011).

Even if there were a methane hydrate burp in the first killer pulse, a new suspect has to be found for the second killing pulse, since there was no cooling in the 200,000 year interval between them. It takes millions of years of cold water for methane hydrates to form again after they’ve melted.

Milkov (2004) concludes “A significantly smaller global gas hydrate inventory implies that the role of gas hydrates in the global carbon cycle may not be as significant as speculated previously.

References

Majorowicz, J., et al. 2014. Gas hydrate contribution to Late Permian global warming. Earth and Planetary Science Letters 393:243-253.
Milkov, A. 2004. Global estimates of hydrate-bound gas in marine sediments: How much is really out there? Earth-Science Reviews 66: 183-197.
Rupple, C. D. 2011. Methane Hydrates and Contemporary Climate Change. Nature Education Knowledge.
Wignall, P. B. 2017. The Worst of Times: How Life on Earth Survived Eighty Million Years of Extinctions. Princeton University Press.

**SBC. June 2015. Gas Hydrates. Taking the heat out of the burning-ice debate. Potential and future of Gas Hydrates. SBC energy institute.**

Recent studies (e.g. Whiteman et al) have raised the alarm that methane emissions could occur in the Arctic, especially over the East Siberian Shelf and in Siberian Lakes (e.g. Shakhova et al). However, there is a vigorous academic debate on the origin and potential impact of these emissions. As acknowledged by the IPCC: “How much of this CH4 originates from decomposing organic carbon or from destabilizing hydrates is not known. There is also no evidence available to determine whether these sources have been stimulated by recent regional warming, or whether they have always existed since the last deglaciation. More research is therefore urgently needed.

The first uncertainty is the amount of gas hydrates stored on Earth. Global gas-in-place estimates range over an order of magnitude 1,000-20,000 tcm, with most estimates around 3,000 tcm. Estimates are even more uncertain at the regional level. For instance, there are no models for Antarctic reservoirs, and estimates for Arctic permafrost have only been done recently.

In the permafrost, additional uncertainty arises from the origin of methane emissions, whereas in the case of ocean sediments, the mechanisms by which methane is released and its ability to reach the atmosphere are also disputed. So are the biochemical and chemical consequences that gas-hydrate releases would have on oxidation mechanisms e.g. there may be resource limitations hindering methane oxidation in the ocean.

Since gas hydrates are only stable under high pressures and at low temperatures, there have been concerns that climate change could result in gas-hydrate dissociation and the release of methane into the atmosphere. The response of gas hydrates to climate change has only been investigated recently. Modelling in this field is in its infancy and faces major uncertainties. Nevertheless, it is generally agreed that gas-hydrate dissociation is likely to be a regional phenomenon, rather than a global one, and more likely to occur in subsea permafrost and upper continental shelves than in deep-water reservoirs, which make up the majority of gas hydrates. Indeed,the later are relatively well insulated from climate change because of the slow propagation of warming and the long ventilation time of the ocean. Moreover, the release of methane from gas-hydrate dissociation should be chronic rather than explosive, as was once assumed;and emissions to the atmosphere caused by hydrate dissociation should be in the form of CO2 because of the oxidation of methane in the water column.

Graphs adapted from Archer (2007), “Methane hydrate stability and anthropogenic climate change”. In the graph on the right, ventilation timescale corresponds to the timescale required by temperature (heat), pressure and solutes such as methane to diffuse through the sediments

Ocean thermal response varies according to depth, as highlighted in the graph above (left), but also from place to place, especially in deep-water locations, due to ocean currents. In sediments, the diffusion of heat towards deeper layers takes time and varies primarily according to depth, but also according to the composition of the sediment and to the geothermal gradient. Heat can diffuse approximately 100 meters in about 300 years (point A). Solutes such as dissolved methane diffuse even more slowly (100 meters in about 30,000 years), point B), while pressure perturbation (e.g. following a sea-level rise) diffuses more quickly (100 meters in about 3 years), point C.

As a result of thermal inertia, heat diffusion and the melting of permafrost take time, and should be slow enough to insulate most hydrate deposits from expected anthropogenic warming over a 100-year timescale. Nevertheless, temperature increases in high latitudes, such as the Arctic, are expected to be much higher than increases in the mean global temperature, and are therefore more likely to affect gas-hydrates reservoirs. Rises in sea level would result in pressure increases at the seafloor that may mitigate further dissociation of offshore gas-hydrate deposits. However, it is likely to be insufficient to negate the warming.

Even if warming were to reach the gas hydrate stability zone, the fate of any methane released would be uncertain.Gas could escape if the pressure exceeded the sediment’s lithostatic pressure, but it might also remain in place. In addition, since gas-hydrate dissociation will start at the edge of the stability zone, even if gas were able to migrate, it might subsequently be trapped in newly formed hydrates.

Finally, even if methane were able to migrate towards the seafloor, it would probably not reach the atmosphere. Most methane is expected to be oxidized in the water column rather than released by bubble plumes or other “transport pathways” directly into the atmosphere as methane. Nevertheless, the oxidation of methane produces CO2, which will have an impact on ocean acidification and will remain in the atmosphere.

