An observation on US nuclear power

A week ago, the New York Times reported the results of a new poll that showed public acceptance for new nuclear power plant construction in the US had declined to 43% from 57% two years earlier.  Yesterday, sources reported that a mass of fuel and cladding appears to have melted through the Fukushima unit #2 reactor vessel.  As the severity of the incident at Fukushima increases, it will undoubtedly affect public opinion in the US.  Obtaining approval for new reactor construction, and extending the licenses of existing aging reactors, will no doubt be much more difficult than before.

I have long maintained that the United States is too large and too geographically diverse to adopt a single energy policy.  Regional differences require regional approaches to the problems.  This is at least one of the reasons that nuclear power in the US is very much an "Eastern" thing.  If the Great Plains is regarded as the separator between East and West -- and there are good reasons for using that separator -- then only eight of the 104 operating reactors are in the West, and seven of those are clustered in the southern half of California and southwest Arizona.  The difference shows up clearly in this map from the NRC:

The most commonly cited figure for the share of "US" electricity generated from nuclear sources is 20%.  However, in (very) round numbers, approximately 25% of Eastern electricity is nuclear while only 6% of Western electricity is.  There are individual anomolies -- about 25% of generated power in Arizona is nuclear in the West, and Kentucky has no reactors in the East -- but the overall picture is clear.  If no new nukes are built, and existing licenses are allowed to expire, the East faces the situation of losing the generators of about one-quarter of its current power usage over the next twenty years.  In the West, the amount is less than one-fifteenth.

The West can almost certainly make up the losses from renewable sources.  There will be difficulties, of course, particularly in maintaining the balance between base load and peaking power, and accounting for seasonal variations.  The West is relatively rich (compared to its population base) in renewable resources.  Plans have been made, even though final commitments have not, for transmission facilities such as the High Plains Express that would make it possible to deliver power from Great Plains wind farms in Montana and Wyoming to urban centers as far away as Phoenix.  The East faces, at least in my opinion, a much more difficult challenge in replacing its nuclear sources.

How the East tackles that problem could well be the source of regional frictions.  If they adopt stringent conservation standards, and attempt to impose those in the West as well (and at a national level the non-western states certainly have the votes to do so), the West would likely see itself as being punished for Eastern choices.  If the East adopts a strategy of exploiting Western renewable resources, very large transmission systems will have to be built.  The West would likely see itself being punished again if the costs of those systems were levied against both East and West.

New tech for separating oil from sand

Researchers at Penn State University have published a paper describing a new approach for separating heavy oil from sands and clays using ionic liquids.  The method is reported to use very little water or energy, and to cleanly separate the oil, the sand, and the solvent so that the sand goes back to its source, the oil goes on to the refinery, and the solvent can be reused.  A picture is worth a thousand words:

Assume for the moment that the tech can be scaled up to industrial sizes.  Is it a good thing?

As a tool for cleaning up the environment by separating out oil from contaminated sediments of various sorts, it would seem to be a very good thing.  There are any number of places that are simply impractical to clean, or finish cleaning, today.  Waste storage near the Canadian oil sands comes to mind as an immediate example.  Oily waste water in holding ponds and the resulting contaminated sediments could actually be cleaned.  As could areas contaminated by oil spills from tankers, pipelines, and wells.

Canadian and Venezuelan firms that extract oil from oil sands would no doubt regard it as a good thing.  Given that little water or energy is required for the separation process, their costs for extracting petroleum would be significantly reduced.  It would also make the operation more environmentally friendly, at least in the sense of local damage.  Lack of available water is also a limiting factor in production of oil from oil sands in areas such as Utah.  The new technology might enable production from those sources.

On the other hand, if you believe that global warming is an issue that must be addressed, then it is clear that any tech that enables increased production of petroleum is a bad thing.  Production from oil sands using ionic liquids may be much cleaner than the current technologies.  But if it enables production of another million barrels of petroleum per day, that's another million barrels per day that will be converted to carbon dioxide and released into the atmosphere, contributing to the global problem.

