Kevin Poulsen at Threat Level
has interviewed Paul Kurtz, at the time of the 2003 blackout the White House advisor on critical infrastructure security, who says the Chinese were not responsible for the 2003 blackout. Former White House Advisor: Hackers Didn’t Cause 2003 Blackout
Archive for the 'Energy' Category
Cryptogon points out this piece in the Times which suggests that the Saudis are producing at exceptionally high capacity, trying to limit price increases. From Plan Would Lift Saudi Oil Output, from the June 14th times:
Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil exporter, is planning to increase its output next month by about a half-million barrels a day, according to analysts and oil traders who have been briefed by Saudi officials.
The increase could bring Saudi output to a production level of 10 million barrels a day, which, if sustained, would be the kingdom’s highest ever. The move was seen as a sign that the Saudis are becoming increasingly nervous about both the political and economic effect of high oil prices. In recent weeks, soaring fuel costs have incited demonstrations and protests from Italy to Indonesia.
Saudi Arabia is currently pumping 9.45 million barrels a day, which is an increase of about 300,000 barrels from last month.
While they are reaping record profits, the Saudis are concerned that today’s record prices might eventually damp economic growth and lead to lower oil demand, as is already happening in the United States and other developed countries. The current prices are also making alternative fuels more viable, threatening the long-term prospects of the oil-based economy.
The ever-methodical J.C. Winnie at After Gutenberg has an outline of how the United States could replace fossil fuels with renewables for transportation needs - and this without a large change in vehicle weight, use patterns, or increases in mass transportation. Add those, and we’d have a plan that would be not only environmentally more palatable, but would substantially increase environmental efficiency. From After Gutenberg:
Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the most important anthropogenic GHG; and, such anthropogenic emissions unequivocally contribute to climate change. The rise of CO2 corresponds to the rise in global temperature and loss of arctic ice mass. Annual carbon emissions grew by about 80% between 1970 and 2004. Coal-fired electric power plants comprise the single biggest source of CO2 emissions in the world. By and large, such admonishments are being ignored by U.S. policy-makers.
While a planetary engineer in Germany, Roland Moesl, envisions saving life as we know it on Planet Earth, a green pundit in America, David Roberts, describes the Syllogism of Doom. Of course, in Germany between 2000 and 2003 their installed PV capacity quadrupled. And, this was while Germany was becoming the world leader in wind development. It is way past time, ‘Merika, to start doing things right.
A good start would be “the most comprehensive and credible report released on wind power by a federal agency in a decade” (and studiously ignored by mainstream media), which indicates how we could achieve 20% wind power by 2030. Yes, 2030 is too late to stop using coal, but as many have observed, no single strategy will suffice. Switching sooner to electric vehicles, strong support for solar and wind energy development, conservation and improved efficiencies can make an earlier contribution than the delayers have programmed us to expect. The growing risk with peak oil is that in their search for alternative fuel, Americans will ignore much more catastrophic change brought on by anthropogenic emissions. The coal and corn zombies must be repulsed.
That’s just an excerpt. Read the rest of this persuasive analysis at Project Gutenberg.
And we’ll pose a question - we’re beginning to notice county and local impediments to renewable installation - and an absence of state mandates to require utilities to buy surplus power back at reasonable rates. If end users installing renewables in grid-tied systems are discouraged from building capacity in excess of their own use, we’re going to have problems.
One alternative is the setting up of local power coooperatives. But we’re leery of solutions that require lots of lawyers and incorporations. As Malcolm Gladwell points out in The Tipping Point, sometimes the tipping point is making things easy.
Dig 5 km, hit 200º C. Watch out for earthquakes! Actually, it’s a bit more complicated. You dig two holes, each 5 km (3 miles) deep. You lay a pipe in each hole, then pump water down into one hole, and up the other. The water heats up, and can turn a turbine.
Geothermal for heat is old news. Teams at Virginia Tech and Johns Hopkins are studying at Deep Geothermal for space heating at Crisfield (click here) and at the Institute of Geophysics ETH, in Zurich, Switzerland (click here).
Deep Geothermal could, theoretically, use the earth’s heat to generate steam for industrial process power. But is this feasible? What is the temperature at the bottom of a coal mine or an empty oil well? How hot is it down there? With what efficiency, if any, can this differential be tapped to boil water to create steam to turn a turbine to generate power? How deep a hole do we need to drill? What are the potentially harmful side effects?
