Its all about marketing. Everyone knows Pepsi is just selling sugar water.
When it comes to security, its much easier to sell sugar water than the real Mccoy. This is why we have so many systems with virtually no security and so many abuses by people in Authority who go running around screaming when it is pointed out they don't know what they are doing.
During the Second World War there was a real need for security in some cases. One was the Manhattin project. If anyone reads Dr. Feynman's memoirs they will find there was no real security. Generals didn't know how to set combinations on their safes. The army didn't even know how to fix the holes in the fences.
As I see it - since most people try to be politically correct we will allways find our authorities running around pointing fingers with indignation why conserned people point out that they actually do not know what they are doing. The issue is that when in comes right down to it - if the bloke in charge doesn't know what he is doing then he shouldn't be in charge.
Stories in Slashdot with this theme include the Electronic Voting mess, where ArsTechnica publishes a step by step expose. Folks in the Usa are in real trouble. There is enough political desire to fix elections that one has to expect foul play. (Of course from the ones who proclaim "Vote for me". "I'm not a crook")
Then the almost universal lack of security on the world's PC's which leave the general population open to a wealth of attacks by a truely organised and determined enemy.
Dimitry Sklyrov thrown in jail for "exposing" Adobe's pitiful mess.
The list is too long to remember. But the theme is always political correctness and lip service and innocent people being singled out when they point out there is a problem.
I've traveled back and forth between the US and Canada a number of times.... sometimes en-route from other destinations like Oz.
I've never had a problem but I have been worried.
Worst case I had was comming back from Oz via LA and being terribly sick. IMHO they should not have let me on the plane, I was infected and infectous with a bad cold/flu.
Yes I had something to declare... I had over $30,000 to declare. When I arrived in Calgary I had not filled in my little something to declare ticket. When I walked up to the customs officer I said I'd like to speak to a supervisor. I was told no way... do I have something to declare? I said Yes I do and I haven't listed it because I'm too sick and besides you can't clear it anyways. Then I was asked how much? Am I over the limit? I said I'm pretty sure I'm over the limit. Its over $30,000 and I'll need a certified cheque for the GST because that alone will be more than $2000 bux. So she says (get this) "I think you need to see a supervisor".
About 2 minutes later the supervisor showed up and I explained I'm an importer and these are commercial goods and I'm way too sick... can we do it Wednesday or Thursday? Do you have a safe room to store it?
Funny. Yes they did. I felt better by Wednesday and phoned them and got the exchange rates and figured out the GST and got the certified cheque and made it back to the airport. They were very curtious. They didn't even open any of the boxes. 2 hours later my courier picked up the stuff and all was fine.
I don't know about others... I travel on a business Visa. My company is a registered importer/exporter and we keep our nose clean. I've just never had any problems.
Of course, I don't own a lap top and I wouldn't keep emails on it anyways. Emails stay on my mail server.
What many of you chaps write scares me. Last time I went to Oz I rented a machine in Oz. I don't like laptops anyways. However I was thinking of getting a toteable and maybe now I won't. What happens if you try to carry a hard drive through customs?
Maybe this is a business opportunity. Leave your peecee at home and rent one here. eh? Instead of rent-a-car, rent-a-peecee. Hmmm....
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BTW - I have had merchandise inspected. There has never been a problem. I have all the paperwork and I often clear myself to save the big bux. THe closest I came to a problem whas when they looked at a photocopied manifest from a supplier in California. These are suppose to be originals. Well - they had the boxes and could have looked in them. The parts were as stated. Perhaps over 10 years with a fully wiped nose does make a difference.
Little does he know. During the Ordovician CO2 levels were 13x to 17x higher than now. The earth slipped into a deep freeze snowball phase during this time. Throughout the Carboniferous CO2 levels were much higher than now. Back in the PreCambrian CO2 was much higher than now... up into the 80,000 ppm range in fact compared to 370 ppm now.
So not only is the story just plain tripe - it is also based on a poor understanding of the history of the planet.
I always thought the Dinosaurs were the most dominant life form. Give me a break!
The parent post is overgeneralized of course... to paraphrase is to overgeneralize.
This is a very insightful post. I agree almost 100%... however there are people who are adept at both politics and technology. Someone with both talents may seem scary to either group.
The way I see it - humanity stretches out between two extreems. On the one hand we have emotion and on the other we have logic. There is a knot of people at each end. The population in the middle may be rather sparse. As the author of the parent post correctly points out, for people at either end of the spectrum it can be very difficult to try to understand the other camp.
I would suggest that the political (emotional) side is substantially more heavily weighted than the technical (logical) side of this teeter totter. If we go back through history what we find is a slow progression of technology and science. It was only a few hundred years ago that observers of nature were routinely condeemed. Indeed many were imprisoned. If we consider primative people, what we find typically is a well developed emotional complex. It seems the hallmark of civilization is the development of logic. This is the essence of law for instance... that issues should be decided on fact and logic. Yet in spite of this, we find emotion running the show far too often.
Simply put, the logical individual is still in the minority. As I see it, the world is run primarily by emotion. Even very logical people often misunderstand how much decision making is governed by emotion. Emotional people of course don't consider the question.
Most drives have serial numbers. People should deal with a vendor with a reasonable exchange policy... if the vendor wants to be in business they should offer some sort of added value to justify their markup. Even a grocery store will typically replace a borken egg.
I think this is more about paranoia and the desire of, in some cases, rather ignorant (but well meaning?) people to show who is the boss.
Pushing innocent people around does not phase a terrorist. I doubt a layman threatening a lawyer with a law suit has much of an effect on the lawyer either. I'm sure some measures are effective and will serve to protect the public. However the question is with regard to the measures that are clearly not effective and serve only to harm innocent bystanders.
Every time I have come from overseas, through an airport here in Canada, I feel like I am treated like a cow. Frankly I find it an insult. Frankly for international traffic between Canada and the USA I feel an open boarder is appropriate. How is it that 300+ million Americans can travel within the USA without this bullshit and 30+ million Canadians can travel within Canada without this bullshit, yet if a Canadian happens to visit the USA we are threatened by our boarder guards? And it happens on BOTH sides? The answer is very simple. This has almost NOTHING to do with security. Its all about collecting taxes... customes taxes.
Canadian customs officials are far more interested in asserting their authority over Canadians than they are over Americans. I'm sure Americans will say the same thing.
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The desire to control and assert "authority" reminds me of many years ago when I did programming in a small company of about 40 employees. We had 3 departments who used the computer. There was a terribly under-employed operator who felt it was his job to guard the printer. Well - he didn't call it that... he called it distributing the printouts. To put this into context... the company owned one (1) 300 line per minute printer and ran a mini computer with some terminals hooked up and did a daily backup. Who here would think this would require a staff of three (3) people? A systems programmer and two (2) operators? Anyone? Lord - what a joke!
Any well managed company would have fired the bloke and told the systems programmer to do the backups... because there was NO NEED for a systems programmer... Besides the guy didn't know how to program, and there was no systems programming required anyways. He was a glorified and over paid systems administrator and not a very good one at that... but I digress.
Our computer operator guarded the printer. Programmers had to routinely wait for hours for him to get off his ass and put a printout in the tray. User's had to wait also, but not as long. Once the printout was retrived from the tray we could confer with the user's if necessary and user's could confer with us. But we all had to wait while this guy took his sweet time. And of course for "security" reasons, programmers were not allowed to touch the printer. Programmers could write the code that ran all of the company's business interests... but we couldn't touch the printer.
I did take over the administration of that mess. I got rid of the systems programmer and the operators and promoted the secretary and she did a fine job. Programers got their own printouts and were more than happy to put user's printouts in the proper bin! Wow! over $100,000 per year in salvaged salaries and no complaints after that.
Just like the under-employed systems programmer and the two subordinate operators, customs officials will also strive to create a justification for their jobs. But does it really stand up to scrutiny?
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Analogy to the boarder guards? Once you are in the USA you can travel without being treated like a cow. Once Americans are in Canada they can travel without being treated like a cow. But from one stockyard to the other... we get treated like cows.
