***Alternative Energy Forecasts*** 21

[deltawhy]

Hello, so I know everyone here has at least an opinion on this subject. I would like to see what the industry experienced members think of alternative energy and the forecast for the near future.

Within the next 5, 10, and 15 years, what do you think will become dominant in North America, Europe, and Australia?

One of the main issues plaguing alternative energy is the method of energy storage. What do you think will become dominant? New types of chemical batteries, flywheel storage, compressed air, water pumping, etc.

How about less known about methods, like plasma gasification and MSW energy?

Will micorgeneration become a major player, with the addition of hybrid and electric vehicles putting massive amounts of stress on the already stressed grid?

Any thoughts?

Regards

 

[TGS4]

Absolutely. They probably generate more Co2 in an hour of commuting than I do all day...

 

[SnTMan]

KENAT, I haven't studied up but it seems to me that NG is ideal for stationary applications, if you can deliver it by pipeline, liquid fuels seem to me ideal for mobile applications because of the superior volumetric energy density.

Agree that vehicles designed for NG can be far better than conversions.

If we are going to subsidize the conversion, I guess I could support the creation (and only the creation) of a fuelling infrastructure, if the subsidy goes away when the job is far enough along.

As for California, I think CARB is just anti-fossil fuel.

Regarding taxes, one of the advantages being pushed for NG is how inexpensive it is compared to gasoline and diesel. But this advantage is not assured into the future without accounting for both supply / demand and the tax regime. I'm wary of a bait-and-switch by the politicians.

I really feel the NATGAS Act is in our future as T Boone seems to be pushing it and the pols won't be able to resist, plus it is always popular to campaign against gas prices. I'm not necessarily against it, but right now a lot is unknown, which of course does not prevent the politicians from plowing ahead.

All we really need is Michelle Bachman's two dollar gas

Regards,

Mike

 

[zdas04]

rb1957,
I have to agree that the absence of proof is not proof. My big concern about this particular religion is that EVERY SINGLE DATA SET is tainted by not being able to be reverted to an unmodified state. Changing data in place is simply not science, it is spin.

Is the earth's climate changing? Of course it is. It has been in a state of flux for something like a billion years, what makes anyone think that changes would stop because we're watching? Temperatures will go up. Temperatures will go down. Unsettled weather will increase. Unsettled weather will decrease. One day something really catastrophic will happen and most of us will die. Could be tomorrow. Could be in a million years. There is no way to tell.

Is AGW real? That has become a religious question. My belief system doesn't stretch to accepting computer models as fact, adulterated data as pure, or researchers who have based their economic life on a hypothesis as unbiased.

David

 

[cranky108]

Like any religin, I won't stop someone from practiceing it (except if you believe in killing other people). And you are free to practice what you want. But don't try to declare it the national religin. And make the rest of us bow.

However, I do agree there are some good things that can come from different ideas. So I will hear what you have to say.

I have seen good uses for alternite energy, but few that would work well on a grand scale.

Keep the new ideas comming.

 

[csd72]

rb1957,

They stopped burning unbelievers at the stake as that caused too many carbon emmissions

Regardless of the science, I just think its absolutely mad to sell something as energy dense and irreplacable as petroleum for such a small fraction of what we charge for milk.

 

[moltenmetal]

TGS4: you are too intelligent to not understand the flaw in your argument about plant and animal CO2 emissions- my 9 yr old kid understands the basics of the biological carbon cycle, so I’m sure you do too.

Fossil carbon combustion releases stored carbon from the earth’s crust into the atmosphere. Plants and animals merely recycle most of the carbon from the atmosphere back to the atmosphere. They do fix some carbon more or less permanently (i.e. seashell carbonate) or at least store it in the biosphere for a long time (i.e. soil organic carbon). Doesn’t matter if you eat the animals and plants or burn them as fuels, the CO2 that is emitted came from the atmosphere.

Tax fossil carbon, and any fossil carbon used to produce fertilizer or to run farm implements to produce plants or animals or food for them would be accounted for. Fossil emissions from agriculture would show up in food prices, and fossil emissions from biofuels production would show up in the prices of these fuels as well. The shell game of buying nat gas to fire the beer stills in corn ethanol plants would soon go by the wayside.