The susceptibility of gas-hydrate deposits to climate-change-induced dissociation varies significantly, according to reservoir location. (1) Moridis et al.2011. Challenges, uncertainties and issues facing production from gas hydrate deposits.

The risk of climate change causing gas-hydrate dissociation and methane leaks varies significantly by location.This can be explained by depth differentials, the existence of mitigation mechanisms such as water-column oxidation, or by the exposure of gas-hydrate deposits to varying regional warming phenomena. High-latitude warming is expected to be much greater than global-mean-temperature warming.

As a rule-of-thumb, gas hydrates held within subsea permafrost on the circum-Arctic ocean shelves and on upper continental slopes are the most prone to dissociation. Subsea permafrost, which were flooded under relatively warm waters due to sea level rises thousands of years ago, have been exposed to dramatic rises in temperature that have led to a significant degradation both of subsea permafrost and t he gas hydrates within it.The latter are believed to store a greater quantity of gas hydrates than the former, but methane releases are less likely to reach directly the atmosphere because of oxidation in the water column.

However, it is very unlikely that climate warming will disturb gas-hydrate deposits that are held in deep-water reservoirs around 95% of all deposits on a millennial timescale. Finally,
gas hydrates in seafloor mounds may also dissociate as a result of warming, overlying water or pressure perturbation, but these account for a very limited share of gas hydrates in place.

The sensitivity of gas-hydrate deposits in onshore permafrost,especially at the top of the hydrate stability zone, is more uncertain and subject to greater debate

Archer et al. calculated that between 35 and 940 GtC of methane could escape as a result of global warming of 3° C, with maximum consequences of adding a further 0.5° C to global warming. On top of the uncertainty reflected in the range above, there are other considerable uncertainties, notably concerning the effectiveness of mitigation mechanisms and the long-term outlook, since methane will continue to be released, even if warming stops.

Reagan and Moridis (2007), “Oceanic gas hydrate instability and dissociation under climate change scenarios”;
Maslin et al. (2010), “Gas hydrates: past and future geohazard?”;
Shakhova et al. (2010), “Predicted Methane Emission on the East Siberian Shelf”;
Whitemann et al. (2013), “Climate science: Vast costs of Arctic change”

**Ananthaswamy, A. May 20, 2015 Methane apocalypse? Defusing the Arctic’s time bomb. NewScientist.**

Do the huge craters pockmarking Siberia herald a release of underground methane that could exceed our worst climate change fears? They look like massive bomb craters. So far 7 of these gaping chasms have been discovered in Siberia, apparently caused by pockets of methane exploding out of the melting permafrost. Has the Arctic methane time bomb begun to detonate in a more literal way than anyone imagined?

The “methane time bomb” is the popular shorthand for the idea that the thawing of the Arctic could at any moment trigger the sudden release of massive amounts of the potent greenhouse gas methane, rapidly accelerating the warming of the planet. Some refer to it in more dramatic terms: the Arctic methane catastrophe or methane apocalypse.

Some scientists have been issuing dire warnings about this. There is even an Arctic Methane Emergency Group. Others, though, think that while we are on course for catastrophic warming, the one thing we don’t need to worry about is the so-called methane time bomb. The possibility of an imminent release massive enough to accelerate warming can be ruled out, they say. So who is right?

Few scientists think there is any chance of limiting warming to 2 °C, even though many still publicly support this goal. Our carbon dioxide emissions are the main cause of the warming, but methane is a significant player.

Methane is a highly potent greenhouse gas – causing 86 times as much warming per molecule as CO2 over a 20-year period. Fortunately, there’s very little of it in the atmosphere. Before humans arrived on the scene there was less than 1000 parts per billion. Levels started rising very slowly around 5000 years ago, possibly to due to rice farming. They’ve gone up more since the industrial age began: the fossil fuel industry is by far the single biggest source, followed by farting farm animals, leaking landfills and so on. Only a tiny percentage comes from melting Arctic permafrost.

The level in the atmosphere is now nearing 1900 ppb, but that’s still low. CO2 levels were much higher to start with, around 270,000 ppb before the industrial age. They have now shot up to 400,000 ppb today. The main reason is that CO2 persists for hundreds of years, so even small increases in emissions lead to its buildup in the atmosphere, just as water dripping into a bath with the plug left in can fill the bath eventually.

Methane, by contrast, breaks down after just 12 years, so its level in the atmosphere can only increase if there are big ongoing emissions.

So for methane to cause a big jump in global warming there not only has to be a massive source, it has to be released very rapidly. Is there such a source?

Yes, claim a few scientists. They point to the Arctic permafrost, and specifically to the East Siberian Arctic shelf. This vast submerged shelf underlies a huge area of the Arctic Ocean, which is less than 100 meters deep in most places. During past ice ages, when sea level dropped 120 meters, the land froze solid.

This permafrost was covered by rising seas as the ice age ended around 15,000 years ago. The upper layer has been slowly melting as the relative warmth of the seawater penetrates down. But the frozen layer is still hundreds of meters thick. No one doubts that there is plenty of carbon locked away in and under it. The questions are, how much is there, how much will come out in the form of methane, and how fast?