The thing is that if we try to gain select country priviledges with regard to boarder travel then we get accused of things that boarder on racizm. This simply leads to a police state. Frankly I do not think a "war on TERROR" justifies our authorities terrorizing innocent travelers to the extent that they do. Very little of what they have done in the past can be justified and its getting worse.
While I definately want to keep breasts where they belong, it occurs to me this is an opportunity for wee geeks to show how insensitive we can be.
A common joke in engineering circles is that engineers tend to use their personalities for birth control.
I expect programmers and web masters have this technique refined somewhat.
So if we are to support breasts and the idea of keeping them where they belong, then perhaps it behooves the primary beneficiaries to share the benefits with wee geeks rather than the jocks (jokes anyone?) in the crowd which urban lore would suggest are questionably more desireable?
If you could get a copy of that lecture and put it on line it would be _great_.
Please to _not_ jump to the conclusion that DNA analysis will be futile. IMHO, quite the opposite.
In all liklihood, if we have ANY DNA available it will be a miracle. However if there is some, then the "some" will vary from cell to cell.
Thus if we map a large enough number of cells we can eventually build up the genome.
In seismic its called "stacking". You take a noisy blurry picture that you sample many times over and you "stack" it. The noise cancels. You are left with the picture.
Similarly, if you find any DNA at all, then if this is a fragment of what was in the cell to start with, and you have part of the picture.
These fragments will overlap and from these overlaps you will eventually be able to make perhaps even a complete picture. An example of this process is "diff" which most here will recognise as a programmers tool.
DNA is programming. Its molecular programming, but it is still programming.
What makes me quiver is the idea that we might be able to build up the DNA patterns by painstakingly replicating the DNA in each isolated cell and then stitching these DNA fragments together by matching the common parts of fragments found in different cells. It would be worse than putting together a jigsaw puzzle with the picture face down on the table... but it should be doable.
I suspect we will be able to tell that Dinos and Birds are, if not close cousins, then perhaps close 2nd cousins. In fact the birds by even be decendants. If decendants, then one would expect large amounts of dino DNA may still be found in bird DNA... and that it is just inactive or that its function is modified. The cell is a rather promiscous DNA xerox machine.
To go way out on a limb... if we can sequence the DNA and stitch it together, then we may be able to find living cells with a biochemistry close enough to Dino DNA that we can in fact make a working cell. Clearly we would be inserting artificial DNA into a cell. But it doesn't matter where the DNA comes from and how it came about - what matters is the proper sequence of DNA bases.
This is clearly along the idea that if you put enough monkeys in front of typewriters that they would create Shakespear's sonnets.
Well - the DNA stitching won't be random. The question is how much of the original picture is still preserved.
Every cell is a copy of every other cell in a given individual. As cells specialize they turn off some of the DNA. The DNA is still there.
Maybe some day we will actually be able to create a working Dino cell. Creataceous park... HERE WE GO!
Its an old story. I read the previous slashdot story last year. Probably our editors were bored on a Sunday morning and wanted to see if we would remember. Criticisms aside... your update is interesting.
So.. what progress has been made in the DNA studies?
You cannot abolish world hunger if people continue to irresponsibly reproduce and do not ensure there children have sufficient resources to survive.
The world is already fairly close to its carrying capacity in many regions. These typically are regions where there is overpopulation. So if parents in these regions choose to have an abundance of children, then what planet(s) are they planning on their children migrating to?
Certainly there can be diasters, we have to cope as best we can. But most of the starvation in the world is due to irresponsibility.
Nuclear weapons and hunger are not connected. Yes - we should eliminate nuclear weapons but that is rather difficult to do when our leading nations are the most guilty.
Consider that you are doing a public service. Most people are simply not aware there are better products out there. Most of what people know comes from biased sources.
Salesmen are known to misrepresent. Would one expect a salesman to tell a potential customer to try Open Office for instance when there is a copy of Word sitting for sale on the shelf? Would the salesman's manager be honest enough to tell their sales staff to do their best for the customer?
Since much of what people think they know tends to come from what marketing people want people to know, would you think we are dealing with a level playing feild?
The profit motive is a very powerful one, and one problem with FOSS is the "F". Licenses do allow for profit to be made. Unfortunately many people who work with FOSS seem to think it is unethical to ask for money for something that is free. This idea does not seem to exist in the business community.
Teachers (and parents for that matter) have no right to take a student's paper and post it anywhere without permission. This is a clear infringment on copyright.
However I think it is likely that teachers, who generally know little about copyright law, will find ways to justify it. Teachers are some of the worst copyright offenders. School boards have justified copying textbooks because it was "cheaper" than buying them. Somehow they had little difficulty justifying paying for buses and teachers, but authors? It was ok to rip off authors and publishers. (The Ontario school board lost in court over this)
Is it any wonder the public doesn't respect copyright?
I'm not coming down on teachers... as a group they "borrow" freely from themselves too. If a teacher finds a work sheet that she likes her first inclination is to copy it. This saves her time.
Now, the Creative comons license and the GNU Free Documentation License cover generally what teachers in general want to do. The thing is that in the past teachers didn't pay much attention to these licenses. Publishers did - or rather the publishers' lawyers did. Then the licenses were ignored for the most part.
In the future people may have to pay attention. If all teachers were to strictly adhere to the licenses that works are published under, and if they feel inclined, simply refuse to use material published under unacceptable licenses, then the "problem" will probably go away rather quickly.
This being said, no one has the right to take a student's work and publish it anywhere. However it is likely that lower court judges will find otherwise and create some theory of law to justify this. What the supreme courts might decide is open to question.
About the only way students can fight this is to ban together and choose to not submit assignments unless copryright laws are observed. I would certainly encourage any student who feels so inclined to place the words "Copyright blah, 20xx, All Rights Reserved" on each and every assignment. If these copyrights are not observed I would further encourge said students to study law and to make their case either in a mock court or if necessary in a real court.
Of course, I'm not a student and had my kids suggested such a thing I, of course, would have backed them 100%.
Furthermore I in fact did back them 100% in this area. The kids did create some rather high profile and remarkable websites before they were out of Grade 12. Included in one of the websites was a complete book. They have asked me to not say anything about their work. I have to repect their rights. However it was published on the net for several years and what they did is protected by copyright legislation.
Sugar is not much easier to ferment than starch. Its about the same. You just need to mash it. Mashing is pretty easy.
All plants have about the same chemistry. They are sugar polymers with the general chemistry of (CH2O)n. Ethanol and all alcohols are slightly oxydized alkanes. An alkane has the general chemistry of C(n)H(2n+2). An alcohol (single alcohols) are C(n)H(2n+1)OH. Set n=2 and you get ethanol: C2H5OH. Methanol (n=1) is also suitable for a fuel but it is poisonous and will blind too many people and thus is too dangerous to use. Methanol also has a lot less energy than ethanol. The reason is that ethanol has one (1) broken C:H bond of 6, methanol has 1 of 4.
I'll not do the chemistry for you, you can do it, its easy enough.
A tonne of dry organic matter is equivalent to about 2 barrels of oil.
Your suggestion that the energy returns on sugarcane are 10:1 verses corn at 1.2:1 are nutz. From the plant's ability to capture sunlight and produce sugar polymers, they are largely the same... although there are significant differences between various species of plants with Hemp being one of the most efficient.
This is unless you are looking at all energy inputs - which the DOE estimates results in about a 30% energy gain as I recall. I suspect these numbers are inaccurate and reflect machinery lifetimes which are far short of reality. The thing is that over 1/2 of the ethanol available from corn is not converted because one would need to use a cellulose conversion process which is possible using enzimes from fungi such as Trichoderma reshii. One can also use pyrolic decomposition.
You are still not going to get 10:1.2 unless the agricultural efficiencies of sugar cane are more than 800% better than corn - which I doubt.