According to New Energy News, Article
Deep Geothermal is potentially the cheapest and most consistent, predictable form of renewable energy. The geothermal sources being probed are 400 degrees Fahrenheit and 3 miles into the earth’s crust (not the 1000 degree heat of the earth’s core). A scientist compared it to scratching the earth’s “shell.” Geodynamics Limited
The Geopower Basel project is being drilled near Basel, Switzerland. Geodynamics Limited, Queensland-based, is drilling near the southern Australian town of Innamincka. Who will finish first?
Hummers: Illogical, Un-Economical, and Bad for The Environment. But They Sure Are Big!
Spencer Reiss, writing in Wired Magazine says “Nuclear Power is The Most Climate Friendly Insdustrial Scale Form of Energy“. Forgetting for a moment that nuclear power requires fuel, waste management, national security infrastructure, massive government subsidies, including artificial limits to liability, nuclear releases tremendous amounts of heat into the environment, and new nuclear are estimated to cost about 2 to 4 times the price of new wind facilities, without cost overruns (and cost overruns are a given with nuclear power plants) and take 10 to 12 years.
The climate friendly industrial scale forms of energy are Solar, Offshore Wind, large scale Marine Kinetic - tapping the Gulf Stream, Deep Geothermal, CoGen, and the NegaWatts available via conservation. Just as a screw can propel a ship thru the water, a screw anchored to the ocean floor will spin because of currents, and can power turbines. Marine Current Turbines, Ltd., based in Bristol, England has just completed the world’s first megawatt scale tidal/marine current driven power plant in the Strangford Narrows in Northern Ireland. If with wind, the sky’s literally the limit, with MCT the sea’s the limit. Geothermal exploits temperature differentials for heating and cooling. Deep Geothermal would use the earth’s heat in abandoned mines and wells to generate steam for industrial process power. Recycled Energy Development, RED, of Westmont, Il does CoGen. RED captures industrial waste energy to produce electricity and thermal power, often without burning any additional fuel or emitting any additional pollution. For industrial partners, RED reduces energy costs substantially, increases reliability, and offers the opportunity for emissions credits. Akeena, Evergreen Solar, First Solar, Sunpower, World Water and Solar, and Vestas Wind are old news. Ausra develops and deploys utility-scale solar thermal technologies to serve global electricity needs in a dependable, market competitive, environmentally responsible manner.
Wired Magazine also published a companion piece by Matt Power that says “Pound for pound, making a Prius contributes more carbon to the atmosphere than making a Hummer” (click here). The fallacy here is that they forget to mention that a Hummer weighs about three times more than a Prius, so to have an honest statistic you need to compare 3 pounds of Hummer to each pound of Prius. They do note that the operating efficiency of the Prius outweighs any manufacturing inefficiency. And they point out that it is better for the planet to buy a used car than a new car.
March 28, 2008 was the 28th Anniversary of the Meltdown at Three Mile Island, which makes March 29 the 28th Anniversary of the Day After Three Mile Island.
Still, it’s hard to say ‘Happy Anniversary.’ The last nuclear power plant to come on line in the United States, the Watts Bar plant in Tennessee, took 23 years to complete. And no new nuclear power plants have been ordered or built.
This is in part because of Three Mile Island, and its sister-disaster, Chernobyl. While the American nuclear power industry says ‘We do it better’ the truth of the matter is that American reactors are safer because American anti-nuclear activists have forced the United States government to pay attention and American nuclear plant owners and operators to build in redundant safety systems. Continue reading ‘The Day After Three Mile Island’
Thursday, March 6, 2008, I attended a seminar on solar and wind power at the Atlantic County Utilities Authority, ACUA, clean energy plant, hosted by Cassandra Kling of Clean Energy Holdings. It’s a small plant: 7.0 MW of wind and 0.5 MW of solar, it provides about 0.1% of New Jersey’s power. On the way back I drove into the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant in Ocean County, NJ, to look around and to get a visceral feel for the place. Oyster Creek provides about 10% of New Jersey’s power. (Click here for the official story or here for NJPIRG.)