Natalia Shakhova of the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, has been studying the East Siberian Arctic shelf for more than two decades. Her team has made more than 30 expeditions to the region, in winter and in summer, collected thousands of water samples and tons of seabed cores during four drilling campaigns and made millions of measurements of ambient levels of methane in the air.

Her team has estimated that there is a whopping 1750 gigatons of methane buried in and below the subsea permafrost, some of it in the form of methane hydrates – an ice-like substance that forms when methane and water combine under the right temperature and pressure. What’s more, they say that the permafrost is already beginning to thaw in places. “Our results show that… [the] subsea permafrost is perforating and opening gas migration paths for methane from the seabed to be released to the water column,” says Shakhova.

Her team’s work hit the headlines in 2010, when in a letter in the journal Science they reported finding more than 100 hot spots where methane was bubbling out from the seabed. But as others pointed out, it was not clear whether these emissions were something new or had been going on for thousands of years.

More sensational stuff was to follow. In another 2010 paper, the team explored the consequences of 50 gigatons of methane – 3% of their estimated total – entering the atmosphere (Doklady Earth Sciences, vol 430, p 190). If this happened over five years methane levels could soar to 20,000 ppb, albeit briefly. Using a simple model, the team calculated that if the world was on course to warm 2 °C by 2100, the extra methane would lead to additional warming of 1.3 °C, so temperatures would hit 3.3 °C by 2100.

This study appeared in an obscure journal and did not get much attention at the time. But then Peter Wadhams of the University of Cambridge and colleagues decided to see how much difference a huge methane release between 2015 and 2025 would make when added to an existing model of the economic costs of global warming. “A 50-gigaton reservoir of methane, stored in the form of hydrates, exists on the East Siberian Arctic shelf,” they stated in Nature, citing Shakhova’s paper as evidence. “It is likely to be emitted as the seabed warms, either steadily over 50 years or suddenly. Understandably, this was big news.

But in reality the idea that 50 gigatons could suddenly be released, or that there’s a store of 1750 gigatons in total, is very far from being accepted fact. On the contrary, Patrick Crill, a biogeochemist at Stockholm University in Sweden who studies methane release from the Arctic, says it is simply untenable. He wants Shakhova’s team to be more open about how they came up with these figures. “The data aren’t available,” says Crill. “It’s not very clear how those extrapolations are made, what the geophysics are that lead to those kinds of claims.

Shakhova now says, “We never stated that 50 gigatons is likely to be released in near or distant future.” It is true that the 2010 study explores the consequences of the release of 50 gigatons rather than explicitly claiming that this will happen. However, it has certainly been widely misunderstood both by other scientists and the media. And her team’s papers continue to fuel the idea that we should be worried about dramatic and damaging releases of methane from the Arctic.

But other researchers disagree. “The Arctic methane catastrophe hypothesis mostly works if you believe that there is a lot of methane hydrate,” says Carolyn Ruppel, who heads the gas hydrates project for the US Geological Survey in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. And her team estimates that there are only 20 gigatons of permafrost-associated hydrates in the Arctic (Journal of Chemical and Engineering Data, vol 60, p 429). If this is right, there’s little reason for concern.

The issue is not just how much methane hydrate there is, but whether it could be released rapidly enough to build up to high levels.

This could happen soon only if the hydrates are shallow enough to be destabilized by heat from the warming Arctic Ocean.

But David Archer of the University of Chicago says that hydrates could only exist hundreds of meters below the sea floor. That’s far too deep for any surface warming to have a rapid impact. The heat will take thousands of years to work its way down to that depth, he calculated last year, and only then will the hydrates respond (Biogeosciences Discussions, vol 12, p 1). “There is no way to get it all out on a short timescale,” says Archer. “That’s the crux of my position.

This concerted push back against the idea of an impending methane bomb has led to something of a feud. Commenting on Archer’s paper, for instance, Shakhova said he clearly knew nothing about the topic. She has repeatedly pointed out that her team has actual experience of collecting data in the East Siberian Ice shelf, unlike her detractors.

But there is skepticism about Shakhova’s actual measurements, too. For instance, her team has reported that methane levels above some hotspots in the East Siberian shelf were as high as 8000 ppb. Last summer, Crill was aboard the Swedish icebreaker Oden, measuring levels of methane over the East Siberian shelf. Nowhere did he find levels this high. Even when the Oden ventured near the hotspots identified by Shakhova’s team, he never saw levels much beyond 2000 ppb. “There was no indication of any large-scale rapid degassing,” says Crill.

It’s not clear why other teams are finding lower levels than Shakhova’s. But to find out if a catastrophic release of methane is imminent, there is another line of evidence we can turn to. Thanks to ice cores from places like Greenland, we have a record of past methane levels going back hundreds of thousands of years. If there are lots of shallow hydrates in the Arctic poised to release methane as soon it warms up a little, they should have done so in the past, and this should show up in the ice cores, says Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.

Around 6000 years ago, although the world as a whole was not warmer, Arctic summers were much warmer thanks to the peculiarities of Earth’s orbit. There is no sign of any short-term spikes in methane at this time. “There’s absolutely nothing,” says Schmidt. “If those methane hydrates were there, they were there 6000 years ago. They weren’t triggered 6000 years ago, so it’s unlikely they’d be triggered imminently.

