Rembrandt Paints An Interesting Picture  

Rembrandt Koppelaar has released another iteration of his depletion model (pdf).

A peak in liquids production is to be expected between 2012 and 2017 based on five factors:

• A production decline in an increasing amount of oil producing regions
• A decline in oil discoveries since the 1960’s
• A limit to the increase in liquids production from the existing reserve base
• An estimate of additional production due to improvements in technology
• An increased production from oil/tar sands and Orinoco heavy oil production

A significant discontinuity in observed oil production trends is necessary to postpone the peak to a date later an 2017. However, there are large uncertainties regarding reserve data, the influence of reserve growth (specifically technological progress) on production and the progression of worldwide decline. Therefore any
peak oil projection has a significant degree of inaccuracy and should not be followed blindly.

The Oil Drum has a look at the problems of natural gas supply in the US.

This site generally focuses on the world situation in regard to oil production. However, given the concerns that are beginning to arise about the supplies of natural gas this winter, it is important to also keep an eye on the situation there. The NYT has just drawn a worrying, but sadly not unexpected, picture of the growing problems that industry and the country will face as natural gas supply and demand entangle. The tenor of the article relates to the costs pointing out that the United States now has the highest prices of any industrialized country. More than half the homes in the country are heated by natural gas, and because of potential shortages, industry may face shut-down since dwellings have priority in times of shortage. This is not new, the impact of higher prices has already driven some industries abroad.

We need to declare a national crisis," Andrew N. Liveris, the chief executive of the Dow Chemical Company, said in recent testimony before the Senate. Dow, the nation's largest chemical maker, has shut 23 plants in the United States in the last three years in places like Somerset, N.J.; South Charleston, W.Va.; and Elizabethtown, Ky., as it shifted production to Kuwait, Argentina, Malaysia and Germany, where natural gas is cheaper.

"Call it demand destruction," Mr. Liveris said. "Dozens of plants around the country have closed their doors and gone away, and are never coming back."

Sun is promoting their latest CPU release as an "Eco-chip" - Technology Review takes a look at this new device and the Viridian marketing angle Sun has chosen for it.

Looking to leapfrog its rivals, computer maker Sun Microsystems Inc. on Monday announced an ''eco-friendly'' server chip that it claims will deliver more performance while requiring less electricity than competing microprocessors. The new chip uses about 70 watts of power on average, significantly less than the 150 watts to 200 watts required by server chips from Intel Corp. or International Business Machines Corp., Sun said.

The California-based computer maker also said removing the world's Web servers and replacing them with half the number of UltraSparc T1-based systems would have the same effect on carbon dioxide emissions as planting 1 million trees. ''It's time the technology industry took a stand -- tripling your datacenter performance shouldn't mean tripling your power bill and needing more coal-fired plants,'' said Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's president.

WorldChanging also has a look at this new release from Sun, and made some interesting observations on data centre power consumption.

With great fanfare, McNealy, the CEO of Sun Microsystems, announced on Monday the introduction of a new energy-efficient processor that will debut in a new line of servers by the end of the year. The company is calling the chip "the world's first Eco-responsible processor."

This is no small matter. While a great deal of focus has been on reducing the energy use of consumer electronics, such as PCs and TVs, far less has gone into the energy impacts of server farms -- facilities housing massive computing storage and routing wizardry used by Google, eBay, Yahoo, and just about any other Web site that maintains a database, performs e-commerce, or facilitates e-mail, Internet telephony, music streaming, and all the rest. Server farms require energy to operate all that electronic equipment, and gobs more to keep the equipment cool. A typical data center can consume nearly 4,000 watts per square foot -- roughly 15 times what they consumed in the early 1990s, and more than half the power required by many homes, according to the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air-Conditioning Engineers.

I couldn't find any reliable data about the aggregate energy used by today's server farms, let alone projections for the rapidly scaling future, but the load for an individual farm can be significant -- and costly. Here's a flavor, culled from a 2001 C|net article: When U.S. Dataport, a company in San Jose, Calif., planned a $1.2 billion server farm "that would be the world's largest data center," it called for "10 huge air-conditioned warehouses on 174 acres that would constantly draw 180 megawatts of electricity -- about enough to provide energy for all the homes in a city the size of Honolulu."

Wired has an article on Stirling engine based solar power plants in southern California, which makes the interesting point that solar may soon be cheaper than fossil fueled power generation. Wired also has an article on a Canadian technology to improve fuel efficiency and reduce particle emissions from diesel engines.

