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Geophysicist Klaus Lackner on Fueling the Future
Posted by Glenn on September 13, 2006 - 12:14pm in The Oil Drum: Local
Topic: Supply/Production
Tags: carbon, columbia university, energy, klaus lackner, oil, peak oil [list all tags]
This lecture was geared for the well educated lay person so he offered generalities on major subjects with only vague estimates of the numbers involved. Below is a brief outline of his lecture, which is not to say that he doesn't have hard numbers to back all this up, he just did not hand them out for us to write down. Still it would be interesting to follow up with his sources at some point.
However, he said that solar was the only renewable potential source of energy capable of scaling up to meet energy demands and that the technology was getting much better, similar in efficiency gains as the early computer technology. So for renewable, he would bet the farm on solar being the best long term investment.
But he said that we should not dismiss the potential of coal and uranium to meet our energy needs either, at least for the next 200-300 years. After that, he could not begin to imagine what technologies might be available. The trick is dealing with coal's carbon output and uranium's potential for proliferation into the wrong hands.
He talked about the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the case for human activity causing global warming, which he thinks is a major threat over the next 50-100 years, especially if we go from current 380ppm to 500-800ppm. He strongly believes that if we were to tax carbon output at it's source or cap output through a trading system we could create a whole new economic incentive for reducing carbon output. This is where he put forth some interesting ideas that I guess he has worked on himself about sequestering carbon from fixed sources (like power plants) and storing it under ground or below the ocean floor. He also thinks that pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere directly might work to offset non-fixed sources (like automobiles run on gasoline). That sounds a little like fantasy right now, but given that there is currently zero incentive to take carbon out of the air, it's not hard to imagine that with some strong incentives, this might not be possible.
Turning to uranium, he stated that there is a limited supply of uranium assuming you use it once and dispose of the spent fuel. But if you use breeder reactors and other ways of reusing fuel to create more and reuse it again and again, you can magnify the limited supply to be 10-100x as large as currently estimated. The problem is where to store the waste and the risk of plutonium proliferating to the wrong folks. He thinks again we should look far beneath the Earth (and far away from water sources) to store the nuclear waste, but also consider places like Yucca mountain to be a good temporary option until we find a good final resting place. Anti-proliferation efforts should be increased dramatically to be as strict and enforcable as possible.
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Editor's Comments: This was certainly an interesting lecture. He made the case better for solar and carbon taxes and against the other renewables as well as I have heard before, if not better. That gave me a fair bit of hope. I was however underwhelmed with the feasibility of long term nuclear storage and carbon sequestration - I would love to see more specifics on these issues. But all in all a great speaker on energy issues. He brought a welcome sense of scale and proportion back to the debate in my mind over the way forward.
is the most authoritative document on carbon sequestration.
In short:
- yes it's economic, if you put a reasonable price on carbon emissions either via a tax, or a 'cap and trade' system
It would probably add c. 2 cents per KWH to your electricity bill (that's me summarising, a closer read of the report might give you a better view)
- the big problem is we don't know where to put the CO2 once we capture it:
- geologic storage may only defer the problem (geological formations leak) and could pose a significant safety risk (I can hear NIMBY coming a mile off). But the fact that we have all these empty oil and gas fields gives confidence that the problems are solvable.
- oceanic storage is entirely speculative, we would need to do a lot more work on the consequences for marine ecology
The Economist this week has a fantastic special section on global warming.
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7884738
is the editorial leader, there is a 12 page special section in the magazine.
...it is actually 24 pages. Huge by Economist standards.
That doesn't take away from the significance of the magazine committing resources to the topic and their reasonable conclusions.
So, is this good MSM or bad MSM? Is this a superficial 24 page treatment of climate change? If the MSM avoid contentious issues just to sell advertising space, then what happened here? Won't this rare bit of truth set the sheeple shaking on their hooves?
Please help me out, I find these sweeping generalizations and plot theories so difficult to follow.
Conspiracy?
Thought control?
Paid-for by whom?
Everything is "unclear" in the land of the fog heads.
But elevating the MSM to public enemeny number one often just means only listening to those you already agree with.
It's nuance, man. Haven't we had this same discussion before - or did I just get a glimpse of ther matrix?
they perform a service by bringing the sponsor's messages to the public. ;-)
The Agency "embraced more than 800 news and public information organizations and individuals." --CIA's 3-Decade Effort to Mold the World's Views, New York Times, 12/25/77
"The final Church report was a disappointment, having been audited by the CIA. A subsequent House investigation was suppressed, though a leak it was published in the Village Voice. The House report indicated that Reuters news service was frequently used for CIA disinformation, and that media manipulation may have been the "largest single category of covert action projects taken by the CIA."" Neoconservatism: a CIA Front?