During the last interglacial period, 125,000 years ago, when temperatures in the Arctic were about 3 °C warmer than now, methane levels rose a little, as expected in warmer periods, but never exceeded 750 ppb. Again, there’s no sign of the kind of spike a large release would produce.

There is, then, no solid evidence to back the idea of a methane bomb and past climate records suggest there is no cause for alarm. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, otherwise it’s going to undermine credibility and slow down our ability to actually make the decisions that we are going to have to make as a society.

No one is saying methane is not a concern. Levels are now the highest they’ve been for at least 800,000 years and climbing. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s worst-case emissions scenario assumes a big rise in methane, to as much as 4000 ppb by 2100.

What about the gaping craters? They are certainly spectacular and scary-looking. The latest idea is that they are caused by the release of pockets of compressed methane as ice seals melt. But the amount of methane released per crater is minuscule in global terms. Around 20 million craters would have to form within a few years to release 50 gigatons of the gas.

Posted in CO2 and Methane, Methane Hydrates | Tagged clathrate gun, climate change, debunk, methane, methane burp, methane hydrate, permean extinction | 4 Comments

Super heavy trucks ruin roads

Posted on July 18, 2020 by energyskeptic

Preface. I’m writing a book now which concludes that only biomass and biofuels can replace diesel and other fossil fuels. But 3 billion people are expected to arrive by 2050, consuming a good chunk of the biomass, plus it will be needed to replace half a million products made from fossil fuels, generate heat for homes and buildings, generate electricity, and dozens of other fossil fuel uses. Rural roads will take even more of a beating than they already are.

There are two articles below, the first about rural roads falling apart, and the second excerpts from a 302 page National Research Council study of Super Heavy commercial trucks that can weigh 2 million pounds. Ouch. Though after reading the whole damn thing, I never did found out the cost we taxpayers shoulder. But I did find what these super heavy objects were of interest, and show some of them below.

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Cohen, P. 2020. The struggle to mend America’s rural roads. As supersize vehicles bear heavier loads, maintenance budgets can’t keep up. New York Times.

Picture this: County highway workers in bright safety vests pour scalding liquid rubber bandages on the road to cover the worst gashes. From above, it looks like skywriting — as if the bandages on the highway were spelling out a message for readers in the clouds.

The roads look like losers in a barroom brawl. Thick, jagged cracks run down the asphalt like scars, interrupted at points by bruised bumps. In some places, guardrails are tilted off their moorings like a pair of glasses knocked askew.

Rural roads are falling apart in small agricultural counties and towns across the Midwest and South, with eroding shoulders dangerous to the 80,000 pound trucks full of soybeans careening down the road. Reconstruction costs $300,000 per mile, and short-term patching $17,000 per mile.

Two-thirds of U.S. freight originates in rural areas where traffic volume has increased from heavy supersized tractor-trailers and farm equipment. In the spring thaw, melting will create soft spots easily damaged by heavy trucks.

These behemoths can produce 5,000 to 10,000 times the road damage of one car (TIC 2020). Although only 19% of American’s live in rural areas, they have 68% of total road miles.

Asphalt roads only have a lifespan of 30 years. Some county’s have roads far older than that.

The result is emergency closings and weight limits. Sometimes a farmer can’t easily move equipment from one field to another. Truckers have to make long detours to deliver feed and fertilizers. Trucks break down with broken axles, wrecked suspension systems, and flat tires.

States often don’t have the money to fix roads. For example, in Wisconsin the gas tax hasn’t gone up since 2006. Often there’s no state or federal assistance either.

Reference

TIC. 2020. How vehicle loads affect pavement performance. Transportation Information Center, University of Wisconsin, Madison.

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NRC. 2015. Practices for Permitting Superheavy Load Movements on Highway Pavements. National Research Council, National Academies Press.

Maximum allowed superheavy vehicle weight. 1 kip = 1,000 pounds

This report documents the practices followed in issuing permits for overweight and superheavy commercial vehicles (SHCVs) or “superloads.” These are trucks that exceed the thresholds set for overweight vehicles allowed to operate with annual permits throughout state highway networks. This synthesis collected detail on the practices that U.S. states and Canadian provinces use. It focuses on SHCV issues related to pavements.

The GVW of the heaviest SHCV ever permitted by some agencies exceeds 2 million pounds

570,000 pound vehicle carrying an electrical anode used in the copper refining process. It was subjected to a bridge analysis, but not to a pavement analysis. It traveled from Nevada to Miami through Arizona

900,000 pound water purification vessel used in oil refining

A massive 900,000 pound water purification vessel used in oil refining was transported from its manufacturing origin in Portland through Oregon, Idaho, and Montana to its final destination in Alberta, Canada. The fee levied was just $4.26/mile for the entire vehicle. No seasonal restrictions were placed on the movement of this load because it was determined that the subgrade soil conditions encountered were relatively dry and therefore not susceptible to frost heave and/or spring thaw. The move took place in November 2013, during which frost and non-frost conditions were encountered. The vessel was delivered by Columbia River barge to Umatilla, Oregon, traveled for a short distance east on I-84, and then followed secondary roads south to the Idaho border near Ontario, Oregon. The vehicle had an overall length of 375 ft, 4 in. and a width of 22 ft, 2 in. Its GVW was 900 kips and its maximum tandem axle load was 44.75 kips. It was equipped with 32 axles and its maximum tire unit load was 604 lb/in. It was propelled by two pusher tractors and one pull tractor. No pavement analysis was conducted for its impact on the I-84 continuous reinforced concrete pavement.