Though Stirling engines have been around for almost two centuries, there have been few efforts in the past to harness the sun to run them, said Stirling Energy Systems CEO Bruce Osborn. Osborn said the Stirling dishes are 30 percent efficient -- 30 percent of the sun's energy is converted into electricity -- which is two to three times as efficient as conventional photovoltaic cells. "Solar panels are more common, and they have gotten more efficient, but they still have a long way to go," he said.

Osborn said his company's dishes are easy to maintain because the engine is a closed system that never needs to be refilled -- an important factor for a large-scale facility in the middle of the desert. In fact, the only resource it consumes is "a little bit of water to wash the mirrors off every few weeks," he said. The company is currently operating a six-dish test site at Sandia National Laboratories to showcase the concept, but the SoCal Edison and SDG&E plants are Stirling Energy Systems' first commercial contracts.

The first phase of the SoCal Edison project will be to build a 1-megawatt test site using 40 dishes, which should be complete by spring 2007. Construction on the full, 500-megawatt facility is expected to begin in mid-2008, and should take three to four years. Each dish can produce up to 25 kilowatts, and the site will eventually have 20,000 dishes stretching across 4,500 acres of desert.

Stirling plans to begin construction on SDG&E's 300-megawatt project in late 2008, and it should take about two years to install the 12,000 dishes covering about 2,000 acres. None of the companies would give a price for building the solar sites or disclose the rates the utilities will pay for power, but both said the cost would be similar to traditional coal or gas.

But as oil prices go up, so could the cost of electricity from fossil fuels. "Soon, solar may be less expensive," Osborn said.

Solar isn't the only renewable energy source that is becoming price competitive with fossil fuel (even ignoring the other advantages and reduction of externalities) - WorldChanging has a post on the rapidly improving economics of wind power in North America. They also have a summary of wind related articles called "Catching Up with the Wind".

With the recent increase in natural gas prices, services using gas as a fuel have correspondingly become more costly. This is most visibly reflected in the cost of home-heating (customers in California have been warned that winter heating costs could double), but it affects electricity as well, used in many regions as fuel for power generation. Combine this with improvements in wind power technologies in recent years, and we get this somewhat startling (but very good to see) entry at the Green Power Markets page at the US Department of Energy:

November 2005 - Utility customers participating in green pricing programs that offer some form of protection from fossil-fuel price changes are finding that their green power premiums are shrinking or even turning negative. For example, as of November 1, Colorado customers participating in Xcel Energy's Windsource program are paying 0.66¢/kWh less for wind energy than for "regular" electricity because of an increase in the utility's energy cost adjustment (ECA). Since the ECA announcement, Xcel has sold out of its remaining available wind energy supply and has established a waiting list for new program signups.

In Oklahoma, OG&E Electric Services customers purchasing the OG&E Wind Power product now pay 0.13¢/kWh less for wind energy than for traditional electricity and customers of Edmond Electric's pure&simple wind power program now pay 0.33¢/kWh less.

In a growing number of regions across the US, wind power is now officially cheaper than the baseline electricity rate.

Elsewhere at WorldChanging they have posts on a new blog on the "Sustainable Future" and a likely upcoming meme - GEMS : Genetically engineered microdevices.

Econbrowser's James Hamilton seems to have become more convinced about peak oil over recent months - here is a speech he delivered on the subject at the American Enterprise Institute (a bastion of neoconservative thinktankology) of all places.

So in terms of where is that surge in world demand for oil coming from? The answer I think is pretty clear. It's coming from the developing countries, particularly China, rather than the major developed countries. And let's take a look at that Chinese oil demand in particular. So here's a graph of China's oil demand going back to 1990. And that's a terrific slope there. It turns out that's a 7.5 percent growth per year, every year for 15 years going up 7.5 percent. And if you grow at that rate you're going to pretty soon start to be a pretty major player on the block. And that's exactly what happened. Now if you show a graph like this with a nice exponential trend to it to an engineer, the first thing they want to do is extrapolate that trend. So let's see what we get. Let's extrapolate that trend out, 7.5 percent growth per year. Here we are in 2005, well you project that out by another 20 years and China will be consuming something over 30 million barrels of oil a day. So for a comparison in the U.S. we're talking about 20 million barrels a day today.

In other words, if this keeps up China is going to be consuming 50 percent more than the U.S. Now one an engineer looks to the graph like that the next question they ask, being an engineer, is oh my gosh, where is that oil going to come from? Where are we going to get the fields to pump it from and the tankers to haul it from and the refineries to use it? And the engineer says we've got some problems here. I don't think this can be done. And you put what the engineers are saying, or would want to say, just extrapolating that trend. It's about to go way off. With what the geologists are saying, which is well there ought to be some peak here in production. You put the two together and the two of them together can get quite worried about things.

So here is an example of the kind of graph that you often see from people who talk about this problem or worry about it a great deal. Designation, we are here. Demand is going up at this tremendous exponential rate. Supply is often limited. And we could maybe argue about how much more oil are we going to find? Are we going to put off that peak 10 years or 20 years, whatever? But whatever your answer to that, no matter how optimistic you wanted to be, if you put it together with these kind of exponential trends of 7.5 percent growth in places like China sooner or later you're going to be overwhelmed. It's just the simple math of the situation.

...

Why are we getting all of this oil out of the Middle East? And you go back to that graph of the production. This is a very unstable part of the world, all kinds of consequences. Why aren't we getting oil from Texas? Again, the same answer. We used up the oil in Texas. In fact the U.S. produced more oil than Saudi Arabia did, but ours is gone now. So we have to turn there. And as time goes on I think we're turning more and more to parts of the world that are less and less attractive in terms of stability of investments, for example Nigeria. My guess is that that's a country we'll be hearing a lot more about geopolitically in the next 10 years because that's going to prove to be a very important country in world production. And people will come to be as familiar with the political parties and conflicts there as we have with some of the other regions. It might not be your first choice of what you're going to hang your economy on, but we don't really have an alternative. And so there's a general principle here. The most reliable sources of oil are used up first. I think in a lot of different dimensions you're seeing we are turning to less and less reliable sources of oil precisely because the best sources are gone. And that is one aspect unambiguously of peak oil that I would say is here now, it's not something in the future.

Wired has another story about the "green" nuclear power campaign, this time trying to promote the idea that if you combine nuclear power plants with wind turbines you can generate hydrogen more effectively (one more example of the "the hydrogen economy is a nuclear economy" meme). Of course, I'd suggest that if hydrogen fuel cells become viable and people work out an efficient way of distributing the stuff we'd still be better off just building more wind and solar plants to create the hydrogen. But the "smart grid" and electricity fuelled vehicles still seem a far more attractive and workable option.

Two scientists say they have come up with a way to make hydrogen fuel cheap enough to compete with gasoline, by combining nuclear and wind power. In the system envisioned by Alistair Miller and Romney Duffey of Atomic Energy of Canada, nuclear power plants would be paired with wind turbines to power electrolysis cells, which make hydrogen by passing an electric current through water.

Wind on its own is too variable, Miller says, leaving electrolysis equipment frequently idle and driving up costs. "The economics just don't work," he says. "It produces very expensive hydrogen." Pairing it with nuclear would keep the equipment operating closer to full capacity and bring the cost down, he says. A bonus is that when the wind is strong and electricity demand is high, excess power can be sold at a profit to the grid. This means that, unlike traditional electricity-based hydrogen production, Miller's system actually makes hydrogen cheaper as the cost of electricity goes up.

Other hydrogen advocates aren't thrilled about the idea of building nuclear power plants to produce hydrogen, however.

...

"The nuclear guys are always trying to come up with arguments to make their industry more green," says Daniel Sperling, co-director of the Hydrogen Pathways Program at the University of California at Davis. "Nuclear's got all kinds of challenges." Concerns raised frequently include nuclear waste disposal, potential terrorist attacks on reactors and nuclear weapons proliferation.

Despite his doubts, Sperling says nuclear shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand for hydrogen production. "I wouldn't see spending money on nuclear to hydrogen at this point, but we should keep it open as an option." Aside from the environmental and security issues, hydrogen from the nuclear-wind system would have other hurdles to overcome, including the added costs of distributing the fuel.

"I think it's certainly possible that you can produce hydrogen that's competitive in price with gasoline and that's produced from a relatively clean source, if you're including nuclear in that," says energy market analyst Roberta Gamble of Frost & Sullivan. "The problem is the transportation of the fuel, the integration into the fuelling system, and then whether or not it would ever be used."

Gamble is doubtful that fuel-cell cars will catch on among consumers, especially within the next 10 or 15 years, when the nuclear-wind system would be most useful. After that, other hydrogen-production technologies being researched could be ready and might make the nuclear-wind system obsolete.

Nearly all hydrogen today is obtained from natural gas in a process called steam methane reforming. But unlike electrolysis, this method produces carbon dioxide, and is growing more expensive as natural gas prices rise.

Ron at MEJ has a link to more scary news about the increasingly reclusive leader of the free world (to use a long out of date term for it).

The Washington Times, you may know, is an "independent" newspaper that is basically the mouthpiece of the Republican party. For that reason, it sometimes gets inside scoops as to what the GOP is thinking, and even what's going on inside the White House. For that reason, their latest story on Bush is extremely disturbing:

"President Bush feels betrayed by several of his most senior aides and advisors and has severely restricted access to the Oval Office, administration sources say. The president's reclusiveness in the face of relentless public scrutiny of the U.S.-led war in Iraq and White House leaks regarding CIA operative Valerie Plame has become so extreme that Mr. Bush has also reduced contact with his father, former President George H.W. Bush, administration sources said on the condition of anonymity."

Matt Drudge adds on his site:

"The sources said Mr. Bush maintains daily contact with only four people: first lady Laura Bush, his mother, Barbara Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes. The sources also say that Mr. Bush has stopped talking with his father, except on family occasions."

Which tends to fit neatly with the introduction to TomDispatch's latest article from Michael Klare on possible acts of dog wagging that we might be in for.

Imagine what they might do in desperation. In fact, Michael Klare, author of the indispensable "Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependence on Imported Petroleum", does just that below, evaluating the various wag-the-dog scenarios this administration might seriously consider using if its situation grows too desperate and elections too near.

After considering these possibilities yourself, think about the context. The signal from the recent hotel bombings in Jordan seems clear enough in its own horrific way. Through its invasion and uniquely inept occupation, the Bush administration has already created a "failed state" not on the failed continent of Africa or in an economically or politically peripheral land like Afghanistan, but exactly in the heart of the richest oil lands of the planet. Iraq is now largely an anarchic world with a central government hardly capable of commanding its own fortified heart -- the Green Zone of Baghdad -- no less much of the rest of the country; where religious militias, terrorist organizations, and fractured insurgent groups have the run of the land; where internecine killing is on the rise; and the delivery of such basics of modern life as electricity and potable water (or water of any kind) are no longer givens.

Whether some in the Bush administration meant to turn Iraq into a land of "chaos" or not, they have certainly succeeded in doing so. Now, the chaos is spreading across borders. The Jordanian bombers, after all, were Iraqis. The targets, American hotels, were both soft and symbolic. But in the future, they may be harder and even more vital -- oil pipelines or other facilities outside Iraq, for instance.

Add into this formula for disaster, an "administration" in Washington that is "uninterested in governing," as Jonathan Schell wrote recently in the Nation magazine (focusing on what the post-Katrina world has revealed to us, but Iraqis already knew all too well). "We all keep referring to the ‘Bush administration,'" he added, "yet administering seems to be the last thing on its mind... If the Bush outfit is not governing, what is it doing? The answer comes readily: It wishes to acquire, increase and consolidate the power of the Republican Party."

If administration is nothing to Bush's people and power is all, the Klare scenarios that follow only seem that much more likely to be used, and what the implementation of any one of them will certainly do is add yet another chaotic pressure to the crumbling structure of our ever less safe and secure world and way of life.

And to close, one for the conspiracy theorists - Bruce Schneier points to some articles on last weekend's blogosphere hit - an MIT study that showed that aluminium foil hats amplify brain waves. The automatic comeback from the paranoid seems to be that obviously a real tinfoil hat is made of tin foil, not aluminium foil...

Abstract: Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as the protective measure of choice against invasive radio signals. We investigate the efficacy of three aluminum helmet designs on a sample group of four individuals. Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions (either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from the cranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government's invasive abilities. We theorize that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason.

And a rebuttal:

A recent MIT study [1] calls into question the effectiveness of Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanies. However, there are serious flaws in this study, not the least of which is a complete mischaracterization of the process of psychotronic mind control. I theorize that the study is, in fact, NWO propaganda designed to spread FUD against deflector beanie technology, and aluminum shielding in general, in order to disembeanie paranoids, leaving them open to mind control.