We have direct evidence to the contrary that it was not a concern when cars were introduced. Wagons of volatile fuel were already being carted through the streets. The main concerns with early gasoline vehicles were noise, air pollution (a contrast to "horse pollution", indeed, but without pollution controls, early cars still were pretty nasty), and various practical concerns like fuel availability and consistency, vehicle and fuel cost, and reliability/the difficulty in starting the vehicles (early electric cars were frequently marketed toward women for this reason, up until the electric starter motor for gasoline cars made its debut).
Ethanol is a very good analogy. Even after hydrogen as a fuel vehicle has pretty much been panned by scientific review in contrast with electricity, it continues to receive funding because the companies working on it are so entrenched with the political establishment. When Chu tried to kill off the hydrogen funding a year or so ago, congress forced him to put it back in.
Yeah, but it burns at mixtures anywhere from 4-75% with air, so that hardly buys you anything. And it detonates down to about 50% with air. You really think a detonation won't damage a pump? Or even a burn (hydrogen burns *hot*)? Pumps are not designed to operate as blow torches. Hopefully they would put flame-sensor shutdowns on the system, but I don't know that they have.
There are two significant risks at play. One is a failure of the storage tanks, most likely due to a manufacturing defect (these things happen, especially with composites, which H2 storage pretty much requires). These tanks are at very high pressures, many hundreds of atmospheres (unless you're dealing with liquid H2 storage, which is actually much more dangerous (air ingestion into an LH tank leaves a trapped SOX/LH slurry, which is a contact explosive)). The other risk is pooling. You're absolutely correct that there are anti-pooling countermeasures which not only can be taken, but essentially must be taken when dealing with hydrogen (aka, this isn't stuff you want sitting around in just an ordinary garage). Even still, even in structures designed to prevent pooling and detonation, it still happens. Fukushima being a glaring recent example, but there are countless others. Hydrogen detonates just so damned easy.
It's not about being "hip"; it's about where the state of technology is. And yes, the tech for hydrogen sucks. But that doesn't mean that there's not still funding for it.
What is the overall efficiency of a Hydrogen powered car (including the energy cost to extract the hydrogen) as opposed to one that runs directly off of fossil fuels?
From below, I posted about the efficiency. Here is a graph from this research paper. To sum it up, if you're burning the H2 in an ICE, you're only making the situation worse. PEMFCs can be a little better than ICE vehicles, but they pale in comparison to electric cars.
Hydrogen passes through solids hundreds of times easier than NG -- or any odorizer -- can. So it's questionable whether an odorizer would help.
The good news is that hydrogen disperses quickly when vented into open air. The bad news is that if there's anything over it, it can pool, and it's extremely sensitive to sparks, burns in almost any fuel-air mixture, and can not only burn, but detonate. And of course there's always the "invisible flame" issues when dealing with pinhole leaks, which are always a pain, but which can be dealt with (thanks to IR cameras, you no longer have to use the old "swing a broomstick in front of you and see if it gets cut in half" method that they used to use at refineries)
Odor generating chemicals won't work with hydrogen. Hydrogen leaks far better than any other chemical, even helium. No odorous compound even comes close. Hence, only a major leak from a hydrogen container would let the odorous compounds escape. The same problem exists with flame visibility; you really need IR cameras to see it well. Other major hydrogen problems are pooling under overhangs and the very extreme sensitivity to even minor static shocks, as well as the wide range of combustible fuel-air mixtures and hydrogen's ability to readily detonate instead of simply conflagrate in STP conditions. Then there's obviously the embrittlement issues, the high pressure storage issues, etc, but also lesser known issues like its ability to enter other pipelines (since it can pass through materials so easily) and follow them to their destination, then pool there (NASA has lost several buildings this way; there's a reason why NASA requires hydrogen pipes to be the topmost, requires all buildings dealing with more than 1kg hydrogen to have roofs designed to be blown away, to have elaborate spark suppression and venting systems, etc).
Odorous chemicals would be fine in a H2 ICE, but PEMFCs have extreme purity requirements for the H2. So no, they would not play nice.
All issues of fuel cost, fuel cell vehicle cost, safety, ozone damage, infrastructure cost, and so forth aside, one of the big complaints about hydrogen is that it's just not that efficient.