The issue, however, with the fermentation process is that in order to produce ethanol at a price approaching gasoline, one needs to be able to ferment at a price that would produce beer for $2.50 bux per keg. This is easy to see. A keg holds 60 liters. 60*0.05 = 3. 3 liters of ethanol have the energy equivalent of about 2 liters of gasoline. At $1.25 per liter you get a budget of $2.50.
If oil sells for about $75 bux per barrel then with ethanol you have a budget of about $150 bux for the tonne of dry plant matter no matter what form it is in. This is if it is 100% starchs, cellulose, pentosans and lignins. Usually there is about 12% or more proteins and other stuff (ash) but I'm ignoring that for now. In a fermentation process the yeild is about 80%. The other stuff can be sold for cattle fodder.
Here is how we get the 80% number: Sugar yeild is quoted as brewers lbs per quarter which is typically 102 for corn and a brewers quarter weights 336 lbs. (Lord, everyone should know this!) This refers to the excess weight of the wort compared to water and is typically quoted in barrels and dates back into the 1700's.
Imperial measure yeilds 36 gallons * 10 pounds per gallon or 360 pounds for a barrel of water.
360 + 102 = 462.
Now a pound of sugar displaces about 10 ounces of water. The "excess" is 6 ounces (16-10) so we get 16/6 as the true amount of sugar. 102*16/6 = 272. IE. Out of a quarter of grain we can expect to get 272 pounds of sugar. 272/336 = 80%
Grain delivered to a plant is typically worth close to $100 per ton... usually a bit more. Corn for instance at $4 bux per bushel is about $133 per ton (short ton = 2000 lbs). After mashing a ton of corn will yeild about 80% or 1600 lbs of glucose which will convert to ethanol at about 51% by weight. 1600*51% = 816 pounds ethanol. There is not going to be much of a profit margin here! Of course the "brewers grains" can be sold for livestock feed because they are high in proteins.
For the chemically impared - here is the calculation.
Imagine thousands of 2 MW wind turbines, located in areas where few people will complain about being an eyesore; we could generate as much as 20,000 MW of power from these turbines.
Yes - just imagine.
There are currently 113 nuclear plants in the GIGAWATT range operating in the USA. Your 20,000 windmills are equivalent to about 20 of these plants - and only when the wind is blowing. If the duty cycle of your windmills is 33% then you are proposing equivalent to about 7 nukes.
The USA produces about 10% of its energy from nuclear. So this is about 10% of 7/113 which is less than 1% of the USA energy needs.
The short of it is that you'll need more than 10,000 windmills and you need to find a place to put them.
You are 100% correct on these points. But it happened a long time ago. During the last 35 years the nuclear industry almost ground to a standstill. No alternatives were put into place to phase out fossil fuels as a source of energy.
Now look what we have:
COAL. The dirty beast. Nobody wants a coal fired plant. The power utilities have decided to go with the flow.... coal is not politically correct. NIMBY Rotating blackouts are becomming common.
Natural Gas... The darling. We get about 2x as much energy from natural gas per carbon atom as we do from anything else. We had a natural gas bubble for decades. Companies like Calpine (NYSE:CPN) decided to put the coal fired electricty sector out of business. By 2000 they had more co-gen's on order than Germany, Japan and the USA could supply. Gas Turbines were the ANSWER. CPN shares were trading at $45 bux and I for one was asking where they were planning on getting their gas from (and telling them I was going to short them into the toilet). They were planning on burning most of the North American natural gas supply. Roll the film forward to 2006. Calpine is trading on the pinks: (CPNLQ.PK). Their share price is about 35 cents. North American natural gas supplies peaked January 2001. There is a mini-gas-relief for now. There is breathing space for companies like Calpine. Personally, I bought some shares at 30 cents on the pinks because I think I'll make a little loose change.
Oil... Prices climbed from the 1998 low of about $10 bux per barrel to over $70 bux. Supplies are sufficient for now. We hear production will be increased. We don't see production increase significantly.
Solar, Wind and alternative green solutions... This will save our bacon we are told.
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In 1970 when Carter was killing the nuclear program, what would Texas oil have been worth had a viable and cheap nuclear power industry develop? I think it is ironic that it was a Democrate that killed nuclear. Nuclear would have made Texas oil dirt cheap. Now it seems it is Texas Oil money funding the Republican President. One might laugh and conclude that both Carter's and Clinton's policies were short sighted in ways they didn't anticipate.
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2006 rolls in. We see the second gulf war with talk of expansion into Iran. We have a war on terror. One of the principle objectives of Bin Ladin is to get oil prices over $100 bux per barrel. Oil hovers in the $70 bux range. Saudi Arabia says no problem... they'll boost production. OPEC production is flat or in decline (for now).
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In 1970, there were arguably 35 years of grace. We had quite a nice cushion here in North America. Fossil fuels were abundant and we had our choice of Coal, Oil, Natural Gas. Nobody was thinking about turning corn into ethanol other than to make wiskey.
In 2006 what cushion do we have? Does anyone thing the Natural Gas supply can be grown for the next 35 years? What of the oil supply? Does anyone think that Saudi Arabia for instance can double production to 20 million barrels of oil per day?... that they can increase production for the next 35 years?
In 1970, the USA was just passing peak production. Does anyone think that the USA can grow their oil production past the 1970 levels? (Well, a few pollies do - when they are asking for votes).
We do have coal. We can replace our oil and natural gas production with coal and we can use it and heavy oils and bitumin to produce liguid and gaseous fuels and we can do it for the next 35 years. However, we can only do this if we are willing to create a river of liquid CO2 measured in the millions of barrels per day (Via Fischer-Trophe) and we can only do it if we install massive infrastructure that will cost trillions and take decades to build... and we don't have decades.
Sitting in the background is the nuclear industry... with solutions... the public is still being lied to. The public is still being told
Damn. Sorry... Hydrogen:Carbon ratio of liquid fuels is about 2:1. This is important. This is why we have a huge shortage of hydrogen for tar sands operations. Fischer-trophe grabs the hydrogen from water and marries carbon to the oxygen in place of the hydrogen. The result is CO2 going up the smoke stack where the O2 part of the CO2 comes from two of the H2O's.
The thing is if we want to use Fischer-Trophe to produce the hydrogen we need then when we get to 5 million barrels of liquid synthetic crude per day, we will also produce as a by product a stream of liquid CO2 measured in the millions of barrels per day as well. This CO2 has value and can be used for miscable floods of old oil fields. It can be transported via old gas pipelines because it is liquid at room temperature at a pressue of about 800 PSI.
I think Clinton and his administration has to shoulder a great deal of the blame. IMHO they sold the future of the country for short term political gain. That's a deal with the devil. The kids carrying the guns in the middle east are the price the devil asked.
Matt Simmons says that oil will hit $350 per barrel when the declines come. I don't know if I will go this far out on the limb. The demand for energy is very inelastic however, so Simmons may well be correct.
I do agree with you that we will not run out of fossil fuels overnight. We have HUGE coal reserves. If we want, we can put in place coal-> liquids via fischer-tropch. However this requires infrastructure and we have not started building it. Meanwhile OPEC and especially Saudi Arabia have been promising production increases. The Saudis still say - hey - no issue - we can boost production over 10 million barrels per day... we can hit 13 and even 20.
The problem is do we beleive them? These promises have been made for two years now. Saudi has not increased production. Simmons says they won't be able to. The water cut in Ghawar is over 60% and they are injecting over 10 million barrels of sea water to keep the reservoir pressures up. The original estimates of oil in place have already been produced. Could the geologists of the 60's and 70's be that worng? I don't think so. It is normal to under-estimate what a feild can do. Thus I think the Saudis are producing from the comfort zone. A map of Ghawar showing injection wells and producing wells tells volumes. The Saudis consider technical data to be a state secret.
So... you are correct, we will not run out of oil overnight. However in a year we can see a 5% reduction in available fuel. The last industry to see this was the Fertilizer industry when North American Gas production peaked in 2001. The fertilizer industry took it on the chin. Over 30% of the plants have been permenantly shut down.
