Mideast Turmoil and the Push For Clean Energy

Hugh Pickens writes writes "Adam Werbach writes that in July 2008 oil prices reached $147 a barrel and suddenly energy prices and alternative energy was on everyone's agenda but soon oil prices fell as the economy faltered and people moved on to the more immediate concerns of keeping their jobs and businesses alive. Now with the possibility looming of $200 a barrel oil, the US has a robust field of clean energy technologies that are slowly coming online, from thinfilm solar to fuel cells to cellulosic ethanol — unlike 2008, when it seemed like we were starting our innovation engine from a cold start. 'In the last three years, as oil prices have softened, we've seen stumbles as companies like Applied Materials pulled back from the clean energy space because of operational and market conditions,' writes Werbach. '2012 will be a rich year for equity capitalizations, giving energy entrepreneurs the capital they need to build infrastructure. Even with the draconian austerity measures that are coming into effect across the country, this is a second opportunity for energy innovation.'"

Comments

Nothing new here

[quarkie68]

In our world there are innovators and there are also people that will vow to re-use existing suboptimal solutions with all their pros and cons until it is absolutely necessary to adopt something else. Unfortunately, the second type is the majority, even if it is completely obvious that the dependency of the West on the Middle East is one of its largest weaknesses. I wonder how many slaps does it take for some people to wake up from their deep oily sleep.

Re:Nothing new here

[quarkie68]

I would agree with you but... I don't. The oil monopoly is supported by some large car driving populations. For most of this folk, it is really a big thing to get on the bike and/or use fuel efficient cars or rationalize the use of the car. This is why the US started considering fuel efficient cars only recently. If you compare the average GM/Ford/whatever gas guzzler they used to chunk out of their production lines (which was cheap for the average Joe to buy) to the average European car there was no comparison. Extrapolate this behavior to the growing middle class of India and China and you get the idea. Power is given to monopolies by people, it does not come by itself. In the absence of realizing the consequences, the majority of the people will use the more readily available and cheapest solution. And that I am afraid is petrol :-( . Not necessarily because they do not have the extra money to pay for an alternative. But because they are sold to the idea of horse power, acceleration, when the most they do on their motorway is 30-40 miles an hour just before the rush hour! :-)

Re:Nothing new here

[iserlohn]

Finally, what's wrong with giving good business to the Middle East? It helps everyone.

That is a very naive view of trade. Take for example the plight of the citizens of Nauru. Although different in scale, it parallels the situation we have in the Middle East.

The Republic of Nauru is a small island nation in the Pacific which had an economy that was based almost solely on phosphate mining which was plentiful once, but not any more. In the beginning, most of the money generate from this industry went to the Australian interests who were exploiting the mines, then gradually the islanders wised up and negotiated a better deal. This money was saved up in a trust fund, but ultimately corruption set in and the trust fund lost most of its value. At the same time, mining had stopped on the island as the phosphate ran out. Now the unemployment rate is near 90% the government failed in implementing reforms to encourage a diverse economy and the establishment of alternative industries.

Trade is not always good, and in some case (such as what's happening in the middle east), it is very exploitive to the people of the lands on which we are sucking the resources from. Many times, it only benefits a few at the top and the money never trickles down to the working population. That frequently causes political instability as the leaders has the resources from the mineral or oil wealth to establish an authoritarian regime. It often causes over-dependency on the export of the natural resources within the state. Once the resources are depleted, what results is a failed state.

Re:Nothing new here

[quarkie68]

There is nothing wrong with doing business in the middle east. What is wrong is to rely so much on the Middle East. This creates contention and undesirable situations, especially for Middle East folk. The very fact that most of them export their resources to oil feed the rest of the world, when very little money returns to them is indicative of most of the geopolitical problems that rose, are rising and will rise in the area.

Oil is not the only example. Manufacturing and outsourcing is another. If only 20% of the Asian manufacturers of integrated circuit/assembly lines decided to close tomorrow for whatever reason, the implications for the US and the rest of the electronic consumer's world would be at least worrying and at most catastrophic for the market.

I believe this is a general trend of globalization, which is mainly driven by us, because we want the cheapest and then someone has to produce that cheapest product by pushing outsourcing to the point where we rely on few places. Personally, if I knew that a product is REALLY only made in the US/UK/Europe etc, I would buy it, even if it was more expensive. Not because I dislike Asia or whatever distant part of the world, but because I want with my behavior to enforce resilience, the very opposite of absolute reliance.
Do you really think that the world has resilience today in terms of energy?