Actually, if you read the abstract, you'll see that they found no evidence of fraccing brines ending up in the water itself -- only the gas. Curious, eh? This, combined with the incredible depth of the reservoirs being fracced vs. the aquifers and the number of layers of cap rock between the fracced reservoirs and the aquifers leads me to the hypothesis that it's not the fracced reservoir itself that's leaking; it's the recovery wells. This could be some combination of poor cementing, poor steel casing/attachments, better gas permeability in the conditions present than anticipated, gas developing its own channel to the surface just outside the well through the weak points in the strata created by the well, etc. Thoughts?
This hypothesis could be tested. In some wells you could inject a tracer gas into the reservoir after fraccing but before production begins, while in others you could inject it into the recovery wells just below the point of the aquifer. You could then draw the following conclusions:
Reservoir: Yes, Well: Yes: Either there are multiple paths for the gas to reach the surface, or more likely, the gas is leaking up through or around the casing of the non-producing well. Reservoir: No, Well: Yes: Gas is leaking out from the production well, but no significant amount is able to move up through/around the casing from the reservoir. Reservoir: Yes, Well: No: No: Gas is leaking up directly from the fracced reservoir, independent of the well. Reservoir: No, Well: No: This would throw this study into doubt.
Unless you're talking about the EITC, no, they don't. They simply refund you what you had withheld, nothing more. If you're talking the EITC, that's not anywhere *close* to 40% of the public. In 2004, it was about 7% of the population who claimed it, and most of those did not receive more back than they spent on income tax alone, let alone all taxes combined (EITC was designed to offset payroll taxes). The number of people getting more back than they spent on all taxes combined, including local and state taxes, is probably zero or close to it.
Concerning bracketed income taxation in general, we're not talking "redistribution of wealth". We're talking taxing luxury spending at a higher rate than non-luxury spending. Do you have a problem with that? if not, do you have a problem with the argument as to why it needs to be addressed on the income side rather than the expenditure side?
so right now the top 10% income earners pay 73% of federal income taxes.
1) They have approximately 80% of the wealth. 2) Income tax is a giant red herring. Income tax its those who are well-off hard, but not the super-wealthy. It's capital gains that hit the super-wealthy, and only at a measly 15 for long-term capital gains. Anyone here remember the challenge to Fortune 500 CEOs to demonstrate that their secretary pays a lower percent of their net income in taxes than they do?
the bottom 40% not only pay no taxes but actually get credits, so they pay negative taxes
1) Have you ever even filed your own taxes? Do you not know how tax credits work? You make it sound like you think that the government cuts you a check if you come up negative. 2) The actual number of people who pay no income tax is 47% (at least for 2009), but this is not "the bottom 40%" of wage earners -- it's the bottom 47% of tax payers. You can make a lot of money, but if you get enough deductions or credits, to pay no income tax. 3) That's only income tax. Said people still pay payroll taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, etc.
you progressives, just answer me this one simple question. what is your goal?
It's really simple: taxing luxury at a higher rate than necessity. That's what it really comes down to. Now, in a perfect world, this would ideally be done on the sales tax side. But apart from discouraging spending, there's a problem. How much luxury is -- and thus at what rate do you tax -- a head of lettuce? Canned button mushrooms? Fresh button mushrooms? Fresh oyster mushrooms? Truffles? Pretty much every consumer product would require its own "luxury assessment", which would be the most absurd of bureaucracies.
Instead, one can tackle this on the income side. A poor person *can't* spend a large portion of their money on luxury; necessities eat up too much of their budget. A rich person *can't* spend a large portion of their money on necessities (what are they going to do, stockpile diapers by the millions?) -- excepting that they spend their money charitably on necessities for others. Which is -- you guessed it -- tax deductible. This is the rationale for higher tax rates for higher income earners -- to tax luxury at a higher rate than necessity.
It's also not including the fact that the known global reserves keeps growing, not declining, despite our huge rate of consumption. In 1920, the world estimate was 60 billion barrels of reserves. In 1950, 600 billion barrels. From 1970 to 1990, estimates increased from 1,500 to 2,000 billion barrels. In 1994, the USGS estimated world reserves at 2,400 billion barrels. In 2000, the same estimate was raised to 3,000 barrels. Note that these estimates are not limited to "proved reserves" and only cover conventional crude. In short, we've been finding conventional crude faster than we've been taking it out of the ground, and faster than we've been expecting to find it -- at least in the long term.