So the question to ask is if supplies of Gasoline and Deisel for example decline by say 5% over the next year - who is going on a diet? Many people will remark that the cost of fuel is not so great... they can give up a meal at a restaurant once a month and that will cover the increased costs. Unfortunately - they are correct.
But what of industry? Can a fertilizer plant give up a meal? Or do they shut down? What of a cement plant or a glass factory?
Industry does not have the slop built in. When they become uncompetative they go out of business. This is called demand distruction. When this happens the economy shrinks and the employees let go have to find other alternatives. The short of it is that the economy is fueled by energy and when energy costs go up, the economy goes into a recession which eventually results in large numbers of people without jobs.
When this happens, the glib remarks that people can just skip a meal at a restaurant to cover the increased costs of energy become a joke... the same joke attributed to Marie Antoinette: "Let them eat cake".
If you really think that solar and wind can supply the energy we need - then consider this. A wind mill produces about 1 megawatt. It does not do this all the time... this is its maximum rating. In operation the duty cycle is closer to 20-35%.
To produce 75 gigawatts from windmills at 100% duty cycle, we would need 75,000 windmills. At 33% duty cycle we would need 225,000 wind mills. If we take the square root of 225,000 we get an array that is about 475 by 475. If we space the windmills 1/2 mile apart that is an area of 250 x 250 miles. Southern Alberta is a large place. We would need to cover all of Southern Alberta to host this many wind mills. We do not have suitable wind conditions over areas this large. Large parts of the Pairies for instance have calm days over 75% of the time. This would drop the duty cycle to under 10% and that would increase the arial extent and number of windmills by a factor of 3x.
World oil production is currently about 85 million barrels of oil per day. OPEC production declined about 2% last month - we don't really know why. The top four (4) feilds produce about 15% of world production and all seem to now be in decline with Kuwait announcing Bergan slipped into decline in Nov 2005 and a Saudi Aramco spoksman admiting Ghawar slipped into decline in April 2006. A 5% decline rate will result in a world wide loss of about 1/2 million barrels of oil production per year from just these top four (4) feilds. Between now and 2015 this will accumulate to a loss of about 3.5 million barrels of production from these four (4) feilds alone.
The thing is the rest of the world is in decline as well and country by country production has been slipping in spite of the best efforts of the industry. Just last year Britian became an oil importer and the year before Indonesia became an importer. Since Indoneasia use to supply Australia this means three (3) more countries line up at the straits of Hormez for oil imports from the Middle East.
If we project a 5% decline on the 85 million barrel world production we end up short about 30 million barrels of production... ie - production falls from 85 million to about 55 million barrles per day to be made up from something and somewhere and this by 2015.
The Alberta Tar Sands is receiving investments of over $10 billion per year. All of these projects require massive amounts of energy which in the past was supplied by Natural Gas. In fact Canada produces about 6.3 TCF of gas per year of which over 1/2 is exported to the USA.
Were we to try to use this gas for energy and chemical feedstocks (hydrogen) which is needed to change the hydrogen:carbon ratio of bitumin (about 10 hydrogen to 7 carbon) into the hydrogen:carbon ratio of syncrude (about 1:1 actually - part of the alkane series: C(n)H(2n+2)), then we would need more than 1/2 of Canada's production by 2015 and in fact the proposed McKensie Valley pipeline can just stop at Ft. McMurray. In this senerio there IS NO EXPORT GAS FOR THE USA. The USA is already short of gas supplies and this is illustrated by spot prices in the $17 bux range a couple years back. The present price drop will be very temporary.
My point is that with these massive investments, Alberta Tar Sands output is expected to climb to only about 3.3 million barrels per day. This will not offset the decline from even the top four (4) oil feilds much less the expected declines from all other producing countries.
We need to install about 75 GIGAWATTS of nuclear energy for Tar Sands operations... this to bring production up to about 5 million barrels of syncrude per day.
NIMBY in part is ok for now for most of the USA. However NIMBY makes no sense here in Alberta.
Without a source of energy to obtain hydrogen from water, we need to chemically obtain it via reactions such as fischer-tropsh. In order to use F-T, anywhere from 1/3 to 1/2 of the carbon found in the bitumin is either relegated to coke piles or sent up the smoke stacks in the form of CO2.
So what I'm advocating and saying is: really the only thing that makes sense is to build big nukes - about 75 of them, and I'd like to see the IFR in that fleet - and I'm advocating building them IN MY BACK YARD.
I would much rather see nukes in my back yard than kids off fighting futile middle eastern wars.
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The point of IFR technology is that it won't come in overnight. There is a LOT of work to be done. Eventually it will be done - but we are all likely to suffer big time in the mean time.
The gas line ups and fuel shortages of the 1970's are nothing compared to where we are going. Yet if we look at the energy we have available via IFR and other advanced reactor designs...
60,000 years supply of uranium on hand for the existing fleet of about 113 reactors in the gigawatt range.... most of this uranium is ca
Clinton seems to have had sex with Argonne Labs Integral Fast Reactor... and next we'll be hearing he didn't have sex with the energy fund. He just created the problem.
It was the Clinton Administration that shut down the Argonne Lab's IFR development program in 1994. This reactor design will do more to solve the coming world energy crisis than anything else...and Clinton did have sex with it!
Unfortunately, this program was canceled just 2 short years before the proof of concept. I assure my colleagues someday our Nation will regret and reverse this shortsighted decision.
The Clinton administration, I think, firmed up quite an anti-nuclear power position....
Q: What will be our energy source, then?
A:I think that many engineers would agree that there is limited, additional gain to be had from conservation. After all, what does one mean by "conservation?" One simply means using less and using less more efficiently. And there have been considerable gains wrung out of the energy supply and energy usage over the past couple of decades. We can probably go somewhat further. But you're talking, you know, 10% or 20%. Whereas over the next 50 years, it can be confidently predicted that with the energy growth in this country alone, and much more so around the world, it would be 100%, 200%, or some very large number.
And so what energy source steps in? There is only one. It's fossil fuel. It's coal. It's oil. It's natural gas. Some limited additional use of the more exotic forms of things, like solar and wind. But they are, after all, very limited in what they can do. So it will be fossil.
Now the question, of course, immediately becomes, well, how long can that last? And everyone has a different opinion on that. One thing that is certain, and that is that the increase in the use of fossil fuels will sharply increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Another thing is certain. You will put a lot more pollutants into the atmosphere as well, in addition to carbon dioxide, which one could argue the greenhouse effect exists or doesn't exist....
So it is very clear that the consequences of short sighted anti-nuclear policies of the Clinton Adminitration were well understood in the early 90's. The lack of solutions to the problems we face now are a direct result of Clinton's administration.
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Note the Integral Fast Reactor burns nuclear wastes and will extend the existing uranium fuel stockpile (called Depleated Uranium, spent fuel, and nuclear waste) to over 60,000 years for the existing fleet of over 100 reactors in the Gigawatt range.... and this without mining any more uranium.
The IFR burns all actinides and hense there are no long term wastes... only light isotopes with 1/2 lives of a few decades at most, and which are used industrially for things like pipe line xrays.
When we are in the throws of the worst energy crisis mankind has ever seen, then I want everyone to look and Clinton's contribution to the problem. I think the quote from the congressional report (above) sums it up nicely.
The short of it is that its prefectly clear we need alternatives to fossil fuels and the issue is that we needed to start developing these alternatives 15 and 20 years ago. It
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Its all about marketing. Everyone knows Pepsi is just selling sugar water.
When it comes to security, its much easier to sell sugar water than the real Mccoy. This is why we have so many systems with virtually no security and so many abuses by people in Authority who go running around screaming when it is pointed out they don't know what they are doing.
During the Second World War there was a real need for security in some cases. One was the Manhattin project. If anyone reads Dr. Feynman's memoirs they will find there was no real security. Generals didn't know how to set combinations on their safes. The army didn't even know how to fix the holes in the fences.
As I see it - since most people try to be politically correct we will allways find our authorities running around pointing fingers with indignation why conserned people point out that they actually do not know what they are doing. The issue is that when in comes right down to it - if the bloke in charge doesn't know what he is doing then he shouldn't be in charge.