As to the AGW/CO2 argument, again you confuse causal proof with evidence of risk. There is none of the former and PLENTY of the latter. In this regard and all others, engineers are NOT permitted to take the position that doing what we’re already doing is fine until we prove 100% that a catastrophic event WILL occur as a direct result. Just look at the other forums on this site: we spend all sorts of money and time and other resources to mitigate risks of serious harm, many of which would probably work out just fine if we sat back and rolled the dice. In this case, since the fuels themselves are FINITE, their other emissions are KNOWN to be harmful, and we have plenty of other, higher, non-fuels uses for them, it seems quite clear to me that mitigating the risk of fossil carbon emission to the atmosphere by doing everything we can to conserve them is in the long-term interest of our species. That remains true even IF doubling the atmospheric CO2 concentration in 100 years turns out to be totally OK for the biosphere.

 

[SWmechE]

This topic comes up every now and then with my engineering friends (we work in oil & gas sector) and many of them are flat ou deniers that CO2 causes warming and it would be silly to try and reduce it. My problem with this is even if CO2 isn't the be all and end all of global warming, why would we continue pumping all the other garbage along with it into the environment when we can strive to do things more efficiently and better for the future?

The funny thing is I think some take this view because they think it threatens their livelyhood. I'm of the camp that like it or not O&G is here to stay for my lifetime and clear, obtainable, concise reduction targets (similar to sulfur reductions and not a CO2 cap and trade, which seems way to liable to be gamed) would just lead to more work for engineers and our business.

On non industrial side of life I think the government needs to get in gear and update building codes... why are we still bulding garbage houses that leak energy so much when basic, passive changes could make a huge improvement? I'm not a building guy so maybe I'm missing something.

 

[TGS4]

moltenmetal - I fully understand the biological carbon cycle. Perhaps my example is a little tongue-in-cheek. However, where do you draw the line with how long said carbon has been sequestered? Less than 1 year for most food? How about burning biomass? Only if it is less than X years old? What is X? Is 100 years too much, or more...

With respect to the idea of risk and risk mitigation, I do this for a living, so I understand the concept fully. You take an examination of the harm, apply a cost to it. Then, you determine the probability of said harm occurring in a particular span of time. Multiply the harm by the probability and you get the risk-based cost of the harm. Now, compare that to the cost of mitigation. Then, divide the mitigation with the probability that the mitigation will succeed in reducing the harm by the stated amount. If the adjusted cost of mitigation is lower than the cost reduction in the harm, then mitigate. If the cost of mitigation is higher, do nothing.

In regards to CAGW, I have found the assessment of the harms to be greatly overstated, while the benefits to be greatly understated. And it is the algebraic sum of the two that determines the cost of the harm. Next, the probability of both the harm actually occurring (do we really believe the 100-year computer models showing the increasing temperature with increasing CO2 content, absent any other natural causes) and the probability of the severity of the harm being at the stated quantity need to be considered. In my opinion, we are nowhere near anything reasonable to even try to quantify these quantities. Compare that with the cost of mitigation - a carbon tax, in your example. The costs will be well understood. However, and this is where I go toe-to-toe with carbon-tax enthusiasts, what is the probability that the mitigation will actually reduce the harms? If I recall correctly, the number that I have calculated in the past, based on a carbon tax of $50/tonne, when based on the emissions of Canada, was valued $36.7 BILLION dollars per year, which will have an impact of 0.000306°C/year. That values the global temperature at $122.876 TRILLION per degrees Celsius. And, that's if you actually believe the IPCC sensitivity values... Are the harms really that expensive?

Like you said, we're engineers. We don't deal in hand-waving, but real numbers. I can provide the back-up calculations for the above number, if you want. Until I have been shown that the cost of the harms (on a per °C basis) multiplied by the probability of the harms occurring is shown to be greater than the number that I have shown above, I will remain convinced that the mitigation is unnecessary.