There are armed guards outside the nuclear plant. There are watchtowers, presumably with armed sentries. They really don’t want people looking around, “getting a feel for the place”. They looked me over, looked at my driver’s license, searched my car – looked in the trunk, looked under the hood, looked in the front seat, the back seat, under the car, and then escorted me out of the complex. I felt like Arlo Guthrie in ” Alices’s Restaurant” (Click here for Arlo on YouTube“, here for Arlo.net) exceptin’ the fact that I wasn’t arrested.
Elisabeth Rosenthal/NYT: Europe, Cutting Biofuel Subsidies, Redirects Aid to Stress Greenest Options
Elisabeth Rosenthal, writing in The Times, report that European policy makers are beginning to smell the coffee on biofuel subsidies:
Governments in Europe and elsewhere have begun rolling back generous, across-the-board subsidies for biofuels, acknowledging that the environmental benefits of these fuels have often been overstated.
But as they aim to be more selective, these governments are discovering how difficult it can be to figure out whether a particular fuel — much less a particular batch of corn ethanol or rapeseed biodiesel — has been produced in an environmentally friendly manner. Biofuels vary greatly in their environmental impact.”A lot of countries are interested in doing this, but it’s really hard to do right,” said Ronald Steenblik, research director of the Global Subsidies Initiative in Geneva. “You can’t look at a bottle of ethanol and tell how it’s produced, whether it’s sustainable. You have to know: Was the crop produced on farmland or on recently cleared forest? Did the manufacturer use energy from coal or nuclear?”
Several countries - including Australia, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, as well as parts of Canada - have removed or are revising incentives for farmers, biofuel refiners and distributors. Continue reading ‘Elisabeth Rosenthal/NYT: Europe, Cutting Biofuel Subsidies, Redirects Aid to Stress Greenest Options’
Exxon is going to build a natural-gas processing facility in a large”boatlike structure” 20 miles off the Jersey coast. According to Times reporter Jad Mouawad, this is “a move meant to deflect safety and environmental concerns aboutproximity to populated areas. 
Perceptions aside, which is more likely (probability of occurrence) to occur, or a leak/accident/fire n on-shore facility? What’s to preclude a system failure which causes failure both in populated areas and in the Atlantic. From Mouawad’s piece about the pipeline, which will be connectedto the Buckeye NY/NJ pipes. Exxon wants to:
build a $1 billion floating terminal for liquefied natural gas about 20 miles off the coast of New Jersey, a move meant to deflect safety and environmental concerns about proximity to populated areas.
The company plans to anchor a boatlike structure in the Atlantic Ocean to process natural gas imported by cargo ships from faraway suppliers in the Middle East, Europe and Africa.
The terminal, if approved, would connect through an underwater pipeline to an existing network that feeds New York and New Jersey, two of the top consumer markets in North America.
Exxon’s project is the latest of several dozen gas terminals that have been proposed in recent years in the United States. Energy specialists say more natural gas supplies will be needed to meet the growth in consumption and to make up for an expected drop in imports from Canada.
In many cases, energy companies have faced stiff opposition in finding sites for large new terminals. This has become one of the thorniest energy issues, especially since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, raised security concerns about cargo ships carrying liquefied gas near big cities.
Still, companies are slowly moving forward with their plans. Since 2002, federal and state authorities have approved 18 new liquefied gas terminals around the country, including 4 offshore, though most analysts do not expect all of them to be built.
While most of the projects are planned along the Gulf Coast, the northeastern corner of the country is attracting attention because of its reliance on natural gas and its large populations. Two terminals to be built off Massachusetts gained approval last year. For Exxon, going so far offshore is an effort to duck the vociferous opposition that has dogged projects on both coasts. Its project, called BlueOcean Energy, would be able to supply 1.2 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day, about 2 percent of the nation’s gas consumption — and enough to meet the needs of five million residential customers.
Exxon’s project is the third offshore terminal proposed for the greater New York region in recent years.
One proposal, to build a gas terminal in the middle of Long Island Sound, has aroused concern since its announcement in 2004 because of the impact it might have on fishing and boating; it is strongly opposed by shore communities and politicians.
That opposition could intensify in coming months as the project, which is known as Broadwater and is a joint venture by Royal Dutch Shell
Another company, the Atlantic Sea Island Group, plans to build a terminal for liquefied natural gas on an artificial island about 14 miles south of Long Island, a project called Safe Harbor Energy.
Opponents of natural gas terminals have cited the potential for leaks, fires, explosions or terrorist bombings. The industry has generally argued that the terminals are secure and accidents are rare, but it has also started looking for ways to build them as far as possible from population centers.