There's a lot of distortion about oil reserves from the doomer crowd. For example, doomers love to point to graphs like this:
Dear god! Run out and panic, right? Well, no. This graph is about as distorting as a graph can get. It's all based on backloading data. For each field, its current proven size is marked at the point in time when the field was discovered. What that should tell you is that regardless of however the actual rate of oil discoveries, you'd expect that shape on the graph! Oil fields aren't suddenly proven at their maximum capacity they're discovered. An oil field isn't proven until you start to produce from it, and there are even supergiants out there that we haven't started producing from yet. And the proven size continues to grow as you expand and explore the field. So for example, Ghawar, when it was first discovered in 1948, it was estimated to have "billions" of barrels. This grew to "60 billion barrels" in the 1970s. It's now produced 65 billion, and is estimated at 100 billion. Graphs like this backload that whole 100 billion to the 1940s.
It's trivially easy to disprove graphs like this. Let's just list some of the more noteworthy discoveries of the past decade or so. Jack 2 (3-15B), Noxal (~10B), Azadegan (~42B), Ferdows/Mound/Zagheh (~38B), Sugar Loaf (~25-40B), Tupi(5-8B), Jupiter(5-8B), West Kamchatka (10.3B), Tahe (29B), Jidong Nanpu (7.5B; potentially 146 in all of Bohai Bay), Kashagan (9-13B), and on and on. See those on the graph? But I guarantee you that a graph like that made a few decades from now will have them all conveniently showing up for this point in time.
There's this notion that "the biggest fields are found first, then everything else goes on the decline". Really? The US drilled its first well in 1859. It took us another 109 years to find Prudhoe Bay. And today we've got the absurdly massive Bakken field looming which back in the 1970s was assumed to be small and impossible to extract (Elm Coulee has proven otherwise). The same can be pointed to all over the world. Just simply pointing to Ghawar is not a counterexample. Look at coal; a single subsea coal deposit found off Norway in 2005 more than triples the world's known coal reserves. Or natural gas -- Israel has spent pretty much its whole existence in a vain search for sizeable deposits of oil or natural gas, only to hit the motherlode last year. How is this sort of thing possible? Simple. New exploration tech beats the pants off old exploration tech; new production tech makes far more things that used to be unviable, viable; there's always more "down" (especially with advancing technology); and most of the world haven't even been surveyed at all or has been only poorly surveyed -- sometimes even in known oil-rich areas (a good example of this is Iraq, which due to decades of war and sanctions is poorly explored and has just been living off its earlier finds).
Hubbert Peaks are the epitamy of fitting a particular curve to whatever arbitrary dataset you want (sometimes by hand) and the insisting that it matches. The US is a popular one, but the best-fit curve for the US is closer to a poisson than a normal (the US oil production
Really? The cost per square meter for me to build more heliostats to make up for a lower efficiency is baked into the cost of the panels? I think not.;)
They don't call it "thin film" for the fun of it; the amount of cadmium in a FirstSolar panel is tiny. You'd do more environmental damage soldiering a panel up to some wires than you would by burning the panel. Actually, you'd do *no* damage from burning the panel, because it's already been demonstrated that heat simply causes the panel to seal. Do we even need to mention how much environmental damage is offset by using it versus other sources of power? Or the dramatically lower energy consumption in CdTe cell manufacture versus traditional silicon?
And beyond all that? FirstSolar includes in the purchase price a recycling deposit.
BUT the fact the solar cells that are available today are basically the same as the ones 15 years ago
BUT the fact is that you've clearly not paid one iota of attention to the price difference between today's cells versus those of 15 years ago (just so you know, they're about 1/3rd the cost now), nor the chemistry differences between today's cells and those of 15 years ago (go back to 1996 and find me a mass-market CdTe cell, won't you? The largest PV manufacturer in the world is now CdTe)
I find ebay to be a great source of non-restricted chemicals. I got 1-2 dozen salts for hydroponics use from there, as well as other things for different projects (silver nitrate for plating, graphite and hematite for microwave absorption, aluminum sulfate for flocculation, food-grade citric and tartaric acid for cooking, etc.). And even as someone who grew up with chemistry sets, I've still learned new stuff in the process. For example, I was unaware of deliquescence until I left a measured sample of one of my salts out for a few hours and returned to find a salty puddle;)
Efficiency is not irrelevant. A given installer only has a finite amount of space to make use of, installing panels costs money, running wires costs money, etc. And especially if they're on a heliostat, but even if they're not, you have to build them hardy enough to withstand the weather for decades. The per-panel or per-square-meter overhead is not irrelevant, and thus efficiency is not irrelevant.