Stories in Slashdot with this theme include the Electronic Voting mess, where ArsTechnica publishes a step by step expose. Folks in the Usa are in real trouble. There is enough political desire to fix elections that one has to expect foul play. (Of course from the ones who proclaim "Vote for me". "I'm not a crook")
Then the almost universal lack of security on the world's PC's which leave the general population open to a wealth of attacks by a truely organised and determined enemy.
Dimitry Sklyrov thrown in jail for "exposing" Adobe's pitiful mess.
The list is too long to remember. But the theme is always political correctness and lip service and innocent people being singled out when they point out there is a problem.
I've traveled back and forth between the US and Canada a number of times.... sometimes en-route from other destinations like Oz.
I've never had a problem but I have been worried.
Worst case I had was comming back from Oz via LA and being terribly sick. IMHO they should not have let me on the plane, I was infected and infectous with a bad cold/flu.
Yes I had something to declare... I had over $30,000 to declare. When I arrived in Calgary I had not filled in my little something to declare ticket. When I walked up to the customs officer I said I'd like to speak to a supervisor. I was told no way... do I have something to declare? I said Yes I do and I haven't listed it because I'm too sick and besides you can't clear it anyways. Then I was asked how much? Am I over the limit? I said I'm pretty sure I'm over the limit. Its over $30,000 and I'll need a certified cheque for the GST because that alone will be more than $2000 bux. So she says (get this) "I think you need to see a supervisor".
About 2 minutes later the supervisor showed up and I explained I'm an importer and these are commercial goods and I'm way too sick... can we do it Wednesday or Thursday? Do you have a safe room to store it?
Funny. Yes they did. I felt better by Wednesday and phoned them and got the exchange rates and figured out the GST and got the certified cheque and made it back to the airport. They were very curtious. They didn't even open any of the boxes. 2 hours later my courier picked up the stuff and all was fine.
I don't know about others... I travel on a business Visa. My company is a registered importer/exporter and we keep our nose clean. I've just never had any problems.
Of course, I don't own a lap top and I wouldn't keep emails on it anyways. Emails stay on my mail server.
What many of you chaps write scares me. Last time I went to Oz I rented a machine in Oz. I don't like laptops anyways. However I was thinking of getting a toteable and maybe now I won't. What happens if you try to carry a hard drive through customs?
Maybe this is a business opportunity. Leave your peecee at home and rent one here. eh? Instead of rent-a-car, rent-a-peecee. Hmmm....
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BTW - I have had merchandise inspected. There has never been a problem. I have all the paperwork and I often clear myself to save the big bux. THe closest I came to a problem whas when they looked at a photocopied manifest from a supplier in California. These are suppose to be originals. Well - they had the boxes and could have looked in them. The parts were as stated. Perhaps over 10 years with a fully wiped nose does make a difference.
Does this qualify as stalking? Perhaps corporate stalking?
This is just plain stupid. Nice he harps on CO2.
Little does he know. During the Ordovician CO2 levels were 13x to 17x higher than now. The earth slipped into a deep freeze snowball phase during this time. Throughout the Carboniferous CO2 levels were much higher than now. Back in the PreCambrian CO2 was much higher than now... up into the 80,000 ppm range in fact compared to 370 ppm now.
So not only is the story just plain tripe - it is also based on a poor understanding of the history of the planet.
I always thought the Dinosaurs were the most dominant life form. Give me a break!
The parent post is overgeneralized of course... to paraphrase is to overgeneralize.
This is a very insightful post. I agree almost 100%... however there are people who are adept at both politics and technology. Someone with both talents may seem scary to either group.
The way I see it - humanity stretches out between two extreems. On the one hand we have emotion and on the other we have logic. There is a knot of people at each end. The population in the middle may be rather sparse. As the author of the parent post correctly points out, for people at either end of the spectrum it can be very difficult to try to understand the other camp.
I would suggest that the political (emotional) side is substantially more heavily weighted than the technical (logical) side of this teeter totter. If we go back through history what we find is a slow progression of technology and science. It was only a few hundred years ago that observers of nature were routinely condeemed. Indeed many were imprisoned. If we consider primative people, what we find typically is a well developed emotional complex. It seems the hallmark of civilization is the development of logic. This is the essence of law for instance... that issues should be decided on fact and logic. Yet in spite of this, we find emotion running the show far too often.
Simply put, the logical individual is still in the minority. As I see it, the world is run primarily by emotion. Even very logical people often misunderstand how much decision making is governed by emotion. Emotional people of course don't consider the question.
Most drives have serial numbers. People should deal with a vendor with a reasonable exchange policy... if the vendor wants to be in business they should offer some sort of added value to justify their markup. Even a grocery store will typically replace a borken egg.
I think this is more about paranoia and the desire of, in some cases, rather ignorant (but well meaning?) people to show who is the boss.
Pushing innocent people around does not phase a terrorist. I doubt a layman threatening a lawyer with a law suit has much of an effect on the lawyer either. I'm sure some measures are effective and will serve to protect the public. However the question is with regard to the measures that are clearly not effective and serve only to harm innocent bystanders.
Every time I have come from overseas, through an airport here in Canada, I feel like I am treated like a cow. Frankly I find it an insult. Frankly for international traffic between Canada and the USA I feel an open boarder is appropriate. How is it that 300+ million Americans can travel within the USA without this bullshit and 30+ million Canadians can travel within Canada without this bullshit, yet if a Canadian happens to visit the USA we are threatened by our boarder guards? And it happens on BOTH sides? The answer is very simple. This has almost NOTHING to do with security. Its all about collecting taxes... customes taxes.
Canadian customs officials are far more interested in asserting their authority over Canadians than they are over Americans. I'm sure Americans will say the same thing.
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The desire to control and assert "authority" reminds me of many years ago when I did programming in a small company of about 40 employees. We had 3 departments who used the computer. There was a terribly under-employed operator who felt it was his job to guard the printer. Well - he didn't call it that... he called it distributing the printouts. To put this into context... the company owned one (1) 300 line per minute printer and ran a mini computer with some terminals hooked up and did a daily backup. Who here would think this would require a staff of three (3) people? A systems programmer and two (2) operators? Anyone? Lord - what a joke!
Any well managed company would have fired the bloke and told the systems programmer to do the backups... because there was NO NEED for a systems programmer... Besides the guy didn't know how to program, and there was no systems programming required anyways. He was a glorified and over paid systems administrator and not a very good one at that... but I digress.
Our computer operator guarded the printer. Programmers had to routinely wait for hours for him to get off his ass and put a printout in the tray. User's had to wait also, but not as long. Once the printout was retrived from the tray we could confer with the user's if necessary and user's could confer with us. But we all had to wait while this guy took his sweet time. And of course for "security" reasons, programmers were not allowed to touch the printer. Programmers could write the code that ran all of the company's business interests... but we couldn't touch the printer.
I did take over the administration of that mess. I got rid of the systems programmer and the operators and promoted the secretary and she did a fine job. Programers got their own printouts and were more than happy to put user's printouts in the proper bin! Wow! over $100,000 per year in salvaged salaries and no complaints after that.
Just like the under-employed systems programmer and the two subordinate operators, customs officials will also strive to create a justification for their jobs. But does it really stand up to scrutiny?
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Analogy to the boarder guards? Once you are in the USA you can travel without being treated like a cow. Once Americans are in Canada they can travel without being treated like a cow. But from one stockyard to the other... we get treated like cows.
The thing is that if we try to gain select country priviledges with regard to boarder travel then we get accused of things that boarder on racizm. This simply leads to a police state. Frankly I do not think a "war on TERROR" justifies our authorities terrorizing innocent travelers to the extent that they do. Very little of what they have done in the past can be justified and its getting worse.
While I definately want to keep breasts where they belong, it occurs to me this is an opportunity for wee geeks to show how insensitive we can be.
A common joke in engineering circles is that engineers tend to use their personalities for birth control.
