The Air Car

Talk about environmentally friendly! It only goes 200 kilometers on a tank (about 125 miles), but it is filled up with air. The first video is a BBC news report.



And here is an Australian report:

New "Elephant" Oil Field Discovered in Brazil

From Business Week:

Petrobras announced Nov. 8 it has found between 5 billion and 8 billion barrels of light oil and gas at the Tupi field, 155 miles offshore southern Brazil in an area it shares with Britain's BG Group and Portugal's Galp Energy. Tupi is the world's biggest oil find since a 12 billion-barrel Kazakh field was discovered in 2000, and the largest ever in deep waters. Perhaps more important, Petrobras believes Tupi may be Brazil's first of several new "elephants," an industry term for outsize fields of more than 1 billion barrels.

Initially, Tupi will produce about 100,000 barrels a day but may ramp up to as much as 1 million before 2020—more than the biggest U.S. field in Alaska's Prudhoe Bay, says Hugo Repsold, Petrobras' exploration and production strategy manager. "It's monstrous," says Matthew Shaw, a Latin America energy analyst at consultant Wood Mackenzie in London.

The oil industry is known for its "boom and bust" cycles. There is little doubt that the high oil prices are fueling the current boom. Although the article touts that this kills the idea of "peak oil," in reality it doesn't completely disprove the theory. The real idea of peak oil -- as I understand it -- is that oil will become increasingly expensive to extract.

Furthermore, the increasing use of hydrocarbons produce other environmental challenges due to the pollutants its use creates. These costs are externalities and cannot easily be quantified.

The high oil prices will also spur investment and study into alternative sources of energy. This will also reduce demand for oil as these alternative energy sources come into use. So far, the biggest impediment to alternative energy uses has been the NIMBY problem and (up to now) relatively large start-up expense. The latter issue is quickly resolving itself; what remains is to convince the public that some scenic views may have to be sacrificed, and (in the case of nuclear energy, if needed) that disposal of nuclear waste will have to be effected.

At some point, we will need to consider public financing of infrastructure to support the alternative energy sectors. I would find an analogy in the creation of railroads and highways. The real problem is how to avoid the problems of the past, namely: private profits underwritten from the socialization of costs.

Hydrogen Technology Now More Feasible

From Yahoo News: New technique creates cheap, abundant hydrogen: report:

CHICAGO (AFP) - US researchers have developed a method of producing hydrogen gas from biodegradable organic material, potentially providing an abundant source of this clean-burning fuel, according to a study released Monday.

The technology offers a way to cheaply and efficiently generate hydrogen gas from readily available and renewable biomass such as cellulose or glucose, and could be used for powering vehicles, making fertilizer and treating drinking water.

Numerous public transportation systems are moving toward hydrogen-powered engines as an alternative to gasoline, but most hydrogen today is generated from nonrenewable fossil fuels such as natural gas.

The method used by engineers at Pennsylvania State University however combines electron-generating bacteria and a small electrical charge in a microbial fuel cell to produce hydrogen gas.

...

In the past, the process, which is known as electrohydrogenesis, has had poor efficiency rates and low hydrogen yields.

But the researchers at Pennsylvania State University were able to get around these problems by chemically modifying elements of the reactor.

In laboratory experiments, their reactor generated hydrogen gas at nearly 99 percent of the theoretical maximum yield using aetic acid, a common dead-end product of glucose fermentation.

"This process produces 288 percent more energy in hydrogen than the electrical energy that is added in the process," said Bruce Logan, a professor of environmental engineering at Penn State.

...

One of the immediate applications for this technology is to supply the hydrogen that is used in fuel cell cars to generate the electricity that drives the motor, but it could also can be used to convert wood chips into hydrogen to be used as fertilizer.

The study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Next Gold

With the advent of global warming, potable water will become an increasingly scarce commodity. As the arctic and antarctic ice caps begin to melt in summer, sea levels will begin to rise. Couple this with poor urban planning (much like what is happening in Atlanta right now) and you have the makings of a potential crisis for millions of people.

There is one thing America is known for: ingenuity. We need to apply our ability to come up with innovative solutions to known water problems. An idea that I think should be given consideration is building desalinization plants along the coasts and pumping converted sea water into potable -- or at least non-potable, but usable -- water.

Certainly the main obstacle to such a project is its capital-intensiveness. And critics could argue against it either because the cost is perceived to be prohibitive and unnecessary based on the premise that global warming doesn't exist (the conservative argument) or because it could become just another case of private profits and socialized losses.

Something that many people don't know is that in the Native American tradition, things that are produced by the earth or nature belong to everyone and should not inure to the benefit of private companies or individuals. The question that begs to be asked in this line of thought is this: Who made the water? Who made the air we breathe? Who made the soil? (Did man make the water, air or soil -- and by extension, the minerals produced by natural processes?) It goes to the heart of property rights that have formed the basis of our legal system.

Ultimately, we must recognize that we owe it to our country -- and our world -- to make the best use of our natural resources. The implementation of a water supply from converted sea water will take many years to implement. The point in its favor, however, is that the need is foreseeable years -- even decades -- in advance.

Obviously, there are other problems related to increasing use and need for other commodities. Energy demand is growing every day, not only due to developing economies in Asia (which, long term, may end up becoming the center of the next empire), but also due merely because of an increasing global population and the energy needs to grow crops to feed them. Overfishing is causing a natural food supply to become more scarce and innovative techniques are needed there as well. That will require a non-polluting and renewable energy source.