Awaiting congress to overturn the line in the last defense spending bill which prohibited the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to the US courts system. Of course, even without that, all of the evidence against the key detainees is irrevocably tainted by torture and other factors.
How about you start with paying attention to who you're responding to? I'm not the person who posted that link.
Beyond that:
1) The map does not claim to cover the things you criticize it for not covering. But it's a damned lot better data than "where are there magma chambers?"; it's actually based on real-world heat flow rate data. Assessment of sites for geothermal power plants involves flow rate data *as well* as a wide variety of other pieces of data. It is a single datasheet, not a be-all-end-all dataset, and was never intended to be.
2) Yet AGAIN you pretend it's a map of magma chambers! ("sorry, but Yellowstone's CALDERA is far more massive than the little triangle representing it") I mean, this is unbelievable. Let's say it ONCE AGAIN: This is NOT a map of magma chambers! It's a map of heat flow rates. They're NOT the same thing.
3) Your claim about drilling causing dangerous gas releases for "periods" as part of normal operation is simply not true. For example, the Hellisheiði geothermal plant (the largest by far in Iceland, which powers Reykjavik and Suðvesturland in general) is a popular tourist destination (despite being actively drilled and expanded), and is one of the key spots for tours on the Golden Circle route. Masks are never used. Geothermal wells are closed systems. There have been H2S *accidents* where H2S has leaked, but that's a totally different issue (and one generally related to a lack of experience in the field, esp. by contractors). Iceland, with its long history of geothermal power utilization, has rather scarce records of H2S accidents. Sensors activate alarms at a mere 10ppm. There were two worker deaths in a notable incident in 2008 where H2S was considered a contributing factor, but because it had consumed the oxygen in the tank that they walked into without checking, not because it poisoned them
4) The earthquake relation is to EGS, not geothermal in general. EGS is a particular technology involving fracturing rock. The Basel case that you cite is such a stupid thing. They sunk a geothermal well right into a fault that had previously destroyed the city. The quake it caused was a whopping 3.4. Do you realize how tiny of a quake a 3.4 is? But that's huge as far as EGS-related quakes go. And even that is something that's not going to happen any more due to lessons learned.
5) Lol, who to listen to, the USGS or RobertM1968? Hmm, tough call there?;)
And really, I have no clue why you're obsessed over the concept of using Yellowstone in particular to generate power (or why even you obsess over Yellowstone in particular as though it's the only active supervolcano in the US -- or wait, let me guess, you don't know any better?). The main impediments to geothermal power at Yellowstone are that it's a cherished national park. There's not going to be a geothermal power plant in Yellowstone for the same reason there's not going to be a copper mine or a sawmill there; there would be bloody riots. And it's illegal, too. There are lots of places that are being *seriously* considered for new geothermal plants. Yellowstone is not one of them. And the heat source of Yellowstone represents just the tiniest fraction of the US's available heat resources. Heck, Yellowstone's hotspot is probably most notable for how *cool* it is. The temperature of the heat reservoir is generally only 50-200C warmer than its surroundings.
I'll repeat: "Your whole post is based on confusion between the locations of subterranean magma chambers and the realizeable heat flow rates from drilled wells.". The fact that you defended yourself by once again mentioning the locations of subterranean magma chambers just drives the point home.
and when you say it removes heat... yep it does, makes the cap more solid and in the long term pressure build up even more.
By that logic, all rock that's solid is just waiting to explode from gasses seeping up from the mantle.
Gas does exist in solid rock. It isn't released in volcanic explosions, however. It slowly seeps to the surface or collects in cap rock reservoirs (any "overfilling" leads to it flowing out the sides of the reservoir). If those reservoirs are rich in CH4, we "mine" them for natural gas. If they're mainly CO2, we usually don't mess with them.
You're simply wrong. Most geothermal power is *not* generated near active volcanoes. Quite a few are on dormant or extinct volcanic areas (relying on residual heat), but that's quite different. And a number are in areas with no active volcanism. EGS in particular has great capacity to spread to non-volcanic areas.