Of course, we also need the causality to demonstrate that the proposed mitigation will actually work, too... Without that causal link, the cost of the mitigation divided by the probability of the success of the mitigation approaches infinity as the probability of the mitigation working approaches zero...

So, here's the gauntlet:
1) What is the total cost of the sum of the harms due to AGW?
2) What is the total cost of the benefits due to AGW?
3) What is the algebraic sum of 1) and 2) above?
4) What is the probability of those harms actually occurring in a specified time?
5) What is the adjusted cost of the harms?
6) What is the probability of the proposed mitigation (carbon tax) actually reducing CO2 emissions and total atmospheric CO2 content?
7) What is the probability that the above-noted reduction in CO2 emissions and total atmospheric content will reduce the temperature?

 

[cranky108]

So if you tax fossel fuels and not bio-fuels (as in carbon tax), how do you handle the fraction of natural gas produced from bio sources?

Which is a point that seems missed, that natural gas can be an alternative energy source, or a fossel fuel. The pipes are there, and the means to use it are there, and it is mostly clean. And in the larger home usages it can replace electricty (air-conditoners, and refridrators).

Also a concern is "if" methane is truly a green house gas, and it leaks from coal seams, then why would you not want to harvest it?

Now I am starting to sound like I like Natural gas.

 

[moltenmetal]

The gas you get from decomp or anaerobic digesters is close to equal parts CO2 and methane. No confusing that with fossil nat gas, which has much less CO2. And you would tax the fossil stuff at source, not the stuff which came from decomp of recently dead things. Pretty easy to tell the difference between a fossil resource and one that came recently from the biosphere.

Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, so do you care about emitting it, and burning it is better than emitting it unburned. Tough to put flares on cows' arses, but it is possible to avoid eating cattle. Again, price should contain the full cost, and people would decide with their wallets.

TGS4: I don't know what industry you work in, but I thought that kind of simplistic cost-benefit analysis went out with the Ford Pinto?! When the harm includes loss of life, rendering people homeless etc., that kind of analysis gets dodgy immediately.

There are plenty of helpful changes to our energy use patterns that can be applied which cost virtually nothing beyond an attitudinal shift or minor expenditure of capital. But even these won't be applied unless compelled, by tax or regulatory means, because people hate some kinds of change on principle.

You can argue that the cost of switching away from fossils is way too high relative to costs of the harm or adaptation to the harm and I'll respect that, at least a bit. Personally, I'm totally against carbon sequestration as a bad idea- it's just a means to p*ss through our fossil resources even faster. Unfortunately, reversing CO2 emissions (on the human timescale) AFTER they have been emitted is not only impossibly expensive it is probably technically infeasible at ANY cost. How is it that you think it's fair that the people who have contributed NONE of those emissions (i.e. future generations) should bear the entirety of those costs? All I'm advocating is user-pay- NOW. I'm not happy when my generation digs a huge hole for our kids to crawl out of, and don't care if it's a fiscal one or an environmental one. When we dig that hole knowingly solely to satisfy our wants or stupidity rather than our needs, as a parent that just makes me sick.

Until 100% of our fossil fuels use is sensible and cannot be replaced by a reasonable alternative, we should be doing everything in our power to eliminate that wasteful use. Right now, energy is still so cheap that people continue to waste it wantonly, without a second thought about it. That needs to change in a major way before I'll respect anyone's concern about global warming mitigations.

 

[rb1957]

i reckon we'd all agree that our society is being extravagant with it's consumption of fossil fuel. the capitalists amongst us will say that that solution we have today is the cheapest (most capital efficient), and price will increase to suit demand and supply. some would say that it's government policy (through taxation) that will "correct" (distort?) the relative costs and either discourage consumption, encourage higher efficiency, or encourage development of alternatives. some will say it's our moral duty to change.

but i think we're deeply divided on the global warming issue. one camp is sure we need to change significantly now, that it is a moral imperative. the other camp is equally sure that doing so is financial suidide.

 

[TGS4]

When the harm includes loss of life, rendering people homeless etc., that kind of analysis gets dodgy immediately.