1.2 million pound transformer moving on Texas roads

This 1.2 million pound truck is hauling a transformer from East Houston to Flat Rock, Texas, in August 2014. It had a total of 31 axle assemblies and measured 320 ft, 4 in. in length and 20 ft, 3 in. in width. The picture was taken on FM Road 3009 in Bexar County, Texas. Each trailer axle assembly consisted of two 4-tire axles side-by-side, taking the width of two adjacent roadway lanes. The heaviest axle assembly of this vehicle was 48,000 lb divided among eight tires. The move involved flag vehicles and police escorts. The permit fee charged for this vehicle was $935 and stipulated that the hauler is liable of any infrastructure damage.

The practices of permitting superheavy commercial vehicles (SHCVs) in the United States varies widely between agencies in terms of both the criteria used to define them, the analysis details for evaluating their impact on pavements, and the fees levied for permitting them.

The gross vehicle weight (GVW) thresholds used to define SHCVs vary from 120 kips to 254.3 kips. Axle load limits by configuration also vary, ranging from 20 to 29 kips for single axles on dual tires, from 34 to 60 kips for tandem axles on 8 tires, and from 50 to 81 kips for tridem axles on 12 tires. In addition, some agencies set limits on the tire weight per unit width (i.e., it varies between 500 and 800 lb/in.), whereas others do not. This obvious lack of uniformity in weight regulations reduces the weights of SHCVs traveling through multiple jurisdictions to the least common set of rules in effect through the jurisdictions involved and imposes a considerable administrative burden on shipping companies.

The literature review also suggests that SHCV single-trip fees vary considerably among the 62 jurisdictions in North America (i.e., 50 states, the District of Columbia, ten Canadian provinces, and the Yukon Territory): • Twenty-three (37%) levy SHCV permit fees that are a function of weight-distance, typically in the form of $/ton/ mile for GVW exceeding a certain value. Interestingly, some of the states that use weight-distance taxes do not use the same approach for levying SHCV permit fees. This fee ranges from $0.006/ton/mi to $0.2/ton/mi with an average value of about $0.049/ton/mi. • Fifteen (24%) levy SHCV permit fees that are related to GVW per axle weight alone and do not consider the distance traveled by the vehicles. • Eight (13%) levy a flat SHCV permit fee that ranges from $5 to $550, regardless of any pavement usage indicators, that is the weight of the vehicle or the distance traveled. • Seven (11%) levy a processing fee and may add an infrastructure usage fee after studying SHCVs on a case-bycase basis. • Two jurisdictions (3%) levy a flat fee and the cost of repairing the infrastructure from any damage rather than the cost infrastructure utilization from SHCV movement.

Thirty-eight agencies responded as to whether or not they conduct pavement analysis as part of their SHCV permit process. Of those, five (13%) always do (Delaware, Missouri, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Vermont), 15 (40%) do so depending on the circumstances (Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oregon, Washington State, Wisconsin, Wyoming, Texas, Virginia, British Columbia, and Ontario), whereas the remaining 18 agencies (47%) never perform such an analysis. The majority of the agencies that perform pavement analysis do so when dealing with a vehicle exceeding their definition of a SHCV. Details of pavement analysis performed were provided by 15 states. Their majority uses either their own in-house developed mechanistic empirical pavement analysis approach or the mechanistic methods developed by industry (i.e., Asphalt Pavement Association and Portland Cement Association). Several agencies indicated that they use the 1993 AASHTO Guide for the Design of Pavement Structures and characterize the truck loads in terms of equivalent single axle loads. None of the responding agencies uses the Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Guide for analyzing the impact of SHCV. Additional details on the pavement analysis performed by the 15 responding states suggest that their majority uses representative thickness and layer/subgrade moduli, and consider the entire length of the SHCV. About half consider only one wheel path and the actual number of tires in the wheel path and the tire inflation pressure, while approximately 25% consider the actual vehicle speed. Furthermore, only four of the 15 responding agencies consider the stability of the pavement subgrade and of those one indicated using a Mohr– Coulomb type of analysis and another using a slope-stability numerical method type of analysis. The number of SHCV permits issued annually varies between agencies and to a large extent depends on their definition of SHCVs. The range is from fewer than 100 to more than 10,000 per year.

There have been regional efforts to establish uniform heavy truck permitting regulations in the United States, whereby a permit issued by one state is accepted for travel in other states. Twelve western states, under the auspices of the Western Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (WASHTO), Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Louisiana, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Utah, and Washington, agreed on a uniform set of truck weight regulations that allow trucks permitted in one of these states to legally operate throughout the rest. In summary, these limits consist of a GVW of 160 kips; tire weights of 600 lb/in. of width; overall consecutive axle weight limits governed by the Bridge Formula; and axle configuration weight limits of 21.5, 43, and 53 kips for single, tandem, and tridem axles, respectively.