The CIA and its tentacles into the MSM.
Unbelievable in its range and depth. We are truly sheeple in this regard.
I unplugged my dish satellite the very day my wife left the farm. It only plays DVD movies now.
The benchmark value I often see quoted is $100 per ton of carbon, equivalent to about $30 per ton of CO2 (because CO2 is about a third carbon). Now, actually I think this is an overestimate of the true costs to the world in terms of greenhouse warning. I found a study a while back that compared over 100 separate analyses of the estimated marginal cost of carbon over the course of this century, and the median value was only $14 per ton of carbon:
http://www.uni-hamburg.de/Wiss/FB/15/Sustainability/enpolmargcost.pdf
But even if we use the higher value of $100/tC, that corresponds to only about 20 cents per gallon of gasoline. Does anyone really think that a 20 cents per gallon tax is going to dramatically change people's behavior? We see fluctuations of greater than that amount all the time. Gasoline has fallen by over 50 cents a gallon in the past few weeks. A 20 cent per gallon tax is going to have very little impact on people's energy usage.
And yet, this is the amazing $100 per ton carbon tax which people think is going to save the world, drive sequestration, promote conservation, encourage alternatives, and have all of these wonderful effects. I don't think so.
Next time someone tells you that a carbon tax or carbon trading is going to fix things, just keep in mind this 20 cents per gallon figure. And maybe also take the economic estimates I linked to above into consideration, which implies a 3 cent per gallon gasoline tax as the economically optimal level. That's not going to change a thing.
Some recent estimates of the cost of GW would be higher, I suspect, as estimates of the speed and impact of GW rise.
Because the range of temperatures, and consequences, is a probability distribution, it's not possible to say 'global warming is going to cost us $100bn'. the right hand half of the curve includes a number of possibilities which are of such great concern as to justify radical action.
Because it might cost us civilisation. We don't know what the planet would be like if sea levels were 6 metres higher (what's the cost of relocating the US Eastern Seaboard, and London?). One major Katrina-style disaster in say, NYC or London, could cost $100bn+.
And we don't know what the world would be like if, say, the Amazon dies. or the sub permafrost methane is released rapidly (it happened once before, about 50 million years ago, and 90% of the species on the planet died).
Or what the costs of 2 billion people migrating out of uninhabitable equatorial areas are.
In terms of the 'necessary' level of carbon taxation, the picture is unclear. Since we don't tax carbon emissions, no effort is made to reduce them. Yet the evidence from previous effluent taxes, eg on water, is that economic agents can reduce output by 90%+ in some cases.
Also there may be cheap ways of increasing the uptake and sequestration of CO2.
So high price elasticity activities will follow first. Consuming gasoline is a low price elasticity of demand activity: it may be the case that much higher price changes are needed there to change behaviour (but improving standards for fuel economy may help).
It might be better to use a 'cap and trade' system, which has the advantage of producing a quantitative limit on CO2 emission. Such a system has the advantage of not putting a tax in the hands of government, that might be tempted to use it for economically inefficient purposes.
Either way, the increasing evidence of rapid global warming, species extinction, and the 'right hand' of the distribution of possible outcomes, means we are going to have to do something, do something dramatic, and sooner rather than later.
Of course, this all could change due to thin films, nanotechnology, etc., but that is more or less the same as saying that cellulosic ethanol will save the day for oil depletion - the potential is there, but the devil is in the details (i.e., scaling up to the necessary levels).
The price has stayed high, even going up some, but costs have been falling consistently.
How can that be? Silicon production hasn't expanded as fast as demand, so Si prices have jumped to ration supply. Similarly, cell production hasn't expanded as fast as demand, so cell prices have jumped to ration supply. So, while costs throughout the supply chain continue to fall exponentially, prices are rising and profit margins are skyrocketing.
Supply is doubling every two years, while demand is growing even faster. That's why it looks like Moore's law.
Wind potential in the US has been estimated as higher than current total production, but the US may be much better off than most of the rest of the world.
For the uninitiated, that's about 2150 quads of pure electricity. Current human energy consumption (raw, not final) is ~400 quads/year from all sources.
World electricity generation averages about 1.6 terawatts and the Stanford estimate is an average, not a peak, so the worldwide wind potential is 45 times the average electricity usage! Total energy usage is only about 2.5 times the electrical usage (IOW, electricity is 40% of the total), so total wind energy is 18 times total human energy use. Doesn't sound like a practical limit to me.