As a result of these challenges, we need to create a national energy policy based on sustainable technologies. This problem, too, is foreseeable. There are many technologies based on sustainable energy: wind, solar, hydroelectric, tidal and geothermal. The effectiveness of each of the natural energy supplies vary depending on location. What is needed is a national program to maximize the use of these various natural energy supplies.

I haven't been writing much lately. I told you I've been thinking a lot. See what happens when I do that?

135 MPG Starting At Only $92,000!

Tesla Motors has a new electric car that goes over 200 miles per charge, according to its website. But at $92,000, you would have to keep the car for quite a while to make up the difference in a Honda Civic or Toyota Corolla.

But if you want a fast car (zero to sixty in "about" 4 seconds), and you want to make some sort of environmental statement (besides the damage done by all the extra batteries), and you have an extra $100,000 to burn, then this car might be for you.

Is Saudi Arabia Running Out of Oil?

In a report over at The Oil Drum, blogger Stuart Staniford argues that the Ghawar oil fields are starting to get depleted and that this accounts for the recent rise in oil prices. The post comes with a lot of maps, charts and technical analysis. I am reproducing some of them here with some of his analysis.


Visualization of oil saturation in Ghawar, with focus region on 'Ain Dar and Shedgum regions at northern end. This is the "Linux Supercluster" picture (finder's credit Bob Shaw), showing a simulation visualization of the state of Ghawar at some year, probably but not certainly 2004. I have color reversed the original picture so that in this version, the red areas are interpreted to represent dry oil in the reservoir. The dark blue areas are water below the oil. The pale blue areas are interpreted to be swept, with most oil that can be removed already gone. Source: Figure 3 of Linux Clusters Driving Step Changes in Interpretation Simulation (pdf).

Mr. Staniford then asks:

Here the question is: is this an accurate picture of the state of recent depletion of Ghawar? (Ghawar is the world's largest oil field, and source of over half of the oil produced by Saudi Arabia).

And if so, then the second question arises: does that depletion have anything to do with this picture?

Saudi Arabian oil production, Jan 2002-Jan 2007, average of four different sources. Annotations show important events causally influencing production, including all documented megaprojects for new supply in the the time period. Graph is not zero-scaled to better show changes. Click to enlarge. Source: US EIA International Petroleum Monthly Table 1.1, IEA Oil Market Report Table 3, Joint Oil Data Initiative, OPEC Monthly Oil Market Report, Table 17 (or similar) on OPEC Supply.

In particular, Saudi oil production has been falling with increasing speeed since summer 2005, and overall, since mid 2004, about 2 million barrels of oil per day in production has gone missing (about 1mbpd in reduction in total production, and about another 1mbpd in that two major new projects, Qatif and Haradh III, failed to increase overall production). That's 2.5% of world production and, if that production hadn't gone missing, gasoline in the US likely would still be somewhere in the vicinity of $2/gallon instead of well over $3.

I will analyze six or seven separate lines of technical evidence, and argue they all point to a consistent picture, which says that the answer to both questions is "Yes". Yes, the northern half of Ghawar is quite depleted. And yes, this probably explains at least part of recent production declines. Furthermore, it is likely that more declines in Saudi production are on the way.

I don't know if this is disinformation just meant to create panic (and therefore drive up the price of oil), or if the shortage due to this one region is just temporary. I can just tell you that the general feeling is that cheap oil is starting to run out. In any case, I think that the link at the top is worth a look.

Before I go on, I think I should give a disclaimer (which I am borrowing, for the most part, from Mike Shedlock's site):

The content on this site is provided as general information only and should not be taken as investment advice. All site content, including advertisements, shall not be construed as a recommendation to buy or sell any security or financial instrument, or to participate in any particular trading or investment strategy (or an endorsement or recommendation of any product on any ad). The ideas expressed on this site are solely the opinions of the author(s) who may or may not have a position in any company or advertiser referenced above. Any action that you take as a result of information, analysis, or advertisement on this site is ultimately your responsibility. Consult your investment adviser before making any investment decisions.

If Saudi Arabia is truly starting to run out of oil, then we here in America need to get cracking developing technology to make our use of oil more efficient and develop alternative forms of energy. Most of our electricity comes from burning coal; and while we have a 250-year supply of it, it burns very dirty. Different areas of the country are more suitable to other, cleaner, forms of energy production: solar, wind and hydro power. Each of these are renewable and relatively clean forms of energy production. While current technology does not allow for these forms of energy production to be used widely, it would be wise for Americans to put our smartest minds to work creating more energy-efficient automobiles and buildings. Rather than looking toward converting food crops into more oil for our cars, we need to focus on making our cities more fuel efficient and develop more mass transit lines so that we can cut unnecessary oil usage.

It is my feeling that we, here in America, need to use our strength of innovation to solve our energy problems rather than looking for ways to produce more energy. Our real problem is that we are wasting too much energy that we have access to now. Reducing the demand on oil by conserving and increasing energy efficiency would be the smartest and most effective method of driving down our energy costs.

Man, talk about a fuel-efficient car!

This new Toyota Prius is a hydrogen-powered car that gets its hydrogen by using wind power to convert some other fuel source into hydrogen. It is not on the market yet, so don't go out and ask your Toyota dealer for it. But this is the sort of thing that can easily be implemented in Oklahoma, particularly western Oklahoma (where wind turbines actually make money).