Slashdot Mirror
We have direct evidence to the contrary that it was not a concern when cars were introduced. Wagons of volatile fuel were already being carted through the streets. The main concerns with early gasoline vehicles were noise, air pollution (a contrast to "horse pollution", indeed, but without pollution controls, early cars still were pretty nasty), and various practical concerns like fuel availability and consistency, vehicle and fuel cost, and reliability/the difficulty in starting the vehicles (early electric cars were frequently marketed toward women for this reason, up until the electric starter motor for gasoline cars made its debut).
Ethanol is a very good analogy. Even after hydrogen as a fuel vehicle has pretty much been panned by scientific review in contrast with electricity, it continues to receive funding because the companies working on it are so entrenched with the political establishment. When Chu tried to kill off the hydrogen funding a year or so ago, congress forced him to put it back in.
Yeah, but it burns at mixtures anywhere from 4-75% with air, so that hardly buys you anything. And it detonates down to about 50% with air. You really think a detonation won't damage a pump? Or even a burn (hydrogen burns *hot*)? Pumps are not designed to operate as blow torches. Hopefully they would put flame-sensor shutdowns on the system, but I don't know that they have.
There are two significant risks at play. One is a failure of the storage tanks, most likely due to a manufacturing defect (these things happen, especially with composites, which H2 storage pretty much requires). These tanks are at very high pressures, many hundreds of atmospheres (unless you're dealing with liquid H2 storage, which is actually much more dangerous (air ingestion into an LH tank leaves a trapped SOX/LH slurry, which is a contact explosive)). The other risk is pooling. You're absolutely correct that there are anti-pooling countermeasures which not only can be taken, but essentially must be taken when dealing with hydrogen (aka, this isn't stuff you want sitting around in just an ordinary garage). Even still, even in structures designed to prevent pooling and detonation, it still happens. Fukushima being a glaring recent example, but there are countless others. Hydrogen detonates just so damned easy.
It's not about being "hip"; it's about where the state of technology is. And yes, the tech for hydrogen sucks. But that doesn't mean that there's not still funding for it.
From below, I posted about the efficiency. Here is a graph from this research paper. To sum it up, if you're burning the H2 in an ICE, you're only making the situation worse. PEMFCs can be a little better than ICE vehicles, but they pale in comparison to electric cars.
Hydrogen passes through solids hundreds of times easier than NG -- or any odorizer -- can. So it's questionable whether an odorizer would help.
The good news is that hydrogen disperses quickly when vented into open air. The bad news is that if there's anything over it, it can pool, and it's extremely sensitive to sparks, burns in almost any fuel-air mixture, and can not only burn, but detonate. And of course there's always the "invisible flame" issues when dealing with pinhole leaks, which are always a pain, but which can be dealt with (thanks to IR cameras, you no longer have to use the old "swing a broomstick in front of you and see if it gets cut in half" method that they used to use at refineries)
Odor generating chemicals won't work with hydrogen. Hydrogen leaks far better than any other chemical, even helium. No odorous compound even comes close. Hence, only a major leak from a hydrogen container would let the odorous compounds escape. The same problem exists with flame visibility; you really need IR cameras to see it well. Other major hydrogen problems are pooling under overhangs and the very extreme sensitivity to even minor static shocks, as well as the wide range of combustible fuel-air mixtures and hydrogen's ability to readily detonate instead of simply conflagrate in STP conditions. Then there's obviously the embrittlement issues, the high pressure storage issues, etc, but also lesser known issues like its ability to enter other pipelines (since it can pass through materials so easily) and follow them to their destination, then pool there (NASA has lost several buildings this way; there's a reason why NASA requires hydrogen pipes to be the topmost, requires all buildings dealing with more than 1kg hydrogen to have roofs designed to be blown away, to have elaborate spark suppression and venting systems, etc).
Odorous chemicals would be fine in a H2 ICE, but PEMFCs have extreme purity requirements for the H2. So no, they would not play nice.
To add information to this discussion, here's the net system efficiency, well-to-wheel, of different energy sources:
Link
That graph is from this paper:
Link
All issues of fuel cost, fuel cell vehicle cost, safety, ozone damage, infrastructure cost, and so forth aside, one of the big complaints about hydrogen is that it's just not that efficient.
The paper directly states otherwise. They found no evidence of fraccing brines in the water.