The literature review suggests that SHCV single-trip fees vary widely between the 62 jurisdictions in North America (i.e., 50 states, the District of Columbia, ten Canadian provinces, and the Yukon Territory): • Twenty-three (37%) levy SHCV permit fees that are a function of weight-distance, typically in the form of $/ton/mile for GVW exceeding a certain value. Interestingly, some of the states that use weight-distance taxes do not use the same approach for levying SHCV permit fees. This fee ranges from $0.006/ton/mi to $0.2/ton/mi, with an average value of about 0.049/ton/mi. • Fifteen (24%) levy SHCV permit fees that are related to GVW/axle weight alone and do not consider at all the distance traveled by the vehicles. • Eight (13%) levy a flat SHCV permit fee that ranges from $5 to $550 regardless of any pavement usage indicators; that is, the weight of the vehicle or the distance traveled. • Seven (11%) levy a processing fee and may add an infrastructure usage fee after studying SHCVs on a case-by-case basis.

Two jurisdictions (3%) levy a flat fee and the cost of repairing the infrastructure from any damage rather than the cost infrastructure utilization from SHCV movement.

The definition of a SHCV or “superload” varies significantly among jurisdictions. Sixteen of the responding agencies (41%) define SHCV in terms of GVW alone, five (13%) use GVW and axle loads regardless of axle spacing, and another five (13%) use GVW and axle loads as a function of axle spacing. Interestingly, the remaining 13 responding agencies (33%) use an alternative definition involving vehicle size, tire loading, axle spacing, and roadway condition.

Additional details on the pavement analysis performed by the 15 responding states suggest that the majority use representative thickness and layer/subgrade moduli and consider the entire length of the SHCV. About half of them consider only one wheel path, the actual number of tires in the wheel path, and the tire inflation pressure, while approximately 25% consider the vehicle speed. Furthermore, only four of the 15 responding agencies consider structural failure of the pavement layers and subgrade as part of the SHCV permitting analysis. Only two of these four states gave details on the actual method used for analyzing the structural stability of the pavement layers.

The results of the survey questionnaire confirmed the findings of the literature review on the various methodologies agencies use for computing SHCV permit fees. Fifteen of the 46 responding agencies (33%) use a GVW-distance-traveled approach (Alabama, Florida, Illinois, Ohio, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Washington, West Virginia, Wyoming, British Columbia, and Ontario), two use a pavement damage-distancetraveled approach (Arizona and Oregon), another two use a number of axles-distance-traveled approach (Idaho and New Jersey), while 19 (41%) use a different methodology.

The findings of this study suggest that the practice of permitting SHCVs could be significantly improved through further study of their impact on pavements and implementation of the results in establishing equitable permit fees that cover pavement utilization and/or damage.

INTRODUCTION

There is an increasing demand for highway transport of very large non-divisible shipments that not only exceed legal gross vehicle weight (GVW) and axle weight limits, but also exceed the special provisions that allow overweight vehicles to operate with routine annual permits. Such vehicles are typically allowed to operate under single-trip permits following an engineering analysis of their impact on the pavement infrastructure (pavements and bridges) on a specific route.

State and provincial practices on permitting such vehicles, henceforth to be referred to as superheavy commercial vehicles (SHCVs) or “superloads,” have a significant impact on both transportation efficiency and infrastructure condition.

The condition of the pavement infrastructure is affected where the fees collected for SHCV permitting do not cover the pavement damage cost caused by these vehicles.

The differences in weight limits between jurisdictions, even those that have common borders, are substantial. For example, a vehicle with a GVW between 150 and 199 kips crossing the Florida–Georgia border would require a SHCV permit review in Georgia but not in Florida, and would be required to have a unit tire weight of less than 550 lb/in. only in Florida, since Georgia does not have this requirement.

Similarly, a vehicle with a GVW between 144 and 191 kips crossing the Minnesota–Wisconsin border would require a SHCV permit review in Minnesota but not in Wisconsin, and would face different maximum permitted axle weights (e.g., tandem axle weights of 40 versus 60 kips and tridem axle weights of 60 versus 81 kips, respectively).

Clearly, there is a lack of uniformity in weight regulations for SHCVs between jurisdictions.

As mentioned earlier, the U.S. Congress recently authorized a Comprehensive Truck Size and Weight Limits Study (1) under MAP-21 funding (Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act; Section 32801), with the following objectives: • Address the differences in safety risks, infrastructure impacts, and the effect on levels of enforcement between trucks operating at or within federal truck size and weight limits and trucks legally operating in excess of federal limits; • Compare and contrast the potential safety and infrastructure impacts of alternative configurations (including configurations that exceed current federal limits) to the current federal truck size and weight law and regulations; and • Estimate the effects of freight diversion resulting from these alternative configurations.