Re:Nothing new here

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

Exactly : currently moving away from oil is prevented, not by of evil corporations conspiring against meddling kids, not (much) by middle eastern theocratic lunatic dictators, not even by the American version of same.

It's prevented by actual, honest-to-God, technical issues.

One thing you never hear greens suggest is ... fixing the problems. It's just so much easier to declare a problem solved and accuse everyone of conspiracies. To depict yourself the victim of whatever is the unpopular enemy "du jour" (is it still BP these days ?). As to whether it gets anyone anywhere ... But where's the fun for "green" parties saying the obvious : we're waiting for decent (= cheap + efficient) energy storage technology. Let's please not waste money or resources on actually becoming green until we ... know HOW. No, not even on co2 reduction (because we won't get it down until we have an actual alternative. Moving co2 production to china does exactly zilch for the environment, except paying for Al Gore's army of cronies and fleet of 30 gallons-a-mile cars)

But wasting taxpayer's money on fool's errands, which then proceed to fail, and then blame the, oh, local bank that demands it's dividends. Or a president. Or congress. Or an oil company that fucked up an installation. Or ... that's like fighting the man, man ! That's so cool.

Re:Nothing new here

[petermgreen]

the electric engine is superior the the ICE in every way.

The engine itself may be but the complete power system including the energy store isn't. With an ICE a cheap and lightweight fuel tank can take you you hundreds of miles. With an electric the batteries are expensive, bulky, heavy and still give a far worse range then a conventional fuel tank.

For example lets compare the lotus elise and the tesla roadster (I think this is a reasonable comparison as the roadster is basically an electric elise).

pros of the roadster:
a bit faster in the straight (according to top gear, if you have better sources that contradict this please post them)
cheaper to run

pros of the elise:
corners a bit better (according to top gear, if you have better sources that contradict this please post them)
longer range
far lower pricetag (according to wikipedia an elise is arround £30K while a roadster is arround £90K).

There are other cheaper electric cars but I dunno which non-electrics they are most comparable to so it's difficult to see how much more expensive they are. I'm sure I also heared somewhere that they were being sold at a loss to help the manufacturers gain experiance with electric technology for when it does become affordable.

Thorium Reactors

[NFN_NLN]

Why is the west still concentrating on solar and wind power while the Chinese are already into Thorium reactors?

The US oil companies can stall all they want while they squeeze as much profit as they can out of fossil fuels.. but the Chinese aren't going to wait around.

Re:Thorium Reactors

[NFN_NLN]

Sorry, forgot to include this:

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, of the British Telegraph daily, suggests that "Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium," and could put "an end to our dependence on fossil fuels within three to five years."[14]

The Thorium Energy Alliance (TEA), an educational advocacy organization, emphasizes that "there is enough thorium in the United States alone to power the country at its current energy level for over 1,000 years."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium#Thorium_as_a_nuclear_fuel

Re:Thorium Reactors

[IHateEverybody]

A lot of it is due to residual fear of any kind of nuclear energy and chronic NIMBYism. Everybody wants cheap energy but no one wants a power plant anywhere near their home. Most people have no idea when thorium is or of its benefits over traditional nuclear energy. This runs into a basic human fear of change. Oil has worked for America for a hundred years and Americans have grown emotionally attached to their gas guzzlers and have rewarded oil companies with the kind of wealth and political influence that make them a force in Washington.

Add a fundamental lack of will and rampant political cowardice and you have a formula for Chinese domination of the "green" industries of the future.

Re:Thorium Reactors

[khallow]

1. The solution isn't more energy usage. The solution is less energy usage, period.

Energy is cheap and there really isn't that much to be gained from energy conservation. Else we would be doing it already.

2. This is because USA still stupidly has an unregulated economy that does whatever it wants.

There are two obvious errors. First, the US economy is far from unregulated. Second, what is left that needs to be regulated? Virtually everything that people claim needs to be regulated is already regulated.

Sane countries, like China, let The Smart People plan their economic growth in accordance with scientific principles.

Do you know what the purpose of a "five year plan" is? Emergency toilet paper. The people implementing the plan don't have a clue. They can't make serious decisions. Second, do you know what's far better than "scientific principles" for running an economy? Markets.

Third, "scientific principles" are a case of the "appeal to authority" fallacy. Please recall that macroeconomics is unusually resistant to scientific principles precisely because of the remarkable difficulty of falsifying any hypotheses about it.

Just imagine if USA had similar policies, and could actually implement them. Ownership of General Motors to advance state economic policies was a good start, but needs to expand to more sectors of the US economy. Letting the market decide is, frankly, irresponsible and a proven recipe for disaster, time and time again. Just look at history.

