One size does not fit all

When it comes to energy, one size does not fit all. Im a big fan of algae biofuel, but Landfill gas can power trash trucks more conveniently and just makes more sense in some places.

Natural Gas and Nuclear: The Bridge to the Future

Ask any environmentalist and they'll tell you the less carbon dioxide, the better. That being case, it would be prudent to ask that person if they consider themselves sensible. By definition, sensible means "having, using, or showing good sense  or sound judgment." Al Gore's goal of "producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and other clean sources within 10 years" is far from sensible. Given that it took more than two hundred years to go from wood, to coal, to oil, to natural gas, to nuclear. Given all their huge advantages, it is, by definition, insensible, to expect to dismantle America's entire conventional energy industry to replace it with alternative energy alone, given their plethora of disadvantages. One conclusion can be drawn with absolute certainty: Energy transitions take time..lots of time. An excellent article by energy journalist Robert Bryce supports this assertion with a factual breath of fresh air. If there were ever a 100% renewable America, or world, for that matter, I see it happening only one way. It's not closed mindedness that's part of my judgement, in fact, it's the opposite. The fact of the matter is that like any project that requires a massive undertaking, such as revamping America's energy economy, it will, as was stated earlier, take lots of time. What then, could accomplish this low emissions goal in the short term, while allowing for the 100% renewable goal to make its decadal, perhaps centennial,  transition? It's no secret that natural gas is cleaner than coal: According to the EPA, "Compared to the average air emissions from coal-fired generation, natural gas produces half as much carbon dioxide, less than a third as much nitrogen oxides, and one percent as much sulfur oxides at the power plant." As such, a sensible person would find natural gas an attractive alternative to coal, while keeping their eye on the prize, given the time necessary to make the transition. If you are a committed environmentalist still not convinced, don't worry, your intellectual independence is very important and I do not plan on compromising that. Realize, however, that had coal production been replaced by natural gas in 2009, according to the EIA, carbon dioxide emissions would have been cut from 1,876.8 million metric tons to 938.4. This seems to be something that is consistent with all environmentalist's values. As such, it becomes obvious that this is not only the fastest, but the most environmentally and economically efficient way to reduce emissions. From there, nuclear appears to be even more attractive: It produces zero emissions and due to its enormous energy density, takes up the smallest amount of land space of energy source. Concerned about its American safety record? Don't be. Nuclear, out of all the energy industries, despite what you might hear on television, has a perfect safety record of zero deaths.  On the contrary, 41 people in the Wind Energy industry died in 2008 alone. In fact, candles kill more people than nuclear energy. Instead of deviating further to try to win any unconvinced hearts and minds over on the issue of nuclear energy, I encourage you to watch this excellent debate where lifelong environmentalist Stewart Brand, author of the Whole Earth Discipline (one of my personal favorites), explains why the planet desperately needs nuclear power better than I ever could. Imagine what the United States, perhaps the world, would look like if nuclear energy had been embraced fully when the technology was developed in the mid-twentieth century. We would be much further down the line in nuclear technology, exploring fusion and institutionalizing thorium as a substitute for uranium would be a common reality. Coal? Oil? Natural Gas? It's likely that they would exist, albeit in much smaller function, as nuclear is superior in every way from energy density to emissions. Electric cars today are likely to get their energy from some source of fossil fuel. If nuclear energy was the frontrunner, they wold be legitimately zero emissions. What about renewable energy? While transitioning from a nuclear dominated energy society, I doubt if we made it that far that many would want to trade it for hundreds of acres of wind turbines and solar panels. Keep in mind, however, that that option remains there. If I am in France, where 70% of its power comes from zero emissions nuclear power, I would prefer to spend my time trying to finalize the final 30% to nuclear, rather than the entire 100% to renewable. Keep in mind though, that to get there would require no less than transitioning from coal to natural gas and nuclear. Only from there is the 100% renewable energy utopia plausible. Now it becomes more evident that simply dismantling our conventional energy structure is not simple, and achieving it will take decades and decades. It may hurt, but its the truth. This Faustian bargain of sorts is consistent with the political process and represents bipartisanship, not lack of principle. If you are reading this, I encourage you to consider my position as I have certainly and liberally considered yours.