I feel reasonably confident predicting that, in the long run, people are going to extract every drop of global petroleum that they can.  And burn it.  Given that as an assumption, cleaner production can only be regarded as a good thing.  Here's hoping the ionic liquids approach is as clean as it looks, and scales.

A Mainstream Economist Recognizes the Finite World

On the day after Christmas, the NY Times published a Paul Krugman column titled "The Finite World."  From that column (all emphasis mine):

Oil is back above $90 a barrel. Copper and cotton have hit record highs. Wheat and corn prices are way up. Over all, world commodity prices have risen by a quarter in the past six months....

What the commodity markets are telling us is that we’re living in a finite world, in which the rapid growth of emerging economies is placing pressure on limited supplies of raw materials, pushing up their prices. And America is, for the most part, just a bystander in this story.... 

So what are the implications of the recent rise in commodity prices? It is, as I said, a sign that we’re living in a finite world, one in which resource constraints are becoming increasingly binding. This won’t bring an end to economic growth, let alone a descent into Mad Max-style collapse. It will require that we gradually change the way we live, adapting our economy and our lifestyles to the reality of more expensive resources.

 Is Dr. Krugman's prediction that there won't be a collapse, that we'll just gradually adapt our lifestyle, a reasonable one?  Almost 40 years ago, The Limits to Growth made predictions about possible outcomes based on a finite set of resources.  The following chart illustrates the standard run of the world model used in Limits (from The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update, used without permission).  The standard run shown in Limits has stood up remarkably well over the nearly 40 years that have passed since it was originally published [1].  The standard run prediction is that there will be a collapse in industrial output, that it should begin in another few years, and that by 2035 or so the global per-capita output will have fallen by more than half.

These two very different views are not necessarily inconsistent.  The Limits view is global, while Dr. Krugman's is specific to the US.  The effects of a collapse are unlikely to be distributed equally around the world.  For example, the US is a very large exporter of food (measured in calories), while almost all countries in Africa are net calorie importers.  Decreased US food production may result in changes in diet, but is unlikely to cause famine in the US (the Krugman prediction).  The corresponding decrease in US exports could, though, leave Africa unable to acquire enough calories to feed its population with widespread famine as the result (the Limits prediction).  This situation would be particularly true if an export-land model effect holds for food as well as other natural resources.  Such an effect would result in US net exports of calories declining at a rate much faster than the decline in production.

Dr. Krugman's prediction also conflicts with the global predictions given in works such as Michael Klare's Resource Wars [2].  In Klare's view, the world will see actual "hot" wars fought over access to resources: oil, water, minerals, etc.  US involvement in such wars seems to me to be unlikely for multiple reasons.  The US still has a robust allocation of natural resources, particularly if we were inclined to manage them better.  The US is relatively isolated from much of the rest of the world: other than Canada, Mexico, and parts of the Caribbean, US involvement has to be across oceans.  And finally, I expect the US people to recognize that the large amounts of resources that are needed to support such long-distance conflict might impact civilian availability to a greater degree than making the effort towards self-sufficiency.  Again, Krugman and Klare's predictions are not necessarily inconsistent on a regional rather than global basis.

I expect all of the predictions mentioned above to be "right" to some degree.  I expect hot wars over natural resources.  And I expect a fairly rapid decline in global food and industrial production.  But I expect the US to stay out of foreign entanglements, and that the decline in production of critical goods and services in the US to be modest, successfully handled by Krugman's "adapting... our lifestyles" approach.  At least for sections of the US; it seems entirely possible to me that areas of the US that have high populations and smaller allocations of natural resources will have problems.  But more on that another day.


[1]  Graham Turner, A Comparison of the Limits to Growth With Thirty Years of Reality, CSIRO, June 2008.

[2]  Michael T. Klare, Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict, 2001.

State budget crises consequences

From time to time I leave comments at The Oil Drum based on my experience as a member of the Colorado legislature's budget staff. Recently, Jeffrey Brown (westexas at TOD) asked me to write a piece about the likely outcomes of the current state budget crises. For various reasons, it ended up being posted as a guest piece at Gail Tverberg's Our Finite World blog, and reposted at the Energy Bulletin (Post Carbon Institute). Just to be complete, I'm reposting it here.