The US merely had to let GM go through bankruptcy court. No action required. The Obama administration screwed that up by rescuing it at the expense of everyone but the unions, and mocking the laws of the land.

It'll be a long time before I buy another GM or Chrysler (or for that matter any banking product from one of the "too big to fail" banks) product and I know that's going to be the case for a lot of other people too. We don't like thieves.

Re:Thorium Reactors

[Zoxed]

> Everybody wants cheap energy
Wrong: people want, for example, warm houses. Whether that comes from pumping energy in, or insulating it to prevent energy leaving it is irrelevance. You can invest in energy saving, and not need cheap energy.

Re:Thorium Reactors

[KonoWatakushi]

Actually, Thorium was the natural choice for nuclear energy; Uranium was chosen instead so that we could build bombs.

Re:Thorium Reactors

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is the west still concentrating on solar and wind power while the Chinese are already into Thorium reactors?>

Eh?! China is concentrating on biofuel, solar and, especially, wind power(*), just like the West. It also research molten salt reactors (aka thorium reactors), just like many countries in the West. In the West, a lot of countries spend a lot of government money on research and experiments with different kinds of power sources, including better ways to utilise nuclear power. Heck! I live in Sweden where we are, since 1983, slowly replacing all nuclear power with other sources of energy, and even inside Sweden there are efforts to develop new, waste free and more efficient, kinds of nuclear power, those researchers get more than a billion dollars a year from the Swedish government and EU. It is pocket money, but nothing say more money would lead to better research. Meanwhile Sweden is concentrating on developing and refining energy sources that already work or show actual promise. Nuclear power has been a very expensive, inefficient and polluting (mostly on the mining side, and some hundreds years in the future when the capsules with our nuclear waste start to leak) dream, for more then 60 years There is no indications that the world will ever see clean and profitable (without government subventions) nuclear power, even if we would spend a lot of money and resources trying to develop such nuclear power.

And as always, it is more efficient to save energy then to find new sources of energy. Sweden could save the energy production of two nuclear reactors, just by applying knowledge and technology that already exist, without any loss in living standard (Swedish living standard is much higher then that in English speaking countries, it is high even compared to New Zealand and Canada). The gain of using energy saving technology and changing energy wasting habits would be even greater in extremely wasteful and inefficient countries like USA(**). In such an underdeveloped country, modernising the industry, infrastructure and consumer products offered, could really improve the life's of the citizens.

(*) In just three years, China went from having almost non-existing (village black smiths) production of wind power plants, to being the leading manufacturer in the world (China has twice the production as the previous leader Denmark). Most of those wind power plants are deployed inside China.

(**) Since the fall of the Warsaw pact, Sweden is deploying energy saving and waste reducing technology to countries around the Baltic sea as part of foreign aid. Every "krona" spent in Poland, former East Germany, Russia (never call it "foreign aid" in the face of a Russian), the Baltic states et.c., give hundred times more in return in form of a clean Baltic Sea, then it would if it was spent in Sweden (of course, as part of the same plan for a clean Baltic sea, we also have technology exchange and share research efforts with other countries around the Baltic Sea, like Finland, Germany and Denmark, it has been so successful that today most of the waste in the Baltic sea origin from Britain, there is a current that take some of the waste from the British shores to the Baltic sea, where it accumulates). Even if neither technology nor living standard in those countries are on par with the rich countries around the Baltic Sea, they are approaching fast, with a lot of help from "green" technology. USA have a technological level roughly equal to those countries when they where still part of the Warsaw pact twenty years ago.

Re:Thorium Reactors

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Thorium was the natural choice for nuclear energy; Uranium was chosen instead so that we could build bombs.

I keep hearing this bullshit over and over, as if peopel just cut and paste it from some random website.
Thorium is a rubbish choice for several reasons:

Firstly, while it is possible to build a thermal breeder reactor using thorium, you would have to really push the the neutron economy, and thus the doubling time would be very long. As a consequence of the very long doubling time, the initial fissile fuel to breed enough U-233 to make a thorium reactor critical would have to come from reprocessed plutonium, meaning you would have to develop the technology needed for uranium reactors and plutonium extraction anyway.

Now if you want to destroy the minor actinide from your uranium waste you need a fast neutron spectrum. The reason for this is that many of the actinides are not fissile for low energy neutrons. You could build a fast reactor using thorium, but in a fast spectrum Plutonium, not U-233 is teh superior fuel due to a much higher neutron yield. It is only for thermal neutrons that Thorium excels.

