EcoRadio

Category: Energy Matters

  • The one thing depleting faster than oil is the credibility of those measuring it

     

    If the whistleblowers are right, we should be stockpiling ammunition. If we are taken by surprise, if we have failed to replace oil before the supply peaks then crashes, the global economy is stuffed. But nothing the whistle-blowers said has scared me as much as the conversation I had last week with a Pembrokeshire farmer.

    Wyn Evans, who runs a mixed farm of 170 acres, has been trying to reduce his dependency on fossil fuels since 1977. He has installed an anaerobic digester, a wind turbine, solar panels and a ground-sourced heat pump. He has sought wherever possible to replace diesel with his own electricity. Instead of using his tractor to spread slurry, he pumps it from the digester on to nearby fields. He’s replaced his tractor-driven irrigation system with an electric one, and set up a new system for drying hay indoors, which means he has to turn it in the field only once. Whatever else he does is likely to produce smaller savings. But these innovations have reduced his use of diesel by only around 25%.

    According to farm scientists at Cornell University, cultivating one hectare of maize in the United States requires 40 litres of petrol and 75 litres of diesel. The amazing productivity of modern farm labour has been purchased at the cost of a dependency on oil. Unless farmers can change the way it’s grown, a permanent oil shock would price food out of the mouths of many of the world’s people. Any responsible government would be asking urgent questions about how long we have got.

    Instead, most of them delegate this job to the International Energy Agency. I’ve been bellyaching about the British government’s refusal to make contingency plans for the possibility that oil might peak by 2020 for the past two years, and I’m beginning to feel like a madman with a sandwich board. Perhaps I am, but how lucky do you feel? The new World Energy Outlook published by the IEA last week expects the global demand for oil to rise from 85m barrels a day in 2008 to 105m in 2030. Oil production will rise to 103m barrels, it says, and biofuels will make up the shortfall. If we want the oil, it will materialise.

    The agency does caution that conventional oil is likely to “approach a plateau” towards the end of this period, but there’s no hint of the graver warning that the IEA’s chief economist issued when I interviewed him last year: “We still expect that it will come around 2020 to a plateau … I think time is not on our side here.” Almost every year the agency has been forced to downgrade its forecast for the daily supply of oil in 2030: from 123m barrels in 2004, to 120m in 2005, 116m in 2007, 106m in 2008 and 103m this year. But according to one of the whistleblowers, “even today’s number is much higher than can be justified, and the International Energy Agency knows this”.

    The Uppsala report, published in the journal Energy Policy, anticipates that maximum global production of all kinds of oil in 2030 will be 76m barrels per day. Analysing the IEA’s figures, it finds that to meet its forecasts for supply, the world’s new and undiscovered oilfields would have to be developed at a rate “never before seen in history”. As many of them are in politically or physically difficult places, and as capital is short, this looks impossible. Assessing existing fields, the likely rate of discovery and the use of new techniques for extraction, the researchers find that “the peak of world oil production is probably occurring now”.

    Are they right? Who knows? Last month the UK Energy Research Centre published a massive review of all the available evidence on global oil supplies. It found that the date of peak oil will be determined not by the total size of the global resource but by the rate at which it can be exploited. New discoveries would have to be implausibly large to make a significant difference: even if a field the size of all the oil reserves ever struck in the US were miraculously discovered, it would delay the date of peaking by only four years. As global discoveries peaked in the 1960s, a find like this doesn’t seem very likely.

    Regional oil supplies have peaked when about one third of the total resource has been extracted: this is because the rate of production falls as the remaining oil becomes harder to shift when the fields are depleted. So the assumption in the IEA’s new report, that oil production will hold steady when the global resource has fallen “to around one half by 2030” looks unsafe. The UK Energy Research Centre’s review finds that, just to keep oil supply at present levels, “more than two thirds of current crude oil production capacity may need to be replaced by 2030 … At best, this is likely to prove extremely challenging.” There is, it says “a significant risk of a peak in conventional oil production before 2020”. Unconventional oil won’t save us: even a crash programme to develop the Canadian tar sands could deliver only 5m barrels a day by 2030.

    As a report commissioned by the US Department of Energy shows, an emergency programme to replace current energy supplies or equipment to anticipate peak oil would need about 20 years to take effect. It seems unlikely that we have it. The world economy is probably knackered, whatever we might do now. But at least we could save farming. There are two possible options: either the mass replacement of farm machinery or the development of new farming systems that don’t need much labour or energy.