I expect programmers and web masters have this technique refined somewhat.
So if we are to support breasts and the idea of keeping them where they belong, then perhaps it behooves the primary beneficiaries to share the benefits with wee geeks rather than the jocks (jokes anyone?) in the crowd which urban lore would suggest are questionably more desireable?
If you could get a copy of that lecture and put it on line it would be _great_.
Please to _not_ jump to the conclusion that DNA analysis will be futile. IMHO, quite the opposite.
In all liklihood, if we have ANY DNA available it will be a miracle. However if there is some, then the "some" will vary from cell to cell.
Thus if we map a large enough number of cells we can eventually build up the genome.
In seismic its called "stacking". You take a noisy blurry picture that you sample many times over and you "stack" it. The noise cancels. You are left with the picture.
Similarly, if you find any DNA at all, then if this is a fragment of what was in the cell to start with, and you have part of the picture.
These fragments will overlap and from these overlaps you will eventually be able to make perhaps even a complete picture. An example of this process is "diff" which most here will recognise as a programmers tool.
DNA is programming. Its molecular programming, but it is still programming.
What makes me quiver is the idea that we might be able to build up the DNA patterns by painstakingly replicating the DNA in each isolated cell and then stitching these DNA fragments together by matching the common parts of fragments found in different cells. It would be worse than putting together a jigsaw puzzle with the picture face down on the table... but it should be doable.
I suspect we will be able to tell that Dinos and Birds are, if not close cousins, then perhaps close 2nd cousins. In fact the birds by even be decendants. If decendants, then one would expect large amounts of dino DNA may still be found in bird DNA... and that it is just inactive or that its function is modified. The cell is a rather promiscous DNA xerox machine.
To go way out on a limb... if we can sequence the DNA and stitch it together, then we may be able to find living cells with a biochemistry close enough to Dino DNA that we can in fact make a working cell. Clearly we would be inserting artificial DNA into a cell. But it doesn't matter where the DNA comes from and how it came about - what matters is the proper sequence of DNA bases.
This is clearly along the idea that if you put enough monkeys in front of typewriters that they would create Shakespear's sonnets.
Well - the DNA stitching won't be random. The question is how much of the original picture is still preserved.
Every cell is a copy of every other cell in a given individual. As cells specialize they turn off some of the DNA. The DNA is still there.
Maybe some day we will actually be able to create a working Dino cell. Creataceous park... HERE WE GO!
Its an old story. I read the previous slashdot story last year. Probably our editors were bored on a Sunday morning and wanted to see if we would remember. Criticisms aside... your update is interesting.
So.. what progress has been made in the DNA studies?
The major creditor would actually be Novell because the license revenues SCO didn't pay to Novell.
Ya... but that's no fun. Novell already owns it!
Go crawl back in your hole, ignorant troll.
Hey, You're a poet and you don't know it but I'll bet your feet do because they're Long Fellows.
You sure got that worng. The judge sided with the guy.
Hey great! Lets bring back Windows 95 for it!
I use to love the techno wannabees bragging about their dual CPU machines with win95 on them! Ah for the good old days!
I think this is a stupid comment.
You cannot abolish world hunger if people continue to irresponsibly reproduce and do not ensure there children have sufficient resources to survive.
The world is already fairly close to its carrying capacity in many regions. These typically are regions where there is overpopulation. So if parents in these regions choose to have an abundance of children, then what planet(s) are they planning on their children migrating to?
Certainly there can be diasters, we have to cope as best we can. But most of the starvation in the world is due to irresponsibility.
Nuclear weapons and hunger are not connected. Yes - we should eliminate nuclear weapons but that is rather difficult to do when our leading nations are the most guilty.
This would be interesting. I wonder how many would pop up as plagerized?
Consider that you are doing a public service. Most people are simply not aware there are better products out there. Most of what people know comes from biased sources.
Salesmen are known to misrepresent. Would one expect a salesman to tell a potential customer to try Open Office for instance when there is a copy of Word sitting for sale on the shelf? Would the salesman's manager be honest enough to tell their sales staff to do their best for the customer?
Since much of what people think they know tends to come from what marketing people want people to know, would you think we are dealing with a level playing feild?
The profit motive is a very powerful one, and one problem with FOSS is the "F". Licenses do allow for profit to be made. Unfortunately many people who work with FOSS seem to think it is unethical to ask for money for something that is free. This idea does not seem to exist in the business community.
Teachers (and parents for that matter) have no right to take a student's paper and post it anywhere without permission. This is a clear infringment on copyright.
However I think it is likely that teachers, who generally know little about copyright law, will find ways to justify it. Teachers are some of the worst copyright offenders. School boards have justified copying textbooks because it was "cheaper" than buying them. Somehow they had little difficulty justifying paying for buses and teachers, but authors? It was ok to rip off authors and publishers. (The Ontario school board lost in court over this)
Is it any wonder the public doesn't respect copyright?
I'm not coming down on teachers... as a group they "borrow" freely from themselves too. If a teacher finds a work sheet that she likes her first inclination is to copy it. This saves her time.
Now, the Creative comons license and the GNU Free Documentation License cover generally what teachers in general want to do. The thing is that in the past teachers didn't pay much attention to these licenses. Publishers did - or rather the publishers' lawyers did. Then the licenses were ignored for the most part.
In the future people may have to pay attention. If all teachers were to strictly adhere to the licenses that works are published under, and if they feel inclined, simply refuse to use material published under unacceptable licenses, then the "problem" will probably go away rather quickly.
This being said, no one has the right to take a student's work and publish it anywhere. However it is likely that lower court judges will find otherwise and create some theory of law to justify this. What the supreme courts might decide is open to question.
About the only way students can fight this is to ban together and choose to not submit assignments unless copryright laws are observed. I would certainly encourage any student who feels so inclined to place the words "Copyright blah, 20xx, All Rights Reserved" on each and every assignment. If these copyrights are not observed I would further encourge said students to study law and to make their case either in a mock court or if necessary in a real court.
Of course, I'm not a student and had my kids suggested such a thing I, of course, would have backed them 100%.
Furthermore I in fact did back them 100% in this area. The kids did create some rather high profile and remarkable websites before they were out of Grade 12. Included in one of the websites was a complete book. They have asked me to not say anything about their work. I have to repect their rights. However it was published on the net for several years and what they did is protected by copyright legislation.
Do you mean like GOOGLE?
Sugar is not much easier to ferment than starch. Its about the same. You just need to mash it. Mashing is pretty easy.
All plants have about the same chemistry. They are sugar polymers with the general chemistry of (CH2O)n. Ethanol and all alcohols are slightly oxydized alkanes. An alkane has the general chemistry of C(n)H(2n+2). An alcohol (single alcohols) are C(n)H(2n+1)OH. Set n=2 and you get ethanol: C2H5OH. Methanol (n=1) is also suitable for a fuel but it is poisonous and will blind too many people and thus is too dangerous to use. Methanol also has a lot less energy than ethanol. The reason is that ethanol has one (1) broken C:H bond of 6, methanol has 1 of 4.
I'll not do the chemistry for you, you can do it, its easy enough.
A tonne of dry organic matter is equivalent to about 2 barrels of oil.
Your suggestion that the energy returns on sugarcane are 10:1 verses corn at 1.2:1 are nutz. From the plant's ability to capture sunlight and produce sugar polymers, they are largely the same... although there are significant differences between various species of plants with Hemp being one of the most efficient.
This is unless you are looking at all energy inputs - which the DOE estimates results in about a 30% energy gain as I recall. I suspect these numbers are inaccurate and reflect machinery lifetimes which are far short of reality. The thing is that over 1/2 of the ethanol available from corn is not converted because one would need to use a cellulose conversion process which is possible using enzimes from fungi such as Trichoderma reshii. One can also use pyrolic decomposition.
You are still not going to get 10:1.2 unless the agricultural efficiencies of sugar cane are more than 800% better than corn - which I doubt.