The difference between my ratio, and E-P's ratio of about 5 to 1 is that in effect I used final energy, rather than raw, which seems more useful for comparison purposes.
Interesting that the Stanford study finds quite a lot of very high wind potential in the American South-East, an area that is often described as not having much wind potential. The difference seems to be that this includes off-shore wind.
On the other hand, another solar technology that is real, here now, and intrinsically much cheaper is being ignored by everybody. The NASA space power free piston stirling engines can put out an honest 35% efficiency right now, and do so for decades, as is required by the NASA space missions. And they don't use any exotic materials or processes.
So why no talk about that????
Talk is all there is about stirling. Show me some shipping engines that are mass produced at a good price point.
No, I don't think so. Reasons. 1) look at the $ invested in the two. Maybe (guessing) at absolute minimum 100/1. 2) Look at the basic physics of the two- lots of quantum miracles trembling on the wings of angels vs mere 19th century newtonian iron. 3) boots on the ground (or in space) NASA and the Army are going for stirlings in a big way. They know all about quantum dots and such stuff, And in the recent Army portable power JP-8 shootout, stirlings won going away,right here and right now, and fuelcells, thermophotovoltaics and the rest were but nowhere-ten years from now.
I spend my time thinking about power for the people in a fossil-free world, the while trying to be true to my sainted professors, and I keep coming up with little steam turbines, IC engines running on moonshine, and stirlings running on anything including sun.
PV does have one huge and maybe overwhelming advantage- lots and lots of thoughtless VC money in it. Where do they find all those thoughtless VC's???
Not at all. You have talk from KAmen - no shipping engine. You have talk from
http://web.archive.org/web/20011019081714/omachron.com/papers.html
No shipping engine. You have a price reduction of $20,000 on the whipsergen.
Yet, where are the shipping stirling gens at reasonable pricing? (because $5000 for an oil burning stirling isn't a bargin.)
Perhaps the military sourcing (using tax dollars) will lead to cheaper civilian stirlings.
I'll bet Kamen is feeling like a fool for not going with a free piston instead of that very ordinary crank he cooked up, containing all the problems everybody knew about for maybe 50 years.
It's easy to find examples of stupid stirlings, there are lots of them. But look at NASA space power stirlings. They are not stupid.
Err, why do I need a 'concentrator' when Unisolar has been selling their triple-junction cells for years w/o a concetrator? Well? (it looks to me like you are trying to toss out a herring to distract the readers from understaing how few stirlings are shipping)
I've asked you to respond in the past when you've been pimp'n stirlings. And, well, you havn't. Rather than addressing the lack of low-cost stirlings (like the omnachron claims) or even how a known working design (the ST-5) isn't able to be bought anymore....your reply is 'show me where a triple junction with concentrator is'?
Come on. Where are the low-cost stirling engines? Or, how about cost competitive enngines?
Well?
Come on. Show the readers where the solar powewred stirlings are able to be bought. becuae I can put down $$ and get a triple jkunction from unisolar.
Stirling Disadvantages- they need high temperature metals, high pressure gas, preferably helium or hydrogen; crank stirlings have severe problems with wear, oil contamination, power variation and working gas leaks. Free piston stirlings have been made only in relatively small sizes for special purposes.
Advantages- very quiet, vibration-free, efficient, able to use any heat source, have very long life in the free piston configuration.
Competition- If a user is satisfied with a Honda genset, or a Toyota sedan, or a Cummins diesel truck, and is willing to accept a fuel price rise, then stirlings offer no advantage. They cannot compete with IC engines in first cost, power density, or even efficiency, relative to a good diesel.
But if there is a need to use biomass, or isotope heat, or sunlight, then stirlings might be advantageous. NASA, for example, presently rates the free piston-linear alternator stirling as the leading candidate for space power using plutonium isotope heat source.
Until recently, the cost of oil has been so low that stirlings had little appeal relative to much cheaper IC engines, and there has been low demand for solar or biomass energy generation. And little money had been devoted to their development. By far the greatest amount, some 500 million dollars, was expended during the automotive stirling effort up to about 1990. Despite intense efforts by Ford, GM and United Stirling, crank stirlings could not be made to compete- they had short life, high cost, mediocre efficiency and intractable problems with power control, wear and leaks.
The present is different for two major reasons- the cost of oil has risen, giving solar and biomass some appeal, and most important, the NASA success with space stirling coolers and engines (both free piston) has justified new hope in their application to renewable energy sources, especially solar.