Jad Mouawad, “Wary of Protests, Exxon Plans Natural Gas Terminal in the Atlantic, The New York Times,December 12, 2007.
McKinsey & Company released a report in November called “Reducing Greenhouse Gases: How Much at What Cost?“
From the executive summary, available here:
- Almost 40 percent of abatement could be achieved at “negative” marginal costs, meaning that investing in these options would generate positive economic returns over their lifecycle. The cumulative savings created by these negative-cost options could substantially offset (on a societal basis) the additional spending required for the options with positive marginal costs.
McKinsey is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a bunch of sandal-wearing, left-wing treehuggers. In fact, this particular study was funded by a number of energy companies. Nonetheless, they’ve come to these conclusions, and a quick look at their prominently website features progressive energy policy. For example, “The Case For Investing in Energy Productivity.”
Perhaps this represents a shift of the political center of gravity among American corporations. If so, a welcome change.
Thanks to David Roberts of Grist.org; see his piece “It Can Be Done” for more details, as well as Mathew Wald’s “Study Details How U.S. Could Cut 28% of Greenhouse Gases.“
One of our principal aims at Popular Logistics is to persuade or remind our readers how unpalatable we’d find any sudden interruption in power supply. Accidental or otherwise. Here’s an example of “energy extortion:” Gazprom (read: Russia qua Gazprom) holds Ukraine hostage:
Russia’s natural gas monopoly Gazprom on Tuesday threatened to further cut gas to Ukraine within hours unless agreement was reached on a debt dispute and contracts for future deliveries. Continue reading ‘Russia Threatens Further Gas Cuts to Ukraine - New York Times’
Check out the following information graphic, prepared by The New York Times based on data provided by the American Wind Energy Association:
This graphic accompanied Clifford Krauss’s article “Move Over Oil, There’s Money in Texas Wind,” in yesterday’s paper.
More on Krauss’s excellent article in another post - but - if you’re also aware that Krauss reported a 45% increase in wind-energy production from 2006 to 2007 - and have that in mind while looking at this chart - this is very good news. If we were to continue at this rate, it would mean a doubling of capacity would occur in slightly over two years.
This is part of a Times series called The Energy Challenge. Check out this series, and you can see that the Times has, perhaps slowly but steadily, been providing good, detailed coverage of energy issues; look closely at the bylines, and it’s apparent that the Times has assigned some of its best reporters to covering energy issues. (As to the chart - which is only credited “The New York Times” - we suspect that Khoi Vinh may have had something to do with it. Why the infographic designer, as who, as much as the reporter and her/his editors, has interpretive responsibility, gets no byline, we don’t understand).
Matthew Wald has a piece in yesterday’s Times about the rules governing the growing piles of waste from nuclear power plants, which the federal government is obliged to store - indefinitely, for all practical purposes. 
What’s most disturbing isn’t actually new - Wald’s explanation of the long-standing setup is troubling enough:
- The federal government has obliged itself to “dispose” of nuclear waste for a fee of one-tenth of a cent per kilowatt-hour
- Because it hasn’t taken the waste away on time - nuclear utilities have sued the federal government for their costs in storing the waste until it’s picked up
- it was supposed to have started picking up the waste in 1998
- this is costing about $500 million per year; because these payments are the result of lawsuits - they’re paid out of a “judgment fund,”
According to Wald,
Initially, the Energy Department tried to pay the damages out of the Nuclear Waste Fund, the money collected from the nuclear utilities, plus interest, which comes to about $30 billion. But other utilities sued, saying that if the government did that, there might not be enough money left for the intended purpose, building a repository. So the government now pays the damages out of general revenues.
The damages are large relative to the annual budget of the Energy Department, which is about $25 billion. But the money comes out of the Treasury, not the Energy Department. Under a law passed in the Carter administration, such payments are recognized as obligations of the federal government and no further action by Congress is required to make them.
The money comes out of a federal account called the Judgment Fund, which is used to pay settlements and court-ordered payments. For the last five years, the fund has made payments in the range of $700 million to $1 billion, with the average payment being $80,000 to $150,000. In contrast, payments to utilities have been in the tens of millions.