The issue, however, with the fermentation process is that in order to produce ethanol at a price approaching gasoline, one needs to be able to ferment at a price that would produce beer for $2.50 bux per keg. This is easy to see. A keg holds 60 liters. 60*0.05 = 3. 3 liters of ethanol have the energy equivalent of about 2 liters of gasoline. At $1.25 per liter you get a budget of $2.50.
If oil sells for about $75 bux per barrel then with ethanol you have a budget of about $150 bux for the tonne of dry plant matter no matter what form it is in. This is if it is 100% starchs, cellulose, pentosans and lignins. Usually there is about 12% or more proteins and other stuff (ash) but I'm ignoring that for now. In a fermentation process the yeild is about 80%. The other stuff can be sold for cattle fodder.
Here is how we get the 80% number: Sugar yeild is quoted as brewers lbs per quarter which is typically 102 for corn and a brewers quarter weights 336 lbs. (Lord, everyone should know this!) This refers to the excess weight of the wort compared to water and is typically quoted in barrels and dates back into the 1700's.
Imperial measure yeilds 36 gallons * 10 pounds per gallon or 360 pounds for a barrel of water.
360 + 102 = 462.
Now a pound of sugar displaces about 10 ounces of water. The "excess" is 6 ounces (16-10) so we get 16/6 as the true amount of sugar. 102*16/6 = 272. IE. Out of a quarter of grain we can expect to get 272 pounds of sugar. 272/336 = 80%
Grain delivered to a plant is typically worth close to $100 per ton... usually a bit more. Corn for instance at $4 bux per bushel is about $133 per ton (short ton = 2000 lbs). After mashing a ton of corn will yeild about 80% or 1600 lbs of glucose which will convert to ethanol at about 51% by weight. 1600*51% = 816 pounds ethanol. There is not going to be much of a profit margin here! Of course the "brewers grains" can be sold for livestock feed because they are high in proteins.
For the chemically impared - here is the calculation.
glucose: C6H12O6 = (CH2O)6 12*6 + 1*12 + 16*6 = 180
ethanol: C2H5OH 12*2 + 1*5 + 16 + 1 = 46
carbon dioxide: CO2 12 + 16*2 = 44
The reactio
Imagine thousands of 2 MW wind turbines, located in areas where few people will complain about being an eyesore; we could generate as much as 20,000 MW of power from these turbines.
Yes - just imagine.
There are currently 113 nuclear plants in the GIGAWATT range operating in the USA. Your 20,000 windmills are equivalent to about 20 of these plants - and only when the wind is blowing. If the duty cycle of your windmills is 33% then you are proposing equivalent to about 7 nukes.
The USA produces about 10% of its energy from nuclear. So this is about 10% of 7/113 which is less than 1% of the USA energy needs.
The short of it is that you'll need more than 10,000 windmills and you need to find a place to put them.
You are 100% correct on these points. But it happened a long time ago. During the last 35 years the nuclear industry almost ground to a standstill. No alternatives were put into place to phase out fossil fuels as a source of energy.
... that they can increase production for the next 35 years?
Now look what we have:
COAL. The dirty beast. Nobody wants a coal fired plant. The power utilities have decided to go with the flow.... coal is not politically correct. NIMBY Rotating blackouts are becomming common.
Natural Gas... The darling. We get about 2x as much energy from natural gas per carbon atom as we do from anything else. We had a natural gas bubble for decades. Companies like Calpine (NYSE:CPN) decided to put the coal fired electricty sector out of business. By 2000 they had more co-gen's on order than Germany, Japan and the USA could supply. Gas Turbines were the ANSWER. CPN shares were trading at $45 bux and I for one was asking where they were planning on getting their gas from (and telling them I was going to short them into the toilet). They were planning on burning most of the North American natural gas supply. Roll the film forward to 2006. Calpine is trading on the pinks: (CPNLQ.PK). Their share price is about 35 cents. North American natural gas supplies peaked January 2001. There is a mini-gas-relief for now. There is breathing space for companies like Calpine. Personally, I bought some shares at 30 cents on the pinks because I think I'll make a little loose change.
Oil... Prices climbed from the 1998 low of about $10 bux per barrel to over $70 bux. Supplies are sufficient for now. We hear production will be increased. We don't see production increase significantly.
Solar, Wind and alternative green solutions... This will save our bacon we are told.
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In 1970 when Carter was killing the nuclear program, what would Texas oil have been worth had a viable and cheap nuclear power industry develop? I think it is ironic that it was a Democrate that killed nuclear. Nuclear would have made Texas oil dirt cheap. Now it seems it is Texas Oil money funding the Republican President. One might laugh and conclude that both Carter's and Clinton's policies were short sighted in ways they didn't anticipate.
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2006 rolls in. We see the second gulf war with talk of expansion into Iran. We have a war on terror. One of the principle objectives of Bin Ladin is to get oil prices over $100 bux per barrel. Oil hovers in the $70 bux range. Saudi Arabia says no problem... they'll boost production. OPEC production is flat or in decline (for now).
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In 1970, there were arguably 35 years of grace. We had quite a nice cushion here in North America. Fossil fuels were abundant and we had our choice of Coal, Oil, Natural Gas. Nobody was thinking about turning corn into ethanol other than to make wiskey.
In 2006 what cushion do we have? Does anyone thing the Natural Gas supply can be grown for the next 35 years? What of the oil supply? Does anyone think that Saudi Arabia for instance can double production to 20 million barrels of oil per day?
In 1970, the USA was just passing peak production. Does anyone think that the USA can grow their oil production past the 1970 levels? (Well, a few pollies do - when they are asking for votes).
We do have coal. We can replace our oil and natural gas production with coal and we can use it and heavy oils and bitumin to produce liguid and gaseous fuels and we can do it for the next 35 years. However, we can only do this if we are willing to create a river of liquid CO2 measured in the millions of barrels per day (Via Fischer-Trophe) and we can only do it if we install massive infrastructure that will cost trillions and take decades to build... and we don't have decades.
Sitting in the background is the nuclear industry... with solutions... the public is still being lied to. The public is still being told
Damn. Sorry... Hydrogen:Carbon ratio of liquid fuels is about 2:1. This is important. This is why we have a huge shortage of hydrogen for tar sands operations. Fischer-trophe grabs the hydrogen from water and marries carbon to the oxygen in place of the hydrogen. The result is CO2 going up the smoke stack where the O2 part of the CO2 comes from two of the H2O's.
The thing is if we want to use Fischer-Trophe to produce the hydrogen we need then when we get to 5 million barrels of liquid synthetic crude per day, we will also produce as a by product a stream of liquid CO2 measured in the millions of barrels per day as well. This CO2 has value and can be used for miscable floods of old oil fields. It can be transported via old gas pipelines because it is liquid at room temperature at a pressue of about 800 PSI.
I think Clinton and his administration has to shoulder a great deal of the blame. IMHO they sold the future of the country for short term political gain. That's a deal with the devil. The kids carrying the guns in the middle east are the price the devil asked.
Matt Simmons says that oil will hit $350 per barrel when the declines come. I don't know if I will go this far out on the limb. The demand for energy is very inelastic however, so Simmons may well be correct.
I do agree with you that we will not run out of fossil fuels overnight. We have HUGE coal reserves. If we want, we can put in place coal-> liquids via fischer-tropch. However this requires infrastructure and we have not started building it. Meanwhile OPEC and especially Saudi Arabia have been promising production increases. The Saudis still say - hey - no issue - we can boost production over 10 million barrels per day... we can hit 13 and even 20.
The problem is do we beleive them? These promises have been made for two years now. Saudi has not increased production. Simmons says they won't be able to. The water cut in Ghawar is over 60% and they are injecting over 10 million barrels of sea water to keep the reservoir pressures up. The original estimates of oil in place have already been produced. Could the geologists of the 60's and 70's be that worng? I don't think so. It is normal to under-estimate what a feild can do. Thus I think the Saudis are producing from the comfort zone. A map of Ghawar showing injection wells and producing wells tells volumes. The Saudis consider technical data to be a state secret.