Fixing the BCS

This past week, Gordon Gee of Ohio State said publicly that Boise State and Texas Christian have no business playing in the BCS title game.  Gee's complaint is that neither Boise nor TCU play the kind of "murder's row" schedule that the Big 10 and SEC member schools play.  This would seem to be a rather peculiar argument to make at this point in the season, when Ohio State's strength of schedule (SOS) is, according to the Sagarin rankings, somewhere between Boise's and TCU's.  It seems even more peculiar in a year when the Big East, one of the conferences whose champion gets an automatic BCS bid, has only one team in the top 25, West Virginia currently at #24.

The BCS system was set up by the big conferences (and Notre Dame) in order to ensure that they got teams into the big-money bowls.  And it worked well for a considerable time, since teams outside of the anointed groups seldom made it into the upper reaches of the rankings on a consistent basis.  The system could handle the infrequent interloper, buying them off with a big payday as an at-large team.  The possibility that an outside team would achieve sustained success seemed remote.  The "strength of schedule" argument is the last line of defense in that case.  The outside teams only seem to be doing consistently well, the argument says, since they don't have to play a difficult conference schedule during the stretch run of the season.

Oddly enough, the situation has become a matter of proposed public policy.  Each year of late there are numerous outcries for Congress to force the NCAA and the BCS schools to do something different.  The most common suggestion is a playoff system similar to that used by the other NCAA divisions.  Such proposals would appear to ignore the important role that the bowl system, with the big games scheduled in a short period of time between semesters or quarters, play in the overall big-time college football picture.  The bowls provide the conferences with additional money (and revenue sharing means that even the poorer schools in the big conferences get a cut).  The bowls are a major recruiting opportunity.  The long lead time for the major bowls give fans time to plan a vacation trip around their team's game.

The problem is, in my mind, not so much that the BCS arrangement with the conferences is a largely closed arrangement, it is that the conferences themselves are closed.  This past summer demonstrated that changing conference membership is quite possible: Nebraska went to the Big 10, Colorado and Utah went to the Pac 10, Boise State went to Mountain West.  The last two make an interesting contrast.  Utah will no longer have to listen to complaints that they didn't play in one of the "tough" conferences.  Boise still will, even though it's pretty easy to make the case that the Mountain West will be superior to the Big East as far as the caliber of its football.

The obvious answer is to make the conferences "open" in the same way that the English Premier soccer league is.  Each year, drop the team with the worst record from the conference (at least for football purposes).  Replace the dropped teams with the highest ranked teams from outside the BCS conferences.  With such an arrangement in place, Gordon Gee's argument would be moot: Boise and TCU would have been added to the big conferences in place of teams like Indiana and Vanderbilt some years ago.  Complaints that such changes would break up tradition are silly.  Teams play four non-conference games each year, and the traditional rivalries could easily be scheduled in those slots.

The post-season part of the BCS system isn't broken.  It serves both the schools and the fans well.  The real problem is that the conference system is broken.  Open the conferences up and let the rising new teams have an opportunity to compete on the "equal" playing field.

Measuring the Volt's mileage

As reported by CNN, the Chevy Volt faces one last government hurdle before it goes on sale to the public.  New cars must have an EPA mileage sticker in order to be sold in the US.  The EPA hasn't figured out how to measure the mileage of a plug-in electric hybrid.  No measurement standard, no sticker, no sales.  This isn't a new issue; GM has been in discussions with the EPA since before September 2008, and the issue remains unresolved.  If you haven't looked recently, the current EPA window sticker for a gas-powered vehicle looks like this:

The case of an all-electric car has also been settled.  The relevant portion of the Tesla Roadster is shown below.  A picture of a stylized battery instead of a stylized gas pump, and the kiloWatt-hours for 100 miles in city and highway conditions instead of the MPG figures.  Of course, there's always the caveat that "actual consumption and range may vary."  Nissan has agreed that the range on a full charge for its new Leaf will vary wildly depending on the conditions: from as high as 138 miles, cruising at 38 MPH and an outside temperature of 68 degrees, to as low as 47 miles in stop-and-go traffic averaging 6 MPH, an outside temperature of 86 degrees, and the air conditioning running.