    There are no obvious barriers to the mass production of electric tractors and combine harvesters: the weight of the batteries and an electric vehicle’s low-end torque are both advantages for tractors. A switch to forest gardening and other forms of permaculture is trickier, especially for producing grain; but such is the scale of the creeping emergency that we can’t afford to rule anything out.

    The challenge of feeding seven or eight billion people while oil supplies are falling is stupefying. It’ll be even greater if governments keep pretending that it isn’t going to happen.

  • Surf’s up for Cornwall’s wave hub

     

    The Wave Hub, which will be based 10 miles off the north coast of Cornwall, will feature a large grid-connected “socket” on the seabed that will allow up to four different marine energy devices to connect to it at any one time. As a result, marine energy companies will be able to field-test devices for a number of years without the need to gain additional planning consent.

    The Hub will be connected by an undersea cable to a new electricity sub-station on the site of a former power station.

    Work on the sub-station will start in January and is expected to take six months to complete. The Wave Hub device will then be deployed and the sub-sea cable laid next summer, when the device is expected to become operational.

    The announcement comes as the Wave Hub project announced that it has appointed Guy Lavender – formely a director for the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games – as general manager for the project.

    Stephen Peacock, executive director of enterprise and innovation at the South West Regional Development Agency, said he hopes the device will put the area at the forefront of marine energy development in the UK. “Our aim is to create an entirely new low carbon industry in the South West and hundreds of quality jobs, ” he said.

    The Wave Hub is being funded with £12.5m from the South West RDA, £20m from the European Regional Development Fund Convergence Programme and £9.5m from the UK government.

    The South West development authority expect investment in local marine energy programmes to reach £100m over the next two years.

    The Wave Hub project has been widely praised by the marine energy industry and three developers have already secured access to the berths – Fred Olsen Limited, Ocean Power Technologies and Orecon – with a number of developers reported to be in talks about using the fourth berth.

    However, the latest stage of the project comes as industry group the BWEA last week warned that the government is failing to adequately support the sector and recommended greater funding is needed to help developers get from the concept stage to full commercial scale generators.

    • This article was shared by our content partner BusinessGreen.com, part of the Guardian Environment Network

  • (Partly) Renewable Ethanol

     

    Judging from a range of recent studies, corn ethanol is about one quarter renewable. Even by the most optimistic estimate — the one the Renewable Fuels Association repeatedly cites — corn ethanol is only 40% renewable.* The US may have displaced 4% of its gasoline use with energy from ethanol in 2008, but less than 2% of that energy came from sunlight captured on those 21 million acres of corn. Most of it came from the natural gas and coal used to make fertilizer and run ethanol plants.

    Ethanol energy output:fossil energy input

    A cursory comparison of study results emphasizes the differences between them. Delving into the data a little further shows that there is actually a remarkable degree of consistency between the studies, despite the different figures they come up with in the end. All agree that ethanol processing is by far the most energy-intensive component of the lifecycle, consuming nearly two-thirds as much energy as we get from burning the fuel. Growing the corn requires the next biggest energy investment: Most conclude that farming requires about a third as much energy as is available from the ethanol (Pimentel and Patzek’s estimate is higher; Kim and Dale’s is lower). All agree that transporting the corn and distributing the ethanol are pretty minor components of the energy investment.

    Ethanol energy output:fossil energy input

    So if ethanol processing takes almost two-thirds as much energy as ethanol delivers, and farming takes almost a third, how can there be any net energy benefit to making corn ethanol?

    The answer lies with the co-product. For every three truckloads of corn that go into an ethanol plant, about one truck comes out full of dried distiller’s grain, a protein-rich animal feed. Since the byproduct is useful, each of the studies assigns a “co-product” credit to the process. A certain proportion of the energy that went in to the process is subtracted because the distiller’s grain co-product is assumed to have saved energy needed to grow animal feed.

    Without the co-product credit all of the studies agree that corn ethanol would be less than 15% renewable.* Among the five studies that conclude there is an energy return to making corn ethanol, the co-product credit accounts for most of the benefit reported.

    Renewable Proportion of Corn Ethanol

    The size of the co-product credit is what really distinguishes the six studies. Those that assign a larger proportion of the energy investment to the co-product conclude that there is a greater energy return to ethanol production.

    Relationship between co-product credit and energy ouput ratio

    Obviously, how the co-product credit is calculated is important. Since dried distiller’s grain is a high protein feed that can substitute for soybean meal, most of the studies use an estimate of the amount of energy needed to produce the soybean meal equivalent of the distillers grain that comes out of the ethanol plant. This seems logical, but Kim and Dale point out that a sure way to improve the energy return from corn ethanol is to reduce the efficiency of soybean production (!).