Matthew Wald, “As Nuclear Waste Languishes, Expense to U.S. Rises
Perhaps a useful goal here would be, at a minimum, to attribute these costs to the cost per kilowatt hour of nuclear power. Strong evidence that, before we see nuclear power as central to our energy problems, we hedge our bets with safer options.
Lawrence Livermore lab explanation of the Yucca Mountain project here.
This Letter to the Editor, written by Larry, was published in the Asbury Park Press, Wednesday, Jan 23, 2008 (Click Here). The full text is reproduced below.
Nuclear power too dangerous.
Nuclear power is not green or cheap. It is a security nightmare.
When you look at mining, milling and transporting nuclear fuel, nuclear power emits four to five times as much carbon dioxide as wind and solar. The fuel cycle also creates massive amounts of radioactive waste — 100,000 metric tons per plant per year. Thermal pollution from Oyster Creek kills fish, shellfish and amphibians. And radioactive wastes must be isolated from the environment for a long time.
No new nuclear power plants were built in the United States after electricity was deregulated. That’s not because of the Three Mile Island accident or the Chernobyl disaster, and not because of the protests against nuclear power or rational fears of the technology, but because of the time and expense to build new nuclear power plants. When you look at the capital costs of building nuclear plants, and add the costs of insurance, evacuation plans, security systems and government regulation, nuclear power becomes too expensive to compete.
So in 2005, the federal government mandated $125 million in tax breaks for each new nuclear power plant and provided loan guarantees of 80 percent of a plant’s cost, including overruns. Taxpayers pay for those tax breaks and loan guarantees. That does not make it cost-effective; it just shifts the burden.
Nuclear power is a security nightmare. If the Sept. 11 killers had crashed one of the hijacked planes into Oyster Creek rather than the World Trade Center or the Pentagon, much of the Jersey Shore would be like the area around Chernobyl — condemned, abandoned and uninhabitable.
If we were smart, we would move forward quickly on offshore wind, photovoltaic solar, geothermal, ocean current turbines and conservation.
Larry Furman
Lydia Polgreen of the Times won the George Polk Award in 2006 for her reporting from Africa. The following passage is from an article filed from Port Harcourt, Nigeria, last November.
The violence that has rocked the Niger Delta in recent years has been aimed largely at foreign oil companies, their expatriate workers and the police officers and soldiers whose job it is to protect them. Hundreds of kidnappings, pipeline bombings and attacks on flow stations and army barracks have occurred in the past two years alone.
Toddlers seized for ransom or political compliance
But these days the guns have turned inward, and open battles have erupted with terrifying frequency on the pothole-riddled streets of this ramshackle city. The origins of the violence are as murky and convoluted as the mangrove swamps that snake across the delta, one of the poorest places on earth. But they lie principally in the rivalry among gangs, known locally as cults, that have ties to political leaders who used them as private militias during state and federal elections in April, according to human rights advocates, former gang members and aid workers in the region.
“What is happening now cannot be separated from politics,” said Anyakwee Nsirimovu of the Institute for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law in Port Harcourt. “The cults are part and parcel of our politics. They have become part of the system, and we are paying in blood for it.”
The cults go by names that veer from the chilling to the improbable - like the Black Axe, the Klansmen, the Icelanders, the Outlaws and the Niger Delta Vigilante. Separate but not entirely distinct from the militant groups that have attacked the oil industry in the past, they represent a new, worrisome phase in a region that has been convulsed by conflict since oil was discovered here in 1956.
Since democracy returned to Nigeria in 1999, politicians across the country have used cults to intimidate opponents and rig votes. A Human Rights Watch report published in October
concluded that the political system was so corroded by corruption and violence that, in some places, it resembled more a criminal enterprise than a system of government. The April elections were so brazenly rigged in some areas and so badly marred by violence that international observers said the results were not credible.
Nowhere is political violence more severe than here in the Niger Delta, where control over state government means access to billions of dollars in oil revenues and control of enough patronage for an army.
Lydia Polgreen, “Gangs Terrorize Nigeria’s Vital Oil Region,” The New York Times, 9 November 2007.
We see two clear implications:
First, the share of American oil-market dollars which find their way to Nigeria aren’t doing the Nigerians a bit of good;
Second, because oligarchy and instability are the norm in energy-resource rich countries, it’s unwise to rely on Nigeria as a contributor to global oil markets. Ready money won’t necessarily buy oil from a country in chaos, especially if someone blows up the wells.