Geothermal Insight: Oil & Gas Coproduction

I've been learning a lot about Enhanced Geothermal Systems lately and it's a pretty novel concept: All you do is send in high pressure water with chemicals to fracture, or "frack", the ground, where the water can permeate the cracks. From there the water will heat up due to the intense heat and pressure of the earth. All that is needed to tap this energy is essentially creating a heat exchange where the heated water is sent up a pipe to a, usually binary, turbine which will create power. Then I got to thinking. Why not, at the end of an oil and gas fields' life, use existing depleted oil and gas fields that are already there to start the enhanced geothermal process? Turns out, this concept has already been thought of! It's known as Oil & Gas Coproduction. I read an article that provided some pretty revealing information. "Much of the 25 billion barrels of this geothermally heated 'wastewater' produced at oil wells each year in the U.S. is hot enough to produce electricity. It is estimated that many of the wells might have clean energy capacities of up to 1 MW."As you can see, this will benefit oil and gas companies' image while allowing geothermal companies to use existing oil and gas infrastructure. Here's an excellent video on understanding Enhanced Geothermal Systems.

The Department of Energy has provided a fact sheet for the Rocky Mountain Oil Field Testing Center (RMOTC) which has provided insight on real-world application. As is becoming evident, solutions like this are a welcome piece of the puzzle in providing cheap, clean, and abundant energy for the planet for generations.

A talk on energy

Why do we need renewable energy? If you ask that question, we, being society in general, don't really need renewable energy at all. I advocate its use, as you can tell by my blog, but I happily debunk many of the myths that renewable energy advocates claim its political adoption will solve. First, especially without government subsidies, renewable energy will be more expensive than conventional energy. As was seen back in 2007, Google created a project called "Cheaper than Coal" that was supposed to research and develop and deploy alternative energy technology, primarily solar, with the hopes of making alternative energy cheaper than coal. The program was ambitiously launched by Google's so-called "Green energy Czar" Bill Weihl  (Pictured below) with high expectations. Unfortunately, after spending around $45 million dollars, Google closed down shop on this program.  This is why it's important to be very careful of "happy talk", or launching a program with an over-ambitious goal, and then under-delivering by a mile.  Second, in my opinion, anthropogenic climate change theory is a farce. There's an excellent book entitled Climate Gate by meteorologist Brian Sussman that extensively explains why. Another excellent resource is the documentary The Great Global Warming Hoax that you can purchase off of amazon.com. These two resources can explain why much better than I can. Additionally, any claims of "scientific consensus" in favor of the anthropogenic climate change theory fall flat n their face. The reason being is an excellent website entitled the "Global Warming Petition Project." As of this blog's authoring, "31,487 American scientists have signed this petition, including 9,029 with PhDs." Thirdly, to add to that, many of the "solutions" of solving this are infinitesimally incapable of ever meeting current energy needs at a price we can afford. The environmental damage wreaked by tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of wind turbines and solar panels would be enormous. At this point, many of you must be thinking I am renewable energy's biggest detractor. It turns out that you'd be wrong. Renewable energy is great for the simple reasons that it creates jobs and competition while spurring innovation. Some people's lives are driven by trying to reach a zero-emissions planet. While I do not subscribe to the philosophy that carbon dioxide is killing the planet, some people do; but that is okay. It's great that these people are contributing to society. If you want to start a solar panel company for business and homes to take them partially or completely off the grid, my hat is off to you! This will also benefit everyone else because electric companies will need to stay sharp because they now have competition. If you discount all the arguable "benefits" like energy independence, zero-emissions economy, energy security, sustainability, and all of these, the real benefits boil down to job creation, technological innovation, and market competition (something crucially important in a free-market capitalist economy). These are very agreeable and desirable benefits and something that the USA, and all developed nations, need desperately.

One way to decrease the price of renewable energy.