    The most optimistic numbers come from Shapouri et al. (2004), who calculate a credit based on the proportion of energy used to make dried distillers grain in a typical ethanol plant. They consider the amount of energy used to dry distiller’s grain an energy credit, because it is used to make the co-product, not ethanol. The net energy calculated using this method is equivalent to the net energy from a plant in which the distiller’s grain drying phase is omitted completely and animals are fed wet distiller’s grains.

    Ethanol promoters understandably wish that any discussion of net energy associated with ethanol production would simply go away. This spring an advocacy group called Ethanol Across America issued a brief headlined with a statement fashioned to end all debate:

    Study after study after study confirms that ethanol production from corn produces more energy than it takes to make it, period. End of story. So why is this still an issue? When you look at the facts, it simply isn’t.

    The problem is, of course, that corn ethanol is being billed as a renewable fuel when it is currently mostly non-renewable. It’s true that most studies say corn ethanol does better than break even from a net energy perspective, but not much better. Calling ethanol 25% renewable (or 75% non-renewable) just doesn’t have the same ring as calling it renewable. Honesty and good policy require that we tell it like it is, though. For ethanol and other “renewable” fuels, I think we’d be well served to abandon the convenient renewable/non-renewable dichotomy, and start qualifying renewable claims with a percentage.

    If you’ve read this far, you might have me pegged as an opponent of first generation (sugar and starch-based) ethanol. I’m not. Many such opponents (e.g. zFacts.com) argue that this is a mature technology, it’s already as good as it’s likely to get, and we should spend our time and resources on other pursuits, like learning to make ethanol out of cellulose. I disagree.

    I think there’s plenty of room to improve first generation ethanol production. Here are some ideas:

    1. Learn to grow feedstock crops without synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. By using biologically-fixed nitrogen, instead of synthetically fixed nitrogen we can cut the amount of energy that goes into grain production by 30-50%. That’s huge. Study after study after study after study confirms that corn yields will not fall by an equivalent amount. If we’re concerned about net energy, then low-input farming is the way to go.
    2. Learn to use other feedstock crops. American farmers are very good at growing corn, but there are plenty of other crops that can produce lots of sugar and starch for conversion to ethanol. India and China have recognized that sweet sorghum and sweet potato can probably out-perform corn, particularly in low-input systems. America’s single minded focus on corn has led an increasing proportion of corn farmers to grow corn after corn, which is a poor management practice that ultimately compromises yields and demands more agricultural inputs. Diversifying feedstock demand can help restore crop rotations to American farms.
    3. Re-integrate crop, animal, and fuel production systems. Drying distiller’s mash down into dried distiller’s grain is one of the most energy intensive operations at an ethanol plant. Distiller’s mash makes a fine animal feed, but it doesn’t ship or store well. The extra energy investment to dry it is unnecessary if the plant is linked to an animal-based farm with a local and immediate demand for feed. Organic waste products from the animals and the ethanol plant can be digested anaerobically to make methane for renewable energy, and the material left over after digestion can be recycled back onto the crop land as fertilizer. A study published earlier this year by Liska et al. concludes that a closed-loop corn ethanol plant like this reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 67% and increases the net energy ratio to 2.2, making corn ethanol that’s 55% renewable.* I suspect that closed-loop plants will work better on a small scale than a large scale: Here, in Kentucky, the move to drying distiller’s mash began when bourbon distilleries got too big for the farms that once were coupled with each distillery.
    4. Stop using nonrenewable fuels for fermentation and distillation. All of the studies that conclude that cellulosic ethanol plants will offer a better energy return than first generation ethanol plants assume that the energy the cellulosic plants use for fermentation and distillation will come from plant matter, not from natural gas and coal. This difference accounts for almost all of the anticipated energy benefit expected of cellulosic ethanol. We don’t need to wait for advanced technology to become available to start converting first generation plants to draw their heat from renewable sources, like wood or crop residues. Brazilians have known this for years: Most of the energy that drives their ethanol production comes from sugarcane residues left over after sugar extraction.

