(via Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math | Politics News | Rolling Stone)
MUST READ by Bill McKibben. Shocking, in a good way, imho:)
Researchers develop a new candidate for a cleaner, greener and renewable diesel fuel (PhysOrg.com) — A class of chemical compounds best known today for fragrance and flavor may one day provide the clean, green and renewable fuel with which truck and auto drivers fill their tanks. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) have engineered Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria to generate significant quantities of methyl ketone compounds from glucose. In subsequent tests, these methyl ketones yielded high cetane numbers – a diesel fuel rating comparable to the octane number for gasoline – making them strong candidates for the production of advanced biofuels
“Confessions of a Chevy Volt Owner.” A surprising, frank interview with an owner of a Volt after one year of driving.
- 203 miles per gallon in the first year at 16,000 miles. Not a typo. His previous car, a Volvo, got 18 miles per gallon. (I get about 28 mpg in my ol’ benz.)
- “I wish I bought the car. I absolutely love it.” He leased it because he was skeptical of owning it. But, wishes he bought it.
- “I didn’t buy it to save money.” The biggest surprise here. He bought it to help eliminate the need for oil.
- “My home electricity bill is about the same as when my daughter lived here in high school.” After a year of plugging it in to his home, his electricity bill remains the same and didn’t go up as expected.
- He responds to the common criticism, “The Chevy Cruze is cheaper.” “Well, a bicycle is even cheaper and saves more gas than the Cruze. So is a used car. So is walking. Look, this isn’t about money, it’s about oil.”
The interview is short and surprising. Have a look.
via climateadaptation:
(via climateadaptation)
IBM is teaming with Statoil, Kongsberg Group and DNV to develop an environmental monitoring system for oil and gas activities. This is an image of subsea operations at Statoil’s Vega Field
Statoil Vega Field (by ibmphoto24)
Cleaner, Cheaper Liquid Fuel from Coal - Technology Review
A new conversion process promises zero carbon emissions during production—but some question whether it will scale.
SRI International is developing a process that combines coal and natural gas to produce liquid transportation fuels that are substantially cleaner and cheaper to make than existing synthetic fuels.
SRI claims its process addresses three liabilities that have slowed the commercialization of the technology. By blending some natural gas into the conventional coal-to-liquids (CTL) process, the private research lab, based in Menlo Park, California, claims to have eliminated CTL’s carbon footprint, slashed water consumption by over 70 percent, and more than halved its capital cost.
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To solve the energy challenge, we will have to find a way to produce, every day, not just what we are producing right now, but at least twice that much. We will need to increase our energy output by a minimum factor of two, the generally agreed upon number, certainly by the middle of the century, but preferably well before that—despite the fact that oil and gas will have long since peaked. Considering that many people on the planet are not using much energy at all and that new energy sources have yet to be developed, billions of people would still be living without modern energy.
To give all 10 billion people on the planet the level of energy prosperity we in the developed world are used to, a couple of kilowatt-hours per person, we would need to generate 60 terawatts around the planet—the equivalent of 900 million barrels of oil per day.
”Future Global Energy Prosperity: The Terawatt Challenge
In 2004, the late Nobel laureate, Richard Smalley, one of the pioneers of nanotechnology, shared this incisive report on the future of the world’s energy needs. With world population passing 7 billion, this assessment is even more salient seven years later.
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“When considering the consequences of peak oil, no everyday experiences and only few historical parallels are at hand. It is therefore difficult to imagine how significant the effects of being gradually deprived of one of our civilization’s most important energy sources will be. Psychological barriers cause indisputable facts to be blanked out and lead to almost instinctively refusing to look into this difficult subject in detail. Peak oil, however, is unavoidable.”
~ A quote from the recently translated Peak Oil analysis written by the German Military (via ASPO)
(Image credit: Johns Hopkins Public Health)
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Watson: From quiz show to oil field | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle
A few months ago, two of the top-winning players on Jeopardy squared off against a computer system named Watson — and lost. Watson was able to navigate the puns and word games that are typical in a Jeopardy question, pore through 200 million pages of natural-language content stored in its memory, and find answers in less than three seconds. This feat may sound like an entertaining bit of trivia, but Watson actually has serious and potentially transformational implications for many Houstonians who work in the oil industry.
The oil industry has been receptive to innovation, especially when it is able to address significant industry challenges. In fact, eight out of 10 global oil and gas executives in a recent IBM study named technology progress as the oil and gas industry’s most important external force in 2030. In fact, one of the biggest challenges technology can help resolve is the sheer volume and velocity of information.
At a recent Society of Petroleum Engineers Digital Energy conference held in The Woodlands, an exploration and production company executive cited the challenge of processing ever-growing volumes of real-time drilling data and then interfacing with multiple interdisciplinary parties on the drilling rig to interpret what is happening or about to happen. The executive went on to say that information technology must address this data challenge, and therefore IT will have the biggest impact on the field of drilling in the future.
That is why a question-and-answer system like Watson that can collect, process and understand data based on natural language within a matter of seconds could have far-reaching implications for the oil and gas industry.
During drilling and completion operations, for example, Watson can take data being collected while a well is being drilled and use sophisticated modeling and scoring techniques, faster than any human, to provide answers such as what is the most efficient way to continue drilling the well, without mishap, and where should the well be completed in the reservoir to optimize production at a reasonable cost. To enhance exploration, Watson could integrate and analyze data from multiple sources and across multiple disciplines, including geophysical/seismic, geological/petrophysical and engineering/operations. This allows engineers and geoscientists more time to adjust and interpret their predictive models rather than collecting data. They can then make decisions more accurately and faster to discover the most efficient way to drill multiple wells, develop the entire field and achieve faster time-to-oil safely and cost-effectively.