After writing my last post, I've pretty much come to the conclusion that renewable energy can work, but the problem is in the price. Subsidies' existence are as volatile in the political sphere as some regions of the globe, so its important that energy in the future be subsidy-independent. So, how do we reduce the price? You only sell the power to energy efficient homes in an energy efficient community. Instead of providing power to only 20,000 homes, or it could provide power to 40,000 homes at half the cost. The price could be split up between a larger number of consumers, thus, making the price lower. For simplicities' sake, lets say that each home had to pay $10,000 a year if there were only 20,000 homes. This would be a total of $200,000,000 million dollars. If you split that up to 30,000 homes (by making each of the original 20,000 homes 50% more energy efficient) the cost would be $6,666.67, an annual reduction of $3,333.34. As you can see, selling them to energy efficient homes would make more sense than normal customers.

Solar plant provides power 24/7.

A 20 MW solar thermal plant in Spain can put to rest the once legitimate claim that solar can "only provide power when the sun shines." This means that this power plant will provide clean solar energy to roughly 20,000 Spanish homes around the clock. Now, how is this achieved? This plant is unique in that instead of sending that energy straight to boil water to create steam to turn turbines to create electricity, the solar energy is used to heat  molten salts. This is essentially a thermal battery. Below is a picture of the tank where the molten salts are stored.

Once "charged", it can provide power for 15 hours with the turbine operating at full speed without any further solar input. This is also great because it negates climatic variability as well providing predictable electric equillibrium, something grid operators appreciate greatly. This has exciting potential to succeed in providing cheap clean power to consumers because it can now provide power 24/7. To wrap up the post, here's an informative look into the Gemasolar CSP+ plant.

The most untapped source of energy.

Imagine turning your oven on high, usually for most people that’s 500 Degrees Fahrenheit and then letting it get nice and hot, and then grabbing the orange glowing bars with both hands. Now you have an adequate idea of how much heat and energy that is. What you don’t know is that is less than half the temperature that even the mildest magma reaches. Magma temperatures can range anywhere from 1,292 F to 2,192 F. Now think how much energy your oven uses when you turn it up to 500 F. It’s a lot, right? Well, since the temperature of magma can be several times that, it becomes obvious that there is a tremendous amount of energy in magma, which means it can be harnessed to produce an enormous amount of electricity. It’s quite simple. You get material whose melting temperature is greater than 2,192 F degrees and make a circulation pump (For instance, tungsten): Depending on the scale, you pump in a certain amount of water, and then the process is a closed loop system. You set it up and pump the water in; from there the magma will heat it up well past boiling to where the pressure is increased to manipulating the piping and then the steam from there furiously turns generators. After that, the steam will then cool and fall down back only to be heated and reheated indefinitely. It’s a closed-loop system. You’re not using any ground water and you're emissions-free. 20% of the cost of typical geothermal is drilling the well, which involves a lot of risk involving trial and error. Since all that is necessary to begin generating powerful electricity is low viscosity magma (possibly high as well), that is practically everywhere. For conveniences sake, Hawaii might be a good place to start, or the Philippines.  To grasp how much energy and heat is in magma, take a look at this daring video.

Imagine how much raw heat that is. If you took the top 10 ft. or so of this can you imagine how long it would remain incredibly hot!? Apparently, lava can retain it's heat for quite some time. Compare the energy density of 1 square foot of lava to 1 square foot of sunshine. Even on the hottest days recorded (being 134 degrees Fahrenheit in Death Valley, California) sunshine is no match. Contrarily, the heat in 1 square foot of lava is more than ten times that! As we can see, since magma is located everywhere, at the right depths of course, this is a paramount source of untapped energy. Why? It is abundant, it can easily produce HUGE amounts of energy, it would take up little space, and this would be a zero emissions power plant. Additionally, it could provide base load power. This is ex

Just to get an idea of what lava can do to water just watch this flowing into the ocean. It immediately flashes the water into steam and keep in mind it will take time for the ocean to cool this all the way down.

Stand alone battery bank?

So I was thinking, and I started to wonder, "Why not just install a battery bank to buy power from the grid at around 3 am?" You wouldn't need a renewable energy system and it would actually start saving you money. Alternatively, you could buy power at around 3 am and sell it at 3 pm. Just for safe measure, is all of that legal? Just want to make sure because you know how regulations sometimes are.