So... you are correct, we will not run out of oil overnight. However in a year we can see a 5% reduction in available fuel. The last industry to see this was the Fertilizer industry when North American Gas production peaked in 2001. The fertilizer industry took it on the chin. Over 30% of the plants have been permenantly shut down.
So the question to ask is if supplies of Gasoline and Deisel for example decline by say 5% over the next year - who is going on a diet? Many people will remark that the cost of fuel is not so great... they can give up a meal at a restaurant once a month and that will cover the increased costs. Unfortunately - they are correct.
But what of industry? Can a fertilizer plant give up a meal? Or do they shut down? What of a cement plant or a glass factory?
Industry does not have the slop built in. When they become uncompetative they go out of business. This is called demand distruction. When this happens the economy shrinks and the employees let go have to find other alternatives. The short of it is that the economy is fueled by energy and when energy costs go up, the economy goes into a recession which eventually results in large numbers of people without jobs.
When this happens, the glib remarks that people can just skip a meal at a restaurant to cover the increased costs of energy become a joke... the same joke attributed to Marie Antoinette: "Let them eat cake".
If you really think that solar and wind can supply the energy we need - then consider this. A wind mill produces about 1 megawatt. It does not do this all the time... this is its maximum rating. In operation the duty cycle is closer to 20-35%.
To produce 75 gigawatts from windmills at 100% duty cycle, we would need 75,000 windmills. At 33% duty cycle we would need 225,000 wind mills. If we take the square root of 225,000 we get an array that is about 475 by 475. If we space the windmills 1/2 mile apart that is an area of 250 x 250 miles. Southern Alberta is a large place. We would need to cover all of Southern Alberta to host this many wind mills. We do not have suitable wind conditions over areas this large. Large parts of the Pairies for instance have calm days over 75% of the time. This would drop the duty cycle to under 10% and that would increase the arial extent and number of windmills by a factor of 3x.
I do not at all agree that
Where to build it? Why here in Alberta!
World oil production is currently about 85 million barrels of oil per day. OPEC production declined about 2% last month - we don't really know why. The top four (4) feilds produce about 15% of world production and all seem to now be in decline with Kuwait announcing Bergan slipped into decline in Nov 2005 and a Saudi Aramco spoksman admiting Ghawar slipped into decline in April 2006. A 5% decline rate will result in a world wide loss of about 1/2 million barrels of oil production per year from just these top four (4) feilds. Between now and 2015 this will accumulate to a loss of about 3.5 million barrels of production from these four (4) feilds alone.
The thing is the rest of the world is in decline as well and country by country production has been slipping in spite of the best efforts of the industry. Just last year Britian became an oil importer and the year before Indonesia became an importer. Since Indoneasia use to supply Australia this means three (3) more countries line up at the straits of Hormez for oil imports from the Middle East.
If we project a 5% decline on the 85 million barrel world production we end up short about 30 million barrels of production... ie - production falls from 85 million to about 55 million barrles per day to be made up from something and somewhere and this by 2015.
The Alberta Tar Sands is receiving investments of over $10 billion per year. All of these projects require massive amounts of energy which in the past was supplied by Natural Gas. In fact Canada produces about 6.3 TCF of gas per year of which over 1/2 is exported to the USA.
Were we to try to use this gas for energy and chemical feedstocks (hydrogen) which is needed to change the hydrogen:carbon ratio of bitumin (about 10 hydrogen to 7 carbon) into the hydrogen:carbon ratio of syncrude (about 1:1 actually - part of the alkane series: C(n)H(2n+2)), then we would need more than 1/2 of Canada's production by 2015 and in fact the proposed McKensie Valley pipeline can just stop at Ft. McMurray. In this senerio there IS NO EXPORT GAS FOR THE USA. The USA is already short of gas supplies and this is illustrated by spot prices in the $17 bux range a couple years back. The present price drop will be very temporary.
My point is that with these massive investments, Alberta Tar Sands output is expected to climb to only about 3.3 million barrels per day. This will not offset the decline from even the top four (4) oil feilds much less the expected declines from all other producing countries.
We need to install about 75 GIGAWATTS of nuclear energy for Tar Sands operations... this to bring production up to about 5 million barrels of syncrude per day.
NIMBY in part is ok for now for most of the USA. However NIMBY makes no sense here in Alberta.
Without a source of energy to obtain hydrogen from water, we need to chemically obtain it via reactions such as fischer-tropsh. In order to use F-T, anywhere from 1/3 to 1/2 of the carbon found in the bitumin is either relegated to coke piles or sent up the smoke stacks in the form of CO2.
So what I'm advocating and saying is: really the only thing that makes sense is to build big nukes - about 75 of them, and I'd like to see the IFR in that fleet - and I'm advocating building them IN MY BACK YARD.
I would much rather see nukes in my back yard than kids off fighting futile middle eastern wars.
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The point of IFR technology is that it won't come in overnight. There is a LOT of work to be done. Eventually it will be done - but we are all likely to suffer big time in the mean time.
The gas line ups and fuel shortages of the 1970's are nothing compared to where we are going. Yet if we look at the energy we have available via IFR and other advanced reactor designs...
60,000 years supply of uranium on hand for the existing fleet of about 113 reactors in the gigawatt range.... most of this uranium is ca
Clinton seems to have had sex with Argonne Labs Integral Fast Reactor... and next we'll be hearing he didn't have sex with the energy fund. He just created the problem.
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It was the Clinton Administration that shut down the Argonne Lab's IFR development program in 1994. This reactor design will do more to solve the coming world energy crisis than anything else...and Clinton did have sex with it!
Read the congressional report: Nov. 6, 1997 (Senate) Page S11890-S11891 here: http://www.anl.gov/Media_Center/Argonne_News/news9 7/crtill.html
Quote:
Unfortunately, this program was canceled just 2 short years before the proof of concept. I assure my colleagues someday our Nation will regret and reverse this shortsighted decision.
If anyone wants to read the PBS interview with Dr. Charles Till - look here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reac tion/interviews/till.html
Quote from the PBS interview:
The Clinton administration, I think, firmed up quite an anti-nuclear power position....
Q: What will be our energy source, then?
A:I think that many engineers would agree that there is limited, additional gain to be had from conservation. After all, what does one mean by "conservation?" One simply means using less and using less more efficiently. And there have been considerable gains wrung out of the energy supply and energy usage over the past couple of decades. We can probably go somewhat further. But you're talking, you know, 10% or 20%. Whereas over the next 50 years, it can be confidently predicted that with the energy growth in this country alone, and much more so around the world, it would be 100%, 200%, or some very large number.
And so what energy source steps in? There is only one. It's fossil fuel. It's coal. It's oil. It's natural gas. Some limited additional use of the more exotic forms of things, like solar and wind. But they are, after all, very limited in what they can do. So it will be fossil.
Now the question, of course, immediately becomes, well, how long can that last? And everyone has a different opinion on that. One thing that is certain, and that is that the increase in the use of fossil fuels will sharply increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Another thing is certain. You will put a lot more pollutants into the atmosphere as well, in addition to carbon dioxide, which one could argue the greenhouse effect exists or doesn't exist.
So it is very clear that the consequences of short sighted anti-nuclear policies of the Clinton Adminitration were well understood in the early 90's. The lack of solutions to the problems we face now are a direct result of Clinton's administration.
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Note the Integral Fast Reactor burns nuclear wastes and will extend the existing uranium fuel stockpile (called Depleated Uranium, spent fuel, and nuclear waste) to over 60,000 years for the existing fleet of over 100 reactors in the Gigawatt range.... and this without mining any more uranium.
The IFR burns all actinides and hense there are no long term wastes... only light isotopes with 1/2 lives of a few decades at most, and which are used industrially for things like pipe line xrays.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor
When we are in the throws of the worst energy crisis mankind has ever seen, then I want everyone to look and Clinton's contribution to the problem. I think the quote from the congressional report (above) sums it up nicely.
The short of it is that its prefectly clear we need alternatives to fossil fuels and the issue is that we needed to start developing these alternatives 15 and 20 years ago. It