Read more:
Why Can’t America Make Alternative Fuels Work? – Gas 2.0
60 years ago, there didn’t seem to be a single challenge America couldn’t overcome. Now, there’s just a lot of negativity about America, especially when it comes to alternative fuels. What are these people so afraid of?
In particular, I’m talking about how in the same breath a person can criticize Big Oil for rising gas prices, and then start talking trash about any kind of alternative to gasoline for fuel. It makes no sense to me that we, as Americans, should have nearly infinite options when it comes to buying just about anything you can imagine, except fuel for our cars. That’s all I really want. Options. I want a gas station that sells more than gas. I want CNG, I want propane, I want different ethanol blends, and I want charging stations that are built by a combination of private and public investment. Is that really asking so much?
For some people, it apparently is. It’s as though we’re afraid of messing with the formula that has made America the most effective economic giant in the world for the last century or so. Make no mistake about it, putting cars into the hands of the common people radically altered the human dynamic. No longer were people confined to the towns where they were born, or reliant upon massive railroads who dictated where tracks were or weren’t laid.
If I had to pick one symbol for America in the 20th century, it’d have to be the Ford Model T. For thousands and thousands of years, the fastest mode of overland travel was the horse, which like humans required lots of food and lots of rest. But with the advent of the automobile, people now had a source of mobility that could take farther and faster than even the swiftest thoroughbred, and required only a few gallons of a seemingly inexhaustible source of fuel.
But we’re in the 21st century now. America may no longer be the world’s most prolific economy in as little as 5 years. There are many billions more people in the world today than there were 60 years ago. And there people are starting to get their hands on automobiles too, changing the dynamics of their lives as well. The world is changing, and if America wants to stay on top, we need to be the innovators in the 21st century that we were in the 20th century.
The problem is, there aren’t a whole lot of things left that we can take the lead in, and not everything we’re first in is exactly admirable. So why would anyone believe that, at a time when the entirety of the rest of the world is leaning towards renewable fuels, would we want to in the other direction? If Europe and China want solar panels and electric cars and wind turbines, well they should buy it from America. That’s a surefire way to get our economy back on track, and the oil companies called before Congress this week have the knowledge and resources to make it happen. So why don’t they?
We’re afraid. We don’t want to mess with success. Oil is cheap and abundant, except its not anymore, and we’re afraid that our lives our going to be lesser for it. So we want to drill for more oil and build bigger highways to we can sit in longer traffic jams and pay ever more for gasoline, because there really is no other option?
The Electric Vehicle Acceptance Tipping Point: $5-A-Gallon Gas
It would be a disaster economically, upsetting family budgets and making the transporting of goods potentially next to impossible. But according to a new survey by Deloitte, it could take something as extreme as $5-per-gallon of gas to persuade most U.S. citizens to abandon gas stations and SUVs and buy electric vehicles. Do we have to destroy this village in order to save it?
For most of the last month, the national average gas price in the U.S. has nudged upwards every single day—it’s now at around $3.83 per gallon. In six states, including New York, the average price is above $4, with Hawaii topping the list at $4.48 per gallon. And there are reports that a few stations have already hit the $5 mark. It’s all thanks to a gradual but continuous rise in the price of oil on global markets—up 48% since last Labor Day. This upward creep is driven by many things, including market fluctuations, decisions about production made by OPEC, and the rise of civil unrest in the Middle East (especially in Libya, which has ceased its oil exports during the civil war). And yet, despite these growing costs, and the fact we know for sure that every mile we drive in a car that eats gas or diesel, we’re actively contributing to global warming, many of us continue to drive cars.
What will it take to change the situation, pushing most Americans to ditch their SUV and buy an eco-friendly electric car? An arbitrary price limit, that’s what—the point at which gas hits $5 per gallon.
That’s what Deloitte found after interviewing 12,000 people worldwide, with more than 1,000 respondents in the U.S. The main conclusion of the survey is that the higher gas prices go, the more consumers favor the notion of electric vehicles. That seems like a no-brainer (even someone poor at math can imagine the increased cost of running a car as gas prices rise), but it’s still an important conclusion given that gas prices are definitely increasing and unlikely to drop any time soon.
Source: Fast Company
Honda’s ‘greenest’ Civic to hit US showrooms
The greenest car you’ve likely never heard of will soon be hitting Honda showrooms across the United States as the Japanese automaker expands sales of its compressed natural gas powered Civic.
Free ride: Rising oil prices boost electric cars’ affordability
One of the biggest knocks against electric cars, other than their current range, is the rather steep upfront cost due to the price of the battery.
Of course, you’re essentially pre-paying much of your fuel costs for the life of the car. But that’s a hard message to get across to a potential buyer contemplating forking over $41,000 for a Chevrolet Volt or $33,000 for a Nissan Leaf before state and federal incentives.
However, rising gasoline prices — now topping $4 a gallon in the San Francisco Bay Area — may finally drive the message home that electric cars, despite the expense of the first generation mass production models, are a hedge against an uncertain fuel future. (Not to mention environmental catastrophe.)
In a new report on electric cars and the smart grid, GTM Research includes a handy chart listing average gasoline prices (as of Jan. 2011) in the United States and Europe, along with the price of electricity and the savings from trading in a gas-guzzler for an electron-sipper.
In the U.S., drivers of battery-powered rides can save the equivalent of $2.05 a gallon, assuming gas prices of $3.25 a gallon and electricity rates of 12 cents a kilowatt-hour. Of course, gas and power prices in the U.S. vary dramatically from state to state. In California, both are among the highest in the land. But so are subsidies for solar panels, which can be used to charge your car, a further hedge against peak oil.