Actually, if you read the abstract, you'll see that they found no evidence of fraccing brines ending up in the water itself -- only the gas. Curious, eh? This, combined with the incredible depth of the reservoirs being fracced vs. the aquifers and the number of layers of cap rock between the fracced reservoirs and the aquifers leads me to the hypothesis that it's not the fracced reservoir itself that's leaking; it's the recovery wells. This could be some combination of poor cementing, poor steel casing/attachments, better gas permeability in the conditions present than anticipated, gas developing its own channel to the surface just outside the well through the weak points in the strata created by the well, etc. Thoughts?
This hypothesis could be tested. In some wells you could inject a tracer gas into the reservoir after fraccing but before production begins, while in others you could inject it into the recovery wells just below the point of the aquifer. You could then draw the following conclusions:
Reservoir: Yes, Well: Yes: Either there are multiple paths for the gas to reach the surface, or more likely, the gas is leaking up through or around the casing of the non-producing well.
Reservoir: No, Well: Yes: Gas is leaking out from the production well, but no significant amount is able to move up through/around the casing from the reservoir.
Reservoir: Yes, Well: No: No: Gas is leaking up directly from the fracced reservoir, independent of the well.
Reservoir: No, Well: No: This would throw this study into doubt.
Unless you're talking about the EITC, no, they don't. They simply refund you what you had withheld, nothing more. If you're talking the EITC, that's not anywhere *close* to 40% of the public. In 2004, it was about 7% of the population who claimed it, and most of those did not receive more back than they spent on income tax alone, let alone all taxes combined (EITC was designed to offset payroll taxes). The number of people getting more back than they spent on all taxes combined, including local and state taxes, is probably zero or close to it.
Concerning bracketed income taxation in general, we're not talking "redistribution of wealth". We're talking taxing luxury spending at a higher rate than non-luxury spending. Do you have a problem with that? if not, do you have a problem with the argument as to why it needs to be addressed on the income side rather than the expenditure side?
I don't know about you, but at $4/gal, that's about 600 miles for me. :)
1) They have approximately 80% of the wealth.
2) Income tax is a giant red herring. Income tax its those who are well-off hard, but not the super-wealthy. It's capital gains that hit the super-wealthy, and only at a measly 15 for long-term capital gains. Anyone here remember the challenge to Fortune 500 CEOs to demonstrate that their secretary pays a lower percent of their net income in taxes than they do?
1) Have you ever even filed your own taxes? Do you not know how tax credits work? You make it sound like you think that the government cuts you a check if you come up negative.
2) The actual number of people who pay no income tax is 47% (at least for 2009), but this is not "the bottom 40%" of wage earners -- it's the bottom 47% of tax payers. You can make a lot of money, but if you get enough deductions or credits, to pay no income tax.
3) That's only income tax. Said people still pay payroll taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, etc.
It's really simple: taxing luxury at a higher rate than necessity. That's what it really comes down to. Now, in a perfect world, this would ideally be done on the sales tax side. But apart from discouraging spending, there's a problem. How much luxury is -- and thus at what rate do you tax -- a head of lettuce? Canned button mushrooms? Fresh button mushrooms? Fresh oyster mushrooms? Truffles? Pretty much every consumer product would require its own "luxury assessment", which would be the most absurd of bureaucracies.
Instead, one can tackle this on the income side. A poor person *can't* spend a large portion of their money on luxury; necessities eat up too much of their budget. A rich person *can't* spend a large portion of their money on necessities (what are they going to do, stockpile diapers by the millions?) -- excepting that they spend their money charitably on necessities for others. Which is -- you guessed it -- tax deductible. This is the rationale for higher tax rates for higher income earners -- to tax luxury at a higher rate than necessity.
It's also not including the fact that the known global reserves keeps growing, not declining, despite our huge rate of consumption. In 1920, the world estimate was 60 billion barrels of reserves. In 1950, 600 billion barrels. From 1970 to 1990, estimates increased from 1,500 to 2,000 billion barrels. In 1994, the USGS estimated world reserves at 2,400 billion barrels. In 2000, the same estimate was raised to 3,000 barrels. Note that these estimates are not limited to "proved reserves" and only cover conventional crude. In short, we've been finding conventional crude faster than we've been taking it out of the ground, and faster than we've been expecting to find it -- at least in the long term.