A plug-in hybrid can be rated in several different ways.  You can measure the gasoline mileage when the vehicle is running on gas, as would be the case for most of an extended highway trip.  The Volt will probably be somewhere in the upper 30s as a straight gasoline vehicle.  You can measure the efficiency as an electric vehicle, in kWh per 100 miles.  The Volt will probably be in the same 30-33 range that the Tesla Roadster and the BMW Mini E get, given similar weights, battery packs, and electric motor efficiency.  But what about the cases where you use both modes?

Assume that the Volt delivers on the 40-mile range from a fully charged battery, and gets 37 MPG on gasoline once the battery is depleted.  A 30-mile trip starting with a fully-charge battery gets infinite gasoline mileage because no gasoline is used.  A 30-mile trip starting with a half-charged battery gets 74 MPG (15 miles on gasoline uses 0.405 gallons, divided into 30 miles).  A 120-mile trip (round trip to my repair something at my daughter's house, say) starting with a fully charged battery get 55 MPG).  One proposed EPA methodology, since discarded, would have given the Volt a rating of 235 MPG for city use.  Working backwards, and using the assumptions above, yields about 47.5 miles driving between charges.

I hold out little hope that the EPA will be able to boil things down to a single tidy window sticker that is useful to consumers.  They can provide the basic information: likely battery-pack range, kWh per 100 miles, and gasoline mileage.  But it's going to be up to the individual consumer to know their driving habits in order to determine how much of the time they can operate in electric mode and how much in gasoline.  If Chevy sales staff are going to be helpful, they're going to need some training so that they can sit down with potential customers and help them work through the details.

To use myself as an example:  I currently drive about 7,000 miles per year.  1,000 of that is a single round-trip to my mother's each summer, another 1,000 is probably on days with between 40 and 120 miles driven, and 5,000 is on days less than 40.  On the other hand, Colorado has recently adopted new electric tariffs so that the incremental electricity used to charge a plug-in vehicle would likely be billed at a higher rate in the summer but not in the winter.  Do I drive more in the summer or winter?  To be honest, excluding the trip to my mother's (which would be almost all gasoline anyway), I have no idea.  And I'd be willing to bet most other people don't either.

In the long run, electric cars make sense because that's how you can burn coal, nuclear, hydro, wind, or solar power in your personal transportation system.

IEA 2010 World Energy Outlook

The International Energy Agency (IEA) released their 2010 World Energy Outlook this week.  The freely available key graphs file contains two that seem particularly interesting from a macro view.  The first shows their forecast for global oil production:

There are a number of things worth noting from this forecast.  First, they show that currently producing crude oil fields, taken together, are in terminal decline.  There's an implication there that enhanced recovery techniques are not going to save us.  Second, total crude production stays almost perfectly level for the next 25 years; by 2035, production from fields we already know about, but are not currently producing, will still be increasing; and fields yet to be found will be producing over 30% of the total conventional crude.  I'll say something about how unlikely I find that in a few days.  The fact that new production almost exactly offsets the decline in current fields seems suspicious.  Finally, total liquids production increases to over 95 million bbl/day, with the increase all coming from natural gas liquids and unconventional sources.

The second graph is the one for the forecast of coal use for generating electricity:

 

China is forecast to increase their electricity production from coal by almost 50%, driving a global increase of 25% over 2010 levels.  You have to think about where the increased production is going to come from.  Generation will probably become more efficient, assuming that new plants use supercritical and ultracritical steam cycles, but a substantial increase in coal production will still be necessary.  It seems to me that such an increase is at least problematic.

If you are a believer in climate change caused by increasing levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere, these two graphs together are extremely discouraging.  Unless you believe that China is going to capture and store the emissions from its coal-fired power plants, the graphs tell a story of steadily increasing emission levels, not the rapidly declining levels that would be necessary to stabilize the CO₂ levels already present.