DEFINITION OF SUPERHEAVY COMMERCIAL VEHICLES

This section summarizes the survey results related to background questions and the way SHCVs are defined and permitted in each jurisdiction. 16 of the responding agencies (41%) define SHCV in terms of a maximum GVW alone. They vary widely from 120 to 500 kips, with the most frequent value being 200 kips. Five of the responding agencies (13%) reported that they define SHCV in terms of GVW and axle group limits regardless of axle spacing. The wide range of GVW and load limits is again evident; GVW limits range from 80 kips to 350 kips and tandem axle loads, for example, range from 34 kips to more than 60 kips. Another five of the responding agencies (13%) define SHCV in terms of GVW and axle group limits as a function of axle spacing. The distribution of these GVW limits, the axle group load limits, and the corresponding minimum axle spacings. In this case, GVWs vary from 100 to 254 kips, tandem load limits from 40 to 50 kips, whereas minimum tandem axle spacings vary from 6 to 12 feet.

Posted in Roads, Trucks | Tagged infrastructure, roads, superheavy, trucks | 3 Comments

Far out #5 (satire): Biofuels made from the victims of climate change, potato power, founding fathers spinning in graves

Posted on July 15, 2020 by energyskeptic

Preface. The “breakthroughs” you read about in batteries, hydrogen, and other so-called renewables are just as unlikely to happen

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Biofuels made from the victims of climate change

https://vimeo.com/129357544

Potato Power

The potato battery is a type of electrochemical battery, or cell. Certain metals (zinc in the demonstration below) experience a chemical reaction with the acids inside of the potato. This chemical reaction creates the electrical energy that can power a small device like an LED light or clock (SFF 2018).

The satirical Onion proposes powering cities on Potato Power. But why not — potatoes are renewable, unlike wind, solar, wave, nuclear, and all other contraptions that depend on fossils for every step of their life cycle.

KNOXVILLE, TN—In what many experts are hailing as a game changer in the field of renewable energy, scientists from the University of Tennessee unveiled Friday a 10-story-tall, 800,000-ton potato capable of powering an entire city. “Our tests have demonstrated this single potato can generate more than 3.5 gigawatts of clean, renewable electricity,” said civil engineering professor Lauren Donaldson, explaining that the colossal tuber, when connected to the electrical grid via one zinc and one copper electrode, could provide enough output to illuminate approximately 70 million standard light bulbs for more than a decade. “In theory, the nation’s energy infrastructure could be revolutionized simply by placing one of these gigantic potatoes next to every city in America. We believe it is entirely conceivable that within 20 years, this technology—perhaps supplemented by several similar-sized lemons connected via lengths of wire and paper clips—could be our primary source of electricity. One day, everything from home appliances to cars to factories may be potato-powered.” Donaldson added that her team’s potato also had the benefit of being largely pollution-free, as nearly 98 percent of its waste products would be fried-up and eaten afterward (The Onion 2020).

Department Of Energy Finds Founding Fathers Spinning In Graves Could Power Country For Next 100 Years (Boffa 2020)

A new report from the Department of Energy has uncovered an unforeseen source of mechanical kinetic energy: our Founding Fathers spinning in their graves. “For decades, our nation has lamented the fact that John Adams is likely oscillating in his coffin,” said a spokesperson. “But we’re only now discovering that our Founding Fathers’ rotational exasperation at the state of America today is a source of clean, white-hot fuel, comparable to over 15,000 nuclear reactors. Environmental scientists were quick to remind reporters that from a Constitutional standpoint, of course we should respect the laws on which America was founded. But from a sustainability standpoint, they urged the public to do everything possible to anger the ghost of Benjamin Franklin. “This source of combustion was first ignited during the freeing of slaves, and boosted by women’s suffrage. But if we’re serious about fighting climate change, we recommend kicking the spinning up a notch by permanently banning all firearms, censoring large amounts of speech, and implementing fully-automated luxury space gay communism.”

References

Boffa, W. 2020. Department Of Energy Finds Founding Fathers Spinning In Graves Could Power Country For Next 100 Years. Unsubscribed.

SFF. 2018. Potato power! Science Fair Fun.

The Onion. 2020. Green Energy Scientists Unveil 800,000-Ton Potato Capable Of Powering Entire City. TheOnion.com

Yes Men: Vivoleum, feat. Reggie Watts. https://vimeo.com/129357544

Posted in Far Out | Tagged far out, potato, power | 2 Comments

Far out power #2: Soap, Raindrops, Hyperloops, and Fitness Centers

Posted on July 12, 2020 by energyskeptic

Preface. Anything goes at a time when the energy crisis hasn’t even hit.

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

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Soap Power

In tubes and tanks under the chassis, something very like soapy water mixed with hydrogen called sodium borohydride and similar to borax found in laundry detergent, is being tested (Steen 2002). Of course, there are many problems why this hasn’t worked out and probably never will.

Thermal depolymerization and landfills turn garbage into biogass. But as energy declines, there will be less and less garbage, not only because there won’t be the fuel to take it to a landfill, but people will be burning anything they can get their hands on to cook and heat with.