There's a lot of distortion about oil reserves from the doomer crowd. For example, doomers love to point to graphs like this:
Link
Dear god! Run out and panic, right? Well, no. This graph is about as distorting as a graph can get. It's all based on backloading data. For each field, its current proven size is marked at the point in time when the field was discovered. What that should tell you is that regardless of however the actual rate of oil discoveries, you'd expect that shape on the graph! Oil fields aren't suddenly proven at their maximum capacity they're discovered. An oil field isn't proven until you start to produce from it, and there are even supergiants out there that we haven't started producing from yet. And the proven size continues to grow as you expand and explore the field. So for example, Ghawar, when it was first discovered in 1948, it was estimated to have "billions" of barrels. This grew to "60 billion barrels" in the 1970s. It's now produced 65 billion, and is estimated at 100 billion. Graphs like this backload that whole 100 billion to the 1940s.
It's trivially easy to disprove graphs like this. Let's just list some of the more noteworthy discoveries of the past decade or so. Jack 2 (3-15B), Noxal (~10B), Azadegan (~42B), Ferdows/Mound/Zagheh (~38B), Sugar Loaf (~25-40B), Tupi(5-8B), Jupiter(5-8B), West Kamchatka (10.3B), Tahe (29B), Jidong Nanpu (7.5B; potentially 146 in all of Bohai Bay), Kashagan (9-13B), and on and on. See those on the graph? But I guarantee you that a graph like that made a few decades from now will have them all conveniently showing up for this point in time.
There's this notion that "the biggest fields are found first, then everything else goes on the decline". Really? The US drilled its first well in 1859. It took us another 109 years to find Prudhoe Bay. And today we've got the absurdly massive Bakken field looming which back in the 1970s was assumed to be small and impossible to extract (Elm Coulee has proven otherwise). The same can be pointed to all over the world. Just simply pointing to Ghawar is not a counterexample. Look at coal; a single subsea coal deposit found off Norway in 2005 more than triples the world's known coal reserves. Or natural gas -- Israel has spent pretty much its whole existence in a vain search for sizeable deposits of oil or natural gas, only to hit the motherlode last year. How is this sort of thing possible? Simple. New exploration tech beats the pants off old exploration tech; new production tech makes far more things that used to be unviable, viable; there's always more "down" (especially with advancing technology); and most of the world haven't even been surveyed at all or has been only poorly surveyed -- sometimes even in known oil-rich areas (a good example of this is Iraq, which due to decades of war and sanctions is poorly explored and has just been living off its earlier finds).
Hubbert Peaks are the epitamy of fitting a particular curve to whatever arbitrary dataset you want (sometimes by hand) and the insisting that it matches. The US is a popular one, but the best-fit curve for the US is closer to a poisson than a normal (the US oil production
Really? The cost per square meter for me to build more heliostats to make up for a lower efficiency is baked into the cost of the panels? I think not. ;)
They don't call it "thin film" for the fun of it; the amount of cadmium in a FirstSolar panel is tiny. You'd do more environmental damage soldiering a panel up to some wires than you would by burning the panel. Actually, you'd do *no* damage from burning the panel, because it's already been demonstrated that heat simply causes the panel to seal. Do we even need to mention how much environmental damage is offset by using it versus other sources of power? Or the dramatically lower energy consumption in CdTe cell manufacture versus traditional silicon?
And beyond all that? FirstSolar includes in the purchase price a recycling deposit.
BUT the fact the solar cells that are available today are basically the same as the ones 15 years ago
BUT the fact is that you've clearly not paid one iota of attention to the price difference between today's cells versus those of 15 years ago (just so you know, they're about 1/3rd the cost now), nor the chemistry differences between today's cells and those of 15 years ago (go back to 1996 and find me a mass-market CdTe cell, won't you? The largest PV manufacturer in the world is now CdTe)
I find ebay to be a great source of non-restricted chemicals. I got 1-2 dozen salts for hydroponics use from there, as well as other things for different projects (silver nitrate for plating, graphite and hematite for microwave absorption, aluminum sulfate for flocculation, food-grade citric and tartaric acid for cooking, etc.). And even as someone who grew up with chemistry sets, I've still learned new stuff in the process. For example, I was unaware of deliquescence until I left a measured sample of one of my salts out for a few hours and returned to find a salty puddle ;)
Efficiency is not irrelevant. A given installer only has a finite amount of space to make use of, installing panels costs money, running wires costs money, etc. And especially if they're on a heliostat, but even if they're not, you have to build them hardy enough to withstand the weather for decades. The per-panel or per-square-meter overhead is not irrelevant, and thus efficiency is not irrelevant.