Please be so kind as to let me know the immediate threats to life and limb that one can expect from a 1-2°C increase in 100 years. And homelessness - that happens far more frequently without any AGW right now - I call it things like living in a flood plain and being surprised when your house gets flooded. Plus, we've already experienced sea level rise greater than or equal to that projected (assuming you believe the projections), without significant/costly impact.

Yes, health and safety are managed differently in the risk scenario - the quantification of the costs is less "cold" than dollars and cents. In my industry, mitigation does not always mean removal of the risk, it may mean better PPE, better warnings of harms, better training to avoid harms. And when all mitigations are considered, the most effective and cost effective one is implemented. Removal/elimination of the harm is often not the most effective.

Again, though, what are the harms?!?

I don't disagree that fossil fuels should be conserved - they are indeed more useful in things other than stationary energy (motive energy is something else...). If you want to talk about taxing fossil fuels because they are finite and could be put to better use to something other than energy - I'd be willing to have a reasonable discussion about that. But doing that under the guise of AGW - a hypothesis that fails the smell test - well that's something I will vigorously oppose.

(On a related note, there was a report - September 29, 2011 by the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy - detailing what they forecast the "costs" of global warming to be for Canada. They estimated $5B/year now, and possibly increasing to $21B-$45B/year by 2050. Right now, $36.7B/year worth of mitigation (the effectiveness of which is highly questionable) doesn't seem worth it to me... I could think of many better things to spend that money on. Of course, keeping that money in the people's hands instead of governments' hands will have a much better economic impact, too...)

 

[zdas04]

Moltenmetal,
Are you really that wooly-headed? You say:

As to the AGW/CO2 argument, again you confuse causal proof with evidence of risk. There is none of the former and PLENTY of the latter. In this regard and all others, engineers are NOT permitted to take the position that doing what we're already doing is fine until we prove 100% that a catastrophic event WILL occur as a direct result. Just look at the other forums on this site: we spend all sorts of money and time and other resources to mitigate risks of serious harm, many of which would probably work out just fine if we sat back and rolled the dice.

I could ask exactly what the "evidence of risk" of AGW is, but I won't put you on that spot.

Here's a hypothetical for you--it is certain that an asteroid of adequate size to significantly affect the viability of life will hit the earth. There is no doubt about that. It has happened before and it will happen again. I don't know if the time horizon is months or millions of years, but it will happen. Should we tax people who look at the sky to pay for the future harm that asteroid will do? In my mind the wealth redistribution Ponzi scheme that is carbon tax is exactly that silly.

David

 

[moltenmetal]

Hey David, there's no need to go ad hominem.

Your asteroid example is not at all comparable, and discredits your argument. There's a HUGE difference between altering behavior to reduce a harm we suspect to be a consequence of that behavior, and taxing people who look at the sky because an asteroid might hit the earth.

I have a modicum of respect for TGS4's position, which is simply that the mitigations cost too much relative to the cost of the harm. It's a persuasive argument until you realize that the cost of the harm is miscalculated- because it is as incalculable as the monetary value of human life. How can you brook any significant cost for a use which satisfies greed or stupidity rather than a real need? The cost of the mitigations I'm talking about is a cost we should be bearing anyway for the long term viability of our species, given the finite nature of fossil fuels and the other uses we have for them- uses that are FAR harder to substitute..

I'm not an enviro-religionist. I feel no guilt for being alive. I am no less entitled to the wise use of the earth's resources to serve my own needs than any other human who has ever lived. What I am NOT entitled to is to squander the earth's resources in full knowledge of the resulting harm to future generations, or to dodge the full cost for that use. Is that a moral position? Certainly- I don't deny it.

I hear much lip service to the conservation of fossil resources on this site from people in the anti-AGW camp and it frustrates me. I know many of you question what you see as an absence of measurable effects for the CO2 concentration increase that has already happened. But I can't help feeling that the concern over the finite nature of the fuels themselves expressed here is totally insincere, and that much of the motivation for AGW denial arises NOT from science, but primarily from a desire to keep doing what we're already doing without feeling any pesky guilt.

