Recently in Energy Category

Why is it this does not surprise me?

With calls for more alternative energy sources, in many cases mandated by state laws, the so-called environmentalists are fighting tooth and nail to make sure that those alternative energy sources will not see the light of day.

Oh, they make all of the appropriate noise about making the move away from the use of fossil fuels, particularly coal, for generating electricity. But once plans for wind farms or solar electric facilities are proposed, those same environmentalists then protest against the power lines needed to get that power to the consumers.

So what is their real agenda?

To control the populace by controlling access to the sources of energy.

In other words, the liberal push for alternatives has the look of a huge bait-and-switch. Washington responds to the climate change panic with multibillion-dollar taxpayer subsidies for supposedly clean tech. But then when those incentives start to have an effect in the real world, the same greens who favor the subsidies say build the turbines or towers somewhere else. The only energy sources they seem to like are the ones we don't have.

They give with one hand and take away with the other.

This might be a real shot in the arm for solar electric technology.

MIT has developed a hybrid photovoltaic/electrolysis system that may make it possible to generate electricity around the clock.

A liquid catalyst was added to water before electrolysis to achieve what the researchers claim is almost 100-percent efficiency. When combined with photovoltaic cells to store energy chemically, the resulting solar energy systems could generate electricity around the clock, the MIT team said.

Currently, MIT is working with photovoltaic cell manufacturers to incorporate electrolysis using their catalyst into solar energy systems. By combining the two, excess capacity during the day could be stored as hydrogen and oxygen, then used in fuel cells at night when needed.

One of the biggest problems with photovoltaic systems has been a means of efficiently storing excess power generated during the day. While batteries have been the primary means of doing so, they aren't nearly efficient enough and need to be replaced on a regular basis in order to maintain system efficiency. But if the excess power can be used to electrolyze water, splitting it into hydrogen and oxygen, and the hydrogen stored in a low pressure system, the hydrogen can then be used to generate electricity in a fuel cell when the sun goes down.

MIT's system greatly reduces the cost of the electrolysis equipment while at the same time increasing the electrolysis efficiency to almost 100%.

This is but one more step towards affordable and efficient solar energy systems.

Will Congress actually do something about energy prices, or will they continue making bleating noises while pointing fingers, and in the end, accomplish nothing? Unfortunately it appears the former is more likely than the latter. At least on Republican knows this and is trying to do something about it.

Senator John Sununu (R-NH) brings up some interesting points about what's really needed, reminding us of what's come before and how little has changed over the years since the last energy crunch.

I remember the oil spikes of 1973, 1980 and 1990. Time and circumstances may have changed, but families and small businesses in New Hampshire feel it just the same. Higher prices for heating oil, gas, and propane drain budgets and hurt the economy. This challenge, like those past, can and must be overcome.

While the date has changed, the proposals from the far left have not: Increase energy taxes, start a lawsuit, ignore the potential of nuclear power, and above all, oppose all new production of American oil and gas.

And to top it off, they'll try to convince us it's for our own good, but not actually get around to explaining why, other than to say we wouldn't understand. I guess that shows us what it is they think of the rest of us. You know...the un-enlightened. Never mind that most of the so-called un-enlightened are far more intelligent than they are because we actually understand the problems most of us face and know how to solve them without the help of the government and, most important, without them.
 
Maybe it's time to give them a dose of reality.

While I may not agree with everything John McCain proposes for his presidency, I have to say I think he's come up with a good idea to help promote the creation of electric vehicles. By proposing an equivalent to the X-Prize, in this case $300 million for the first automaker to create the next generation car battery that would wean us off of oil.

Of course there are still a number of details that would have to be worked out, but that's something that can wait until after McCain takes office.

It has become less and less understandable to me why the US is not developing the vast energy wealth that lies off our coasts and under the very ground that is America. There have been a number of opinion pieces expounding why we should or should not make use of our own energy resources. I've even had lunchtime discussions with a co-worker about this topic. He's a firm believer we should drill for our own oil because it will merely delay the time it will take us to move beyond an oil economy. I countered that we can ill afford to leave our supply of needed energy in the hands of foreign powers not friendly to the US.

Let's face it, folks. There are a lot of people in the US doing their darnedest to make sure we remain dependent upon foreign sources of oil even though we have very large domestic sources rivaling those of all of the oil exporting nations combined. So what's keeping us from actually developing our petroleum resources?

Our Congress and some of our former presidents.

At this point in time, is there another country on the face of the earth that would possess the oil and gas reserves held by the United States and refuse to exploit them? Only technical incompetence, as in Mexico, would hold anyone back.

But not us. We won't drill.

California won't drill for the estimated 1.3 billion barrels of recoverable oil off its coast because of bad memories of the Santa Barbara oil spill - in 1969.

We won't drill for the estimated 5.6 billion to 16 billion barrels of oil in the moonscape known as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) because of - the caribou.

In 1990, George H.W. Bush, calling himself "the environmental president," signed an order putting virtually all the U.S. outer continental shelf's oil and gas reserves in the deep freeze. Bill Clinton extended that lockup until 2013. A Clinton veto also threw away the key to ANWR's oil 13 years ago.

Our waters may hold 60 trillion untapped cubic feet of natural gas.

And that's barely scratching the surface of what we have sitting under our own soil. But we can't touch it. Not a single drop, not a therm, not a cubic foot, not one bit of it will be used because Congress has decided it would be bad for us and our economy if we were to achieve the ability to tell the Middle Eastern oil klepto-theocracies and Venezuelan dictator-in-waiting Hugo Chavez to eat their oil. The logic of this escapes me. No has been able to explain to me how putting our economic safety into the hands of countries that have no love for us in any shape or form is the right thing to do. Oh, I've heard the platitudes and the uneducated economic theories why this self-imposed economic threat is supposed to be good for us, but not one of them rings true and almost all of them I've heard have been disproven time and time again. Yet here we are. It's madness.

Even if we were to start drilling and exploring today, the first barrels of oil from our own wells wouldn't be available for at least 5 years, and more likely 10 years. This time lag makes it crucial for us to get started now, while foreign oil supplies are still available. Waiting until they are cut off, either from changes in hostile governments policies, or worse, due to war, is foolish. No, not foolish, but stupid.

Maybe it's time to tell Congress to stop being so obstructionist and allow us to develop our own petroleum resources, relinquishing the hold foreign sources of much needed oil presently have on us.

What if one of the answers to our energy problems turns out to be nothing more than a fancy ink jet printer?

Researchers at Colorado State University have been using an ink jet printer to deposit materials on a substrate in order to create what has been called a photoelectrolytic solar cell. Rather than generating electricity when sunlight strikes the cell, the photoelectrolytic cell generates hydrogen by splitting water atoms into its constituent elements. The hydrogen released could be collected and stored for use by a fuel cell or hydrogen burning internal combustion engine.

To be practical, a solar-photoelectrolytic material must not only split