Raindrop power

Researchers reported that a single drop can muster 140V, or enough power to briefly light up 100 small LED bulbs. It’s far from being able to produce continuous power. This system works with drops of the same size falling from the same height and may not do as well otherwise, and degradation of surface charge may reduce the generator’s efficiency with time. Meanwhile maybe someone can build a miniature Las Vegas for mice (Delbert 2020).

Elon Musk’s hyperloop

Not going to happen for too many reasons to list. Just one is that because temperature ranges from 32 to 120 F, there’d need to be 6,000 expansion joints. If even one failed, disaster. The vacuum would be released. This 28 minute video explains this and much more at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNFesa01llk

Fitness center power (Carbajales-Dale 2018)

Let’s harness the muscle power of 54 million fitness center members to generate electricity

It’s time to look at what we can gain from muscle power, which will have to increasingly replace fossil fuels as they decline. This has the added bonus of helping to cope with the obesity crisis. The authors estimate that an average American has 5 pounds of excess fat, which translates to 133,000 GJ of stored energy. Using human muscle as an energy source has the added benefit of reducing heart disease, strokes, and diabetes.

Gym members comprise a large potential muscle power workforce. Over 54 million people are members of a fitness center in the U.S. where their potential electricity generating exercise is wasted. Instead, members do the opposite and consume electricity, since equipment such as treadmills, ellipticals, stationary bikes, and rowers are electric. And air conditioning to keep members cool uses additional electricity.

This study looked at how much electric power could be generated by 40 members at a gym in South Carolina.

At best, 3-5% of the gym’s average daily electricity demand could be provided at a large cost. To convert the rowing machines to generate electricity would take 33 years to pay back, perhaps longer than a rowing machine will last

References

Carbajales-Dale, M., et al. 2018. Human powered electricity generation as a renewable resource. BioPhysical Economics and Resource Quality.

Delbert, C. 2020. The Cool Way Scientists Turned Falling Raindrops Into Electricity. Popular Mechanics.

Steen, M. 16 Sep 2002. A squeaky clean future for the car? Reuters News Service.

Posted in Far Out | Tagged hyperloop, raindrop, soap | Comments Off

Can you grow enough fruit and vegetables to be self-sufficient?

Wong, J. 2020. Can you really grow enough fruit and veg to be self-sufficient? Newscientist.com.

The Golden Age of Russian Oil Nears an End

Stratfor. 2020. The Golden Age of Russian Oil Nears an End.

Failure to Optimize Production

Far out #3: Sugar power

Riordan, T. June 21, 2004. A Sweet Way to Fuel Cars. For a group of researchers at Sandia National Labs, sugar in the gas tank isn’t such a bad idea. New York Times.

Limits to growth: Oil & Gas Fracking sand

Vince Beiser. 2018. The World in a Grain. The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization. Riverhead Books.

Heavy-duty hydrogen fuel cell trucks a waste of energy and money

**ARB. November 2015. Medium- and heavy-duty fuel cell electric vehicles. Air Resources Board, California Environmental Protection Agency.**

NRC. 2003. Energy and Transportation: Challenges for the Chemical Sciences in the 21st Century. National Research Council

NACFE. 2020. Making sense of heavy-duty hydrogen fuel cell tractors. North American council for freight efficiency.

A billion new autos by 2030 will kill climate change

**Jolly, D. December 7, 2015. Despite Push for Cleaner Cars, Sheer Numbers Could Work Against Climate Benefits. New York Times.**

Methane apocalypse? Not likely.

Dyonisius, M. N., et al. 2020. Old carbon reservoirs were not important in the deglacial methane budget. Science 21: 907-910

Mooney, C. 2013. How Much Should You Worry About an Arctic Methane Bomb? Mother Jones.

**SBC. June 2015. Gas Hydrates. Taking the heat out of the burning-ice debate. Potential and future of Gas Hydrates. SBC energy institute.**

Graphs adapted from Archer (2007), “Methane hydrate stability and anthropogenic climate change”. In the graph on the right, ventilation timescale corresponds to the timescale required by temperature (heat), pressure and solutes such as methane to diffuse through the sediments

**Ananthaswamy, A. May 20, 2015 Methane apocalypse? Defusing the Arctic’s time bomb. NewScientist.**

Methane, by contrast, breaks down after just 12 years, so its level in the atmosphere can only increase if there are big ongoing emissions.

Super heavy trucks ruin roads

Cohen, P. 2020. The struggle to mend America’s rural roads. As supersize vehicles bear heavier loads, maintenance budgets can’t keep up. New York Times.

NRC. 2015. Practices for Permitting Superheavy Load Movements on Highway Pavements. National Research Council, National Academies Press.

The GVW of the heaviest SHCV ever permitted by some agencies exceeds 2 million pounds

Far out #5 (satire): Biofuels made from the victims of climate change, potato power, founding fathers spinning in graves

Biofuels made from the victims of climate change

Potato Power

Department Of Energy Finds Founding Fathers Spinning In Graves Could Power Country For Next 100 Years (Boffa 2020)

Far out power #2: Soap, Raindrops, Hyperloops, and Fitness Centers

Soap Power

Raindrop power

Elon Musk’s hyperloop

Fitness center power (Carbajales-Dale 2018)

References

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