"Alternative" Energy

[tokala]

What, ALL Peak Oiler's are more in touch with reality? An how long have they been redicting this peak?

At least those that appear to know what they are talking about.

You know, geologists, people working in the oil patch, scientists working on energy issues, energy financiers, physicists...

People like these.


If someone wants a more level-headed view on alternative energy than what can be expected from a guy like Yergin, look here:
http://www.withouthotair.com/
It's by a Cambridge physics professor. the online version is free, by the way

 

[Boundless]

BTW, I agree with Peak Oil, i'm just playing Devil's Advocate

 

[Cutlass]

You might want to read up a bit on what the peak-oilers have to say about Mr. Yergin before you spend your money.

Yergin might not be right. But he has a lot of credibility on oil. Like with the global warming debate, where is the credibility? There are a lot of problems with the Peak Oil case.

 

[tokala]

I was under the impression that the "cornucopians" like Yergin are the side with the credibility problems.
I.e. the side opposed to math and geophysics, hoping for some miracle (new technology will solve the problem ... somehow) like the AGW "skeptics".

I would be really interested where those "lots of problems" with the peak oil case would be.

 

[Murky]

That video just stole 1.13 of my life.. all it shows is installation of solar cells.. why show me this?!

The idea is that we can produce enough alternative energy. The timelapse of a big solar installation shows how this can be accomplished.

Alternative energy is not dirty, it's not difficult and most importantly is available.

 

[Cutlass]

I was under the impression that the "cornucopians" like Yergin are the side with the credibility problems.
I.e. the side opposed to math and geophysics, hoping for some miracle (new technology will solve the problem ... somehow) like the AGW "skeptics".

I would be really interested where those "lots of problems" with the peak oil case would be.

Look, I'm not an expert. I can only try to follow what is being said and try to judge based on the strengths of the arguments.

Yergin's argument is essentially that improved technology for assessing reserves and extracting oil continues to improve. And as it does the proven reserves globally increases in most years, even as more oil is extracted.

Now maybe he's right, maybe he's wrong. I can't tell on my own. But he makes a strong case and I do think that he's credible.

That does not mean that oil will ever be cheap again. Yergin does not think oil will be cheap in the future, and he does think that prices will remain volatile.

But that is not the same thing as oil becoming too scarce to support motor vehicle consumption.

Yergin does make the case that diversifying away from oil as best we can is the right course of action. So it's not like he is a "drill our way to happiness" person like a lot of American politicians. The biggest problems are surging demand in the BRICs and 3rd World and the fact that new sources are more costly to extract, lowering their value while raising their costs. Not that supply will in any foreseeable time frame begin to decline.

As for the credibility of Peak Oil, the main problem is that the amount of oil keeps increasing. Now there can be flaws in that, and some people are of the impression that Saudia Arabia is lying and that they do not have nearly the oil that they claim to have.

So I'm not saying I'm entirely convinced either way. But I do think the case against Peak Oil is pretty strong.

 

[tokala]

Yergin's argument is essentially that improved technology for assessing reserves and extracting oil continues to improve. And as it does the proven reserves globally increases in most years, even as more oil is extracted.

The "proven reserves" are anything but proven. See the "talk about oil" thread
The problem with peak oil is not that there isn't any more oil somewhere.
It's that the we are running out of easily recoverable fields with high flow rate. The oil is there, but we cannot get at it fast enough if the cost should stay in halfway reasonable bounds( i.e. ~ $100 per barrel)

Now maybe he's right, maybe he's wrong. I can't tell on my own. But he makes a strong case and I do think that he's credible.

Yergin apparently has a track record of writing what the audience wants to hear.

That does not mean that oil will ever be cheap again. Yergin does not think oil will be cheap in the future, and he does think that prices will remain volatile.

Well, for the past few years Yergin did write oil will be cheap in the future; only as this was recently getting to obviously detached from reality, he changed course.

But that is not the same thing as oil becoming too scarce to support motor vehicle consumption.

It will be if a few hundred million Chindians want to have cars, too.

The biggest problems are surging demand in the BRICs and 3rd World and the fact that new sources are more costly to extract, lowering their value while raising their costs. Not that supply will in any foreseeable time frame begin to decline.

No matter if peak (conventional) oil was five years ago, or will be in ten years, the amount of oil available for export is declining, and that decline will accelerate, as consumption in most oil exporting countries is increasing rapidly.
Add to that that, as you correctly observe, consumption in non-OECD countries is also increasing rapidly, and aou should get the picture ...