It is also more difficult to reprocess throium, there's some intense gamma-emitters formed in a reactor using them, and there's a bunch of other issues.

Re:Thorium Reactors

[tmosley]

Keep up with the technology. Thorium produces short lived (10-15 years) waste that can be stored on site, and, in fact, can and HAS been designed to be 100% safe (pebble bed reactors, anyone?), where they physically CAN'T melt down.

You SAY that solar thermal doesn't produce a lot of waste, but you have clearly never been to a smelting operation, nor have you considered the energy input it takes to produce the hundreds of thousands of miles of tubing and mirrors that would have to be purpose made for such plants, or the environmental effect they would have on the NOT lifeless deserts you people want to destroy with them.

Further, you can't use WATER to store the energy--you can barely store heat in water. How are you planning to heat water to a boil using the energy stored in water? If you want it to produce energy overnight you have to use molten sodium. There's an environmental catastrophe waiting to happen. You are talking about distributing little pockets of 10,000 degree heat all around the place, rathe than having a few,centralized, large, easily controlled pockets of 3,000 degree heat that won't melt much more than ice, certainly not steel and concrete.

Re:What do you mean by 'Clean'

[NFN_NLN]

Most of the 'clean' energy projects are not for replacing oil (as a transport fuel) but are for replacing fossil fuels like coal and natural gas in electricity production.
Until we get a big breakthrough in battery technology we are not going to be able to run our cars on wind and solar power.

Transportation only accounts for 27% of US energy consumption. You can still make a large impact even if you left cars to run on fossil fuels.

http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:VQZGOdC8BrMJ:www.need.org/needpdf/infobook_activities/IntInfo/ConsI.pdf+automobiles+percentage+energy&hl=en&gl=ca&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESiuc1DbXndHxR3juwumi8zfv8PraBjI9Q6rRJddCRo2TVVM2d6ar8e-9lofdg138GPS-jCQAA5o0F6wbGk4kC51MYiOK_-rw0y7XWluvhzo-JBVPyZpTJAxeMZYQaAvcMJE3eha&sig=AHIEtbTo2UW2PHXen6_KMZpEnGeuEAj4vQ

Re:Domestic oil is an alternative

[jjohnson]

America has plenty of shale oil, which is more expensive to produce than the oil in the tar sands of Alberta, which is more expensive to produce than the oil in the Middle East. Environmentalism has nothing to do with failure to develop North American oilfields; the cost of a barrel of oil simply isn't high enough to start thoroughly exploiting local deposits.

Oil has to be around $70/barrel for the tar sands to be worthwhile, and no one knows the floor price to make shale oil extraction profitable because that's a field of engineering only now being developed. As for the Gulf of Mexico, the reason BP was drilling 5,000 feet down was because all the shallow fields have been sucked dry.

Oil is too cheap

[Opportunist]

Not too expensive. It's too cheap!

You will not see any investment in alternative energies or more efficient engines as long as it's cheaper to just use more oil. Do you think people would care about getting 10 or 30 miles to the gallon if we still had the gas prices of the 70s? Especially if that 10 mpg car would cost quite a bit more since more R&D is necessary? Efficiency is never free, someone has to come up with a way to save fuel.

And as much as it will hurt, only with higher prices for gas other, more expensive, forms of energy will become popular. Electric and H2 cars will instantly be a hit when gas prices double.

And also, let's not forget that local production becomes quite a bit more interesting if the transport of crap from China gets more expensive...

Re:Oil is too cheap

[rrohbeck]

Price volatility is the problem. Right now the price is high but after the next recession when the price drops again many new projects will be canceled again because they're not profitable. Exactly that happened in 2009.
There needs to be a tax that props up the price to some minimum level.

Re:Oil is too cheap

[Opportunist]

It's hardly a recession that creates cheap oil. If oil is cheap in a recession, it only means that there's enough stockpiled that oil sellers can open the flow when they need money.

Re:Overpriced trains are madness

[HereIAmJH]

In addition, trucks cause quicker roadway deterioration.

On the other side of the coin, passenger traffic tends to be clustered on limited routes during short periods of the day. So passenger traffic causes cities to build over capacity to support traffic flow for 4-5 hours of the day. For example, a local loop interstate has 4-6 lanes (each direction) to handle rush hour in the morning and evenings. Even so, it is quite common for a 6 mile stretch to be bumper to bumper for close to 2 hours in the evening. Outside of the morning and evening commutes, 2 lanes in each direction would be sufficient. That carries over to ramps and interchanges as well. Most of the interchanges around town are being rebuilt to increase rush hour capacity, not because of wear.