 

[zdas04]

I've never denied that the climate is changing. It always has, and it always will. This hour's cause is an interesting academic discussion. My problem is that all of the "solutions" that assume man is the culprit feel like kids who are convinced that if they are riding in a falling elevator all they have to do is jump up in the air as it hits. The "solution" doesn't solve the "problem" and they still end up broken in the end.

As to conservation, I personally have implemented projects that have reduced lost hydrocarbons by at least 1,000 times (I haven't done the math in a few years, that was the number in 2004) the hydrocarbons that will be burned for my benefit in my lifetime. And you know what? I didn't do a single one of them to "save the planet" or to "conserve the resource for future generations". I did every one of them because they had a positive net present value. The economics of not wasting resources can be very favorable. I make a really good living showing people how to make money from hydrocarbons they were throwing away. These are real conservation measures, not symbolic claptrap like driving an electric car or putting a PV panel on your roof to sell power to the grid. Now if someone where talking about using a PV panel to charge an electric car, I'd be willing to run those numbers. Last time I did, they were a negative NPV, but things change.

David

 

[TGS4]

moltenmetal - the fundamental issue that I have with the solutions (carbon taxes, etc) are that they imply causal proof. Without causal proof, what evidence do you have that doing "anything" is actually going to help? What if we taxed that heck out of fossil fuels - and that resulted in a significant drop in man-made CO2 production - and nothing changed? Then, the harms, that you have placed such a high value on, will still occur. And your risk assessment falls apart.

Maybe the level of "proof" of a causal link is lower for you than for me. Fine. But both of us need to examine the consequences of what will happen if we are wrong. From my perspective, adaptation to changes (anthropogenic or natural) is the key. If I am wrong, and CO2 has a significant effect, then we'll just adapt to that. And maybe 100-200 years from now, we can re-examine the calculus of risk. We'll be a lot smarter, and have a lot more data by then. Maybe a causal link will be demonstrated to a higher level of "proof"...

For the prevention perspective, what if your prevention does not succeed - what if CO2 has low-to-zero impact on temperature? Then what do you do?

This is a serious question that both sides of the debate need to answer - what if you are wrong? Will your "solution" be worse than what would have otherwise have happened? This is the aspect of cost-benefit / risk assessment that is frequently forgotten.

 

[KENAT]

SNT man, my point is that there are lots of readily viable alternatives to Gas as a large scale static electrical generation energy source.

Coal, Nuclear, HEP, Geothermal various other renewable sources...

However, almost none of these are well suited as vehicle fuels, and transforming them into a form potentially suitable as a vehicle fuel can be wasteful.

So, lets consider keeping the liquid fossil fuels for things where they are particularly well suited, be it chemical industry or aircraft or certain niche ground vehicles...

Lets save Gas for mobile applications where it's not too inconvenient.

Lets use other sources for large scale static electrical generation. For instance, rather the using grain etc. to then generate ethanol, might it make more sense to just burn the darn stuff directly or grow an alternate crop suitable for combustion or something?

Let's also take reasonable steps to reduce waste, incentivised if need be.

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(probably not aimed specifically at you)
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[SnTMan]

KENAT, can't argue with any of that...

Regards,

Mike

 

[moltenmetal]

KENAT: right on.

TGS4: if we find no causal link between CO2 and detrimental climate change, we can burn fossil fuels again with abandon- until they're gone of course. But we will have created choices for ourselves. We won't HAVE to burn fossil fuels to the extent that we do now, because we'll have weaned ourselves off our energy addiction, and still have the fossil carbon sources for higher value, harder to substitute uses.

 

[TGS4]

moltenmetal - as I've said before, I don't actually disagree with you on the benefits of preserving fossil fuels (especially the high energy-density liquid variety) for high value uses. I mostly agree with KENAT's summary of the appropriate-ness of fuel allocations.

Now, if only we, as a species, could have the adult conversation about this topic, and not "hide" it in the AGW context... The topics are separate and only mildly related with respect to the proposed "solution"

Coming around to the OP, energy is prosperity. The more energy, the more prosperity. Has been that way since mankind first successfully controlled fire. Anything alternatives that ADD to the energy mix are OK with me. Any substitutions of one energy source for another need to be examined with a skeptical eye to the net benefits.