As for the credibility of Peak Oil, the main problem is that the amount of oil keeps increasing. Now there can be flaws in that, and some people are of the impression that Saudia Arabia is lying and that they do not have nearly the oil that they claim to have.

See above. The amount in the books may increase, but not the flow rate, and much less the amount available for export.

Some food for thought:

Okay, probably enough off topic stuff for now.
But it ties into the topic "alternative" energy, as we might need larger amounts of non-oil based liquid fuels for transportation, and faster than is commonly thought.

 

[Boundless]

The idea is that we can produce enough alternative energy. The timelapse of a big solar installation shows how this can be accomplished.

Alternative energy is not dirty, it's not difficult and most importantly is available.

An how many years does a solar panel have to work to produce more energy than was required to build and install it?

 

[El_Machinae]

That phase shift for inelasticity is pretty scary ...

 

[Arwon]

An how many years does a solar panel have to work to produce more energy than was required to build and install it?

That's actually all the more reason to start rolling as much as we can out now, of course.

Of course, there's a lot of murkiness around how some of those EROI figures are calculated.

 

[Boundless]

I can't ever see a point the energy cost of a highly technological item such as a photovoltaic cell is going to be low enough for it actually to be worth creating (The earth is in a energy debt though it's creation).

I believe we would be better trying to increase the efficiency of biomass, but also looking at enegry generated at a microbial level and attempting to harness that.

 

[El_Machinae]

It will be sheer economics that makes the decision regarding PV vs. biomass. I mean, biomass is technically PV, so there's merely the question of when we can get better than nature is.

I'm fine with PV in arid regions and biomass in wet regions.

 

[Boundless]

I think you are missing my point.

$$$$ Price is irrelevant IMO.

The "cost" should be how much "energy" is used to create the devise. How much fuel was burnt to create this produce. Can it ever repay that "earth debt"

 

[Arwon]

This is all murky as hell to calculate, but:

The figure at the bottom is a ratio to unit of input. So coal gives 80 units of output to a unit of input, photovoltaics gives 6-ish, sugarcane ethanol 3-ish and biodiesel barely more than 1.

Now, granted, solar in any form only pays off over a period of time instead of at the point of production, but I don't see how that's terribly material, and it also matches its cost structure - capital upfront costs are high, then there's negligible ongoing O&M due to no fuel costs. I guess the answer to your question, Boundless, would be "between roughly a fifth and a tenth of the average solar panel's lifetime".

This is the source and it bemoans the poor state of research.

Even today, photovoltaics only returns marginally less energy for energy invested than natural gas in the United States, and returns more than ethanol or biodiesel. I can only assume in places with greater economies of scale like Germany, Spain and China, the energy return on photovoltaics is higher, of course. And in Brazil the energy return on sugar would probably be higher.

The cost curve looks pretty good for solar, and remember that if we weren't using that energy to make solar panels, it wouldn't necessarily being used to make different energy. It would likely be being used to make something with zero energy return in another part of the industrial landscape. We should be using as much of the fossil fuels as we can to produce renewable energy production, though unfortunately without other measures (like a carbon price) that just adds to total energy demand.

 

[Boundless]

Thanks for that Arwon.

 

[Singularity]

An interesting aspect of your question Boundless and Arwon's chart is also the relation between carbon intensity(estimated lifetime cost of CO2 pr KWH produced) and energy return. After all there is price and then there is a price.

I stole this chart from an irish site about the transition from Peak Oil. It displays a scatter chart of carbon intensity/energy return vs invested.

I'm really surprised at Tidal energy here. I guess the reason it's not more common is related to challenges in ideal location and maturity of technology. And I'm very surprised why we even bother with tar sand oil....

One thing is sure though, as the EROI of oil gets lower so does the argument against heavy private and governmental investment into renewable energy weaken - regardless of the carbon intensity of the source.

Edit: Like Arwon wrote, there's a lot of different numbers out there on these things all depending on who funded the study of EROI(read: Shell or Al Gore). So I'm taking these numbers with a pinch of salt.

 

[El_Machinae]

I think you are missing my point.

$$$$ Price is irrelevant IMO.

The "cost" should be how much "energy" is used to create the devise. How much fuel was burnt to create this produce. Can it ever repay that "earth debt"

Ah, I was. Thanks.