Awaiting congress to overturn the line in the last defense spending bill which prohibited the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to the US courts system. Of course, even without that, all of the evidence against the key detainees is irrevocably tainted by torture and other factors.
How about you start with paying attention to who you're responding to? I'm not the person who posted that link.
Beyond that:
1) The map does not claim to cover the things you criticize it for not covering. But it's a damned lot better data than "where are there magma chambers?"; it's actually based on real-world heat flow rate data. Assessment of sites for geothermal power plants involves flow rate data *as well* as a wide variety of other pieces of data. It is a single datasheet, not a be-all-end-all dataset, and was never intended to be.
2) Yet AGAIN you pretend it's a map of magma chambers! ("sorry, but Yellowstone's CALDERA is far more massive than the little triangle representing it") I mean, this is unbelievable. Let's say it ONCE AGAIN: This is NOT a map of magma chambers! It's a map of heat flow rates. They're NOT the same thing.
3) Your claim about drilling causing dangerous gas releases for "periods" as part of normal operation is simply not true. For example, the Hellisheiði geothermal plant (the largest by far in Iceland, which powers Reykjavik and Suðvesturland in general) is a popular tourist destination (despite being actively drilled and expanded), and is one of the key spots for tours on the Golden Circle route. Masks are never used. Geothermal wells are closed systems. There have been H2S *accidents* where H2S has leaked, but that's a totally different issue (and one generally related to a lack of experience in the field, esp. by contractors). Iceland, with its long history of geothermal power utilization, has rather scarce records of H2S accidents. Sensors activate alarms at a mere 10ppm. There were two worker deaths in a notable incident in 2008 where H2S was considered a contributing factor, but because it had consumed the oxygen in the tank that they walked into without checking, not because it poisoned them
4) The earthquake relation is to EGS, not geothermal in general. EGS is a particular technology involving fracturing rock. The Basel case that you cite is such a stupid thing. They sunk a geothermal well right into a fault that had previously destroyed the city. The quake it caused was a whopping 3.4. Do you realize how tiny of a quake a 3.4 is? But that's huge as far as EGS-related quakes go. And even that is something that's not going to happen any more due to lessons learned.
5) Lol, who to listen to, the USGS or RobertM1968? Hmm, tough call there? ;)
And really, I have no clue why you're obsessed over the concept of using Yellowstone in particular to generate power (or why even you obsess over Yellowstone in particular as though it's the only active supervolcano in the US -- or wait, let me guess, you don't know any better?). The main impediments to geothermal power at Yellowstone are that it's a cherished national park. There's not going to be a geothermal power plant in Yellowstone for the same reason there's not going to be a copper mine or a sawmill there; there would be bloody riots. And it's illegal, too. There are lots of places that are being *seriously* considered for new geothermal plants. Yellowstone is not one of them. And the heat source of Yellowstone represents just the tiniest fraction of the US's available heat resources. Heck, Yellowstone's hotspot is probably most notable for how *cool* it is. The temperature of the heat reservoir is generally only 50-200C warmer than its surroundings.
I'll repeat: "Your whole post is based on confusion between the locations of subterranean magma chambers and the realizeable heat flow rates from drilled wells.". The fact that you defended yourself by once again mentioning the locations of subterranean magma chambers just drives the point home.
By that logic, all rock that's solid is just waiting to explode from gasses seeping up from the mantle.
Gas does exist in solid rock. It isn't released in volcanic explosions, however. It slowly seeps to the surface or collects in cap rock reservoirs (any "overfilling" leads to it flowing out the sides of the reservoir). If those reservoirs are rich in CH4, we "mine" them for natural gas. If they're mainly CO2, we usually don't mess with them.
Yes, the ancient year of 2004, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and John McCain was only a child.
Your whole post is based on confusion between the locations of subterranean magma chambers and the realizeable heat flow rates from drilled wells.
You're simply wrong. Most geothermal power is *not* generated near active volcanoes. Quite a few are on dormant or extinct volcanic areas (relying on residual heat), but that's quite different. And a number are in areas with no active volcanism. EGS in particular has great capacity to spread to non-volcanic areas.