    By combining tactics I suspect it’s possible to make first generation ethanol competitive with cellulosic ethanol in terms of net energy return, and to move in this direction immediately, rather than waiting for the expensive and experimental enzyme technology that seems to be holding up development of the cellulosic ethanol segment. The only way that either will ever replace a substantial portion of our gasoline consumption, though, is if we can dramatically reduce our consumption. Over the past two years Americans have done just that, reducing oil use by 9%. That’s a much bigger bite out of the energy pie than we got by turning 21 million acres of corn into ethanol

  • Researchers: “Upconversion” Creates “Super-efficient” Solar Cells

    The work, published in the journal Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, aims to increase efficiency in crystalline and amorphous silicon solar cells through application of synthesized sensitizer and emitter molecules. Such “single-threshold” materials “produces voltage by promoting electrons above this threshold upon absorption of light,” explained paper co-author Tim Schmidt; photons with energy below that threshold can’t be harvested, and any energy above that threshold is lost through heat, he added.

    Maximum efficiency of single-threshold PV converters is about 30%, the group notes. One proposed way to improve that is to place an upconverting material behind the cell, to convert low subthreshold photons into usable light; such a cell would have an efficiency limit of >50%, though best-recorded efficiency has been ∼ 10 -6. Their work specifically focuses on using “triplet-triplet annihilation” in organic molecules. When two triplet emitter molecules encounter each other, the result is either a singlet, triplet, or quintet spin state; if a singlet (1:9 chance), it converts to a lower energy state and fluoresces, yielding “upconverted” light.

    Applying this “upconversion” method, the group says, results in striking improvements: efficiency limit “under the standard solar spectrum” of over 50%, and up to 63% under 100-fold solar concentration. From the paper abstract:

    Emitter triplet states are produced through triplet energy transfer from sensitizer molecules excited with low energy photons. The triplet emitter molecules undergo triplet-triplet annihilation to yield excited singlet states which emit upconverted fluorescence. Experiments comparing the 560nm prompt fluorescence when rubrene emitter molecules are excited directly, using 525nm laser pulses, to the delayed, upconverted fluorescence when the porphyrin sensitizer molecules are excited with 670nm laser pulses reveal annihilation efficiencies to produce excited singlet emitters in excess of 20%. Conservative measurements reveal a 25% annihilation efficiency, while a direct comparison between the prompt and delayed fluorescence yield suggests a value as high as 33%. Due to fluorescence quenching, the photon upconversion efficiencies are lower, at 16%.


    (Read more from Photovoltaics World at electroIQ.com)

  • The future of oil

     

    Superficially, the so-called “super majors” appear to be in good health. Fortune‘s Global 500 list places the “big six” – Shell, ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Total, and ConocoPhillips – among the seven largest corporations in the world, as measured by 2008 revenues. In third place, Wal-Mart stands alone as the only top seven company not dedicated to finding, extracting, processing, distributing and selling the liquid transportation fuels that drive the global economy, although few business models are as dependent on the ready availability of relatively cheap oil.

    Worryingly for such companies, 2008 may prove to have been the high water mark for the global oil industry, with geological, geopolitical and climate-related pressures now creating new market dynamics. The oil question is now, more than ever, a transport question. Cheap and reliable supplies of transportation fuel are the very lifeblood of our globalised economy. So it matters profoundly that we are entering an era in which oil supplies will be neither cheap nor reliable.

    For the likes of Shell, BP, and ExxonMobil, whose rates of liquid hydrocarbon production peaked in 2002, 2005, and 2006 respectively, the current economic paradigm requires them to replace reserves. Investors primarily value IOCs on this basis, as well as their ability to execute projects on time within budget. A key problem for the IOCs is that petroleum-rich countries feel increasingly confident in the ability of their own national oil companies to steward their domestic resources. So generous concessions once offered to IOCs in return for technical and managerial expertise are now deemed unnecessary.

    The imperative to satisfy investor expectations fuels an increasingly risky growth strategy, which drives IOCs towards energy-intensive (and potentially climate-destabilising) unconventional oil substitutes, such as tar sands (in Canada), gas-to-liquids (in Qatar), and coal-to-liquids (in China and elsewhere). These pathways are not chosen as ideals: they are more or less reflexive responses to external market pressures.

    Meanwhile, the uncomfortable fact is that our economies are addicted to liquid hydrocarbon transport fuels, the consumption of which creates a catalogue of negative side effects. And we cannot hope to address this addiction by way of our “dealers” developing even more damaging derivatives of the same drug.

    As if that were not enough, there is the hot topic of “peak oil“, defined as the point at which global oil production reaches a maximum rate, from where it steadily declines. The basic principle is uncontroversial: production of a finite non-renewable resource cannot expand endlessly, and this has been demonstrated in practice at national level all over the world. The heated debate centres on the point at which the peak in global oil production is likely to be reached.