In my estimate, $ is a direct proxy for energy, since *every* dollar spent on the PV will eventually be used by some person eating grains. I mean, we live in a society where we turn fossil fuels into calories and then get people to do stuff. A portion of each cash exchange is eventually used to fund diet. And our diets are destructive. This is basically why a $100k vehicle is more environmentally damaging than a $20k one.

I missed the gist of your question, because there comes a point where there's no real 'earth debt'. If I use PV to make PV, then am I generating an earth debt? So, since there is clean energy, the energy cost doesn't have to be a metric of the environmental destruction.

So, I think Arwon's showed that we can use (in theory) PV to make PV. It's like compound interest.

 

[El_Machinae]

I think you are missing my point.

$$$$ Price is irrelevant IMO.

The "cost" should be how much "energy" is used to create the devise. How much fuel was burnt to create this produce. Can it ever repay that "earth debt"

Ah, I was. Thanks.

In my estimate, $ is a direct proxy for energy, since *every* dollar spent on the PV will eventually be used by some person eating grains. I mean, we live in a society where we turn fossil fuels into calories and then get people to do stuff. A portion of each cash exchange is eventually used to fund diet. And our diets are destructive. This is basically why a $100k vehicle is more environmentally damaging than a $20k one.

I missed the gist of your question, because there comes a point where there's no real 'earth debt'. If I use PV to make PV, then am I generating an earth debt? So, since there is clean energy, the energy cost doesn't have to be a metric of the environmental destruction.

So, I think Arwon's showed that we can use (in theory) PV to make PV. It's like compound interest.

 

[Arwon]

I think all this illustrates that the accounting practices we should be using to make these decisions don't really bear much relationship to economic incentives as they currently exist. The challenge is how to make them align.

And yeah, El_Machinae, there's a bit of work out there on establishing "solar breeders" where solar power is the input into the factories making more solar. It's not the only input of course, the various elements like silicon have to come from somewhere, but I suppose you could work back through the supply chain eventually.

You can make anything a "breeder" really, as long as its net energy is high enough.

 

[MrCynical]

Which idea for "alternative" energy do you believe is most promising?

Well you'd obviously be looking for a mixture - preferably at least one ultra-reliable base supply which can be supplemented by the more erratic sources.

Hydro/Tidal/Geothermal - These are all quite clean and reliable, but have specific site requirements that make them unusuable or at least inefficient in many areas. Hydro in particular could be argued not to be really alternative - it's been used for ages because it works. Snag is that this means the economically viable sites have been used so what we have already is likely to be what is economically viable unless there is some major improvement in the technology. Good for a base supply.

Solar - Probably the most promising in my opinion, at least in terms of large scale power stations and concentrated systems like solar towers. I'm rather less convinced by the current fad of sticking photovoltaic cells on every roof. I have a few environmental concerns about the extraction of the rare earths needed to make these, so I'd prefer they were used efficiently. Slapping them on every building means a large percentage will be poorly located - let's get some economy of scale going and pick optimal sites. There's a lot of desert on this plaanet which we're not using for much at the moment. Inevitably this still works better in some countries than others.

Wind - too unreliable for a base supply, but can be supplemental. The need to back up the entire fraction from wind with other sources puts a limit on how large a percentage of the overall grid can be efficiently supplied by this method.

Wave - this is starting to remind me of fusion in terms of the amount of time it's remained experimental and the number of missed predictions of when it will become economically viable. I therefore file it in the same category - power a city for a year without blackouts or absurd costs, then it'll be worth talking about this.

Biofuels - Ugh. Classic case of fixating on dealing with one issue. OK, it's carbon neutral but everything else about this is both an environmental and economic disaster. Some of the biofuels from plankton ideas might be margninally better, but given some of the stupid things which are already being done with biofuels this is one area I'd be content to see the plug pulled on completely.

Fission - Again, carbon neutral. If you want to go by that to the exclusion of everything else, then this is the way to go. Ultimately a stop gap, but nuclear fuels (in particular thorium) could be used far more cleanly and efficiently than they are now. Good for a base load.

Fusion - Well if it works its the best solution, but I'm not holding my breath. So many predictions about when it'll be viable, and all of them wrong. However optimistically ITER may be presented, until a commercial fusion plant starts operating it is unwise in the extreme to work on the assumption fusion will one day be viable.