But these are recent events. There has been too little time for industry to respond by producing affordable engines. Hence, we cannot buy them for the most basic of reasons- to this date they have not been considered a profitable investment by manufacturers.
AS
ALanofBigEasy is to trains
Keep up the good work Wimbi !!
You're my inspiration.
I'm in agreement with you that population explosion and social /cultural stagnation are the Pink Elephants in the middle of our living room.
The solar business is a good way of making finite bounds understandable.
At high noon the best one can hope for is 1kWatt of incident energy per sqaure meter (that's a mere ten 100 watt light bulbs for each 3 foot by 3 foot parcel of land if you need to think of it that way.)
However, since conversion efficiencies are so poor, even at a wondeful 25% efficency we are quickly down to 250 watts per square meter (two 100 watt bulbs and a 50 watter) being squeezed out of that 1m^2 parcel of land (or rooftop). And that is only at high noon on a cloudless, pollution free day.
On the other hand, it's far far better to design new, emission-free solutions rather than sitting around and becrying the overbreeding problem day and night. The crying game gets us nowhere.
Even 5% efficiency would take a huge bite out of net electric consumption if it was cheap enough per watt. Our problem isn't efficiency, that's for sure; it's cost and lifetime.
What you don't seem to realize is that expense is a proxy for resource inputs. If solar costs too much without its externalities of production accounted for, it's going to be even more expensive if they are. (Of course, coal will rise considerably more.)
EROEI considerations currently favor wind over solar; energy return on a land-based wind farm may be as little as 0.26 years.
Population growth globally is stabilizing. Some people argue that it will stabilize at a level (about 9B) that is higher than the Earth's carrying capacity, but it's not heading out for perpetual growth.
Same thing for resource consumption. For instance, per Alan the US now puts out only 2.4% more CO2 from liquid fuels than it did 30 years ago, despite roughly a doubling in GDP (and France, for instance, puts out 30% less, despite substantial GDP growth). Similarly, car sales are only a bit higher than they were 30 years ago, despite much higher population (due to immigration, not the birth rate). In general US resource consumption is stabilizing.
Now, you can argue that the whole world can't imitate the US in getting to the same levels of resource consumption (and clearly in the simplest terms that's correct), but it's not the same problem as perpetual growth.
It's funny - both the cornucopians and the anti-growth people are arguing about a problem (perpetual growth) that doesn't really exist in the terms in which it's often put.
The cost is astronomical, in comparison to the grid. Our system produces less than a kilowatt hour per day, (which the grid sells for 15 cents), at a cost of over two grand.
plus, the support is very poor; unless you pay a heap to a contractor, you basically have to research and design it and maintain it yourself. And, worst of all, all the "experts" disagree about battery characteristics (equalization, etc.), about how to lay out a PV system, etc. etc. etc. It's really quite vexing.
It suits my personality (I studied electronics for a semester and a half, and I'm very good at doing the math in my head). But for someone of very limited technical knowledge and skills, it might be very challenging.
But having designed a comfortable lifestyle for my wife and myself that uses less than a KWH/day, I can confidently state that the VAST majority of residential electrical energy used is wasted. Our society can, without significent sacrifice, cut it's electricity usage in half. But there is no desire to do so until costs get much higher than they are at present.
For a quarter century I have had conversations with environmentalist friends (who rail about mountaintop removal for coal, for instance), about simply turning off lights they aren't using. It's rare that behavior changes as a result.
Beliefs about the outer world rarely seem strong enough to force change; often times huge energy bills don't provoke change either; they just whine about how much it costs. And blame the providers of energy for gouging.
Compared to maybe $1000 system cost per delivered kilowatt for a big fossil fueled power plant, or $300 for a diesel.
But all this is nuts. How much juice do we throw away on big signs urging me to buy soda pop, which I detest? Or you-name-it pet wasteful caper offering us a destroyed planet in return for some sort of rotgut or rotsoul? As I said, time for a change of species.
Ah, well, maybe my home power stirling will work tomorrow. I'll let y'all know.
It sounds like he has a very small off-grid, battery system.
You'd expect it to be much more expensive: it's standalone, and it's very small. Beyond that, for the central plant you have to add a lot of other costs: system overhead, capacity factor (a natural gas plant may be cheap, but it doesn't run that much), transmission, fuel, etc, etc.
Solar PV costs about $.25 all told, and utility costs average $.10 in the US. About half the PV cost is for the support structure, installation, etc, which ideally would be eliminated by ma