    “Early toppers” argue that the peak has already been passed, and that the world will never produce more than 85 million barrels per day. By contrast, “late toppers” point to the huge scale of unconventional reserves – for example, Alberta’s tar sands resource is vast – that remain untapped, as well as the potential bounty locked away in frontier regions such as the Arctic Ocean, where global warming is opening up new areas for oil and gas exploration.

    Unfortunately, what matters is not the absolute size of these unconventional and frontier resources, but the rate at which they can be developed and brought to market. By definition, this is the “difficult” oil. Production rates are determined by a series of significant financial, social, and environmental constraints that raise grave concerns for the viability of a global economic system made possible by liquid transport fuels.

    At the same time, leaders of all the major economies finally acknowledge what scientists have long been warning: to avoid catastrophic climate-change impacts, the global average surface temperature increase must be limited to 2° Celsius compared with the pre-industrial era. To stand any reasonable chance of avoiding a 2° Celsius rise, our best understanding of the climate change science suggests that global greenhouse-gas emissions must peak within the next five to 10 years, and then decline by more than 80% on 1990 levels by 2050. Realistically, meeting this requirement will demand that we engineer a transition to a zero-carbon energy system by mid-century.

    So what might a zero-carbon energy system look like? As well as dramatic improvements in the energy efficiency of buildings and appliances, and massive deployment of sustainable renewable energy technologies, we will no longer be allowed to burn fossil fuels without capturing and sequestering the carbon dioxide emissions. This implies that we must restrict our use of fossil fuels to stationary facilities, such as power plants, where carbon capture and storage (CCS) is practical (see “Outlook and obstacles for CCS“). Strikingly, a zero-carbon energy system will also mean that no liquid hydrocarbon fuels, with the exception of biofuels, can be consumed in mobile applications such as transport.

    This does not make pleasant reading for international oil companies. Their core business today may be described as: digging geological carbon resources out of the ground, converting those resources into liquid fuels, then marketing those fuels to consumers who set them on fire in internal combustion engines to move around. By 2050, these activities will all be considered to be strikingly primitive.

    SustainAbility and of Volans. His personal website is http://www.johnelkington.com. Gary Kendall is director of SustainAbility’s Energy Sector and Climate Change Programme.

    John Elkington is co-founder of

     

  • UK carbon capture competition ‘dead on its feet ‘says expert

     

    Speaking to BusinessGreen.com, Professor Stuart Hazeldine, a geologist at the University of Edinburgh and leading expert in CCS technologies, said that the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) should close the competition and award the funding to Scottish Power to develop CCS at its Longannet plant in Fife in order to prevent any more time being wasted.

    “Scottish Power are the only people who can deliver by 2014 now,” he said. ” The competition timescale has already slipped and to get it back on track the award needs to be made soon.”

    Back in 2007 the government said it would award the winner of its CCS competition around £1 billion to help fund a commercial scale carbon capture demonstration project.

    The government has said it plans to announce the winner some point next year with three proposals in the running: Longannet, RWE npower’s station at Tilbury in Essex, and E.ON’s plans for a new coal plant at Kingsnorth in Kent.

    “RWE npower are showing a manifest lack of movement on their CCS offerings and E.ON have delayed Kingsnorth plans,” said Hazeldine. “That leaves one obvious winner.”

    He added that the long-running competition had discouraged other firms from coming forward with project proposals. “The UK has such a slow track record on developing CCS that anyone who is able to has gone elsewhere,” he said. “We need to get on with it.”

    The government has now committed to helping fund “up to four” CCS plants in the UK. The first – the competition winner – will be funded by the Treasury, but any further plants will be funded primarily from a levy on energy bills.

    As well as awarding the competition to Scottish power, the government should announce a “feed study” – a detailed engineering evaluation – for CCS at Kingsnorth so that E.ON can install the technology when it likely revives the plant in the second half of this decade, Hazeldine advised.

    Hazeldine first made his controversial recommendations at a Westminster energy forum last month, where Martin Deutz, director of the cleaner fossil fuels unit at DECC, defended the department’s position.

    “It is an active commercial negotiation and I’m not going to say anything about the commercial position of each of the companies,” he said. “But I would say that the negotiations that we have been having with the bidders have thrown up a number of extremely interesting and important issues… they are important issues which have to be dealt with financially, operationally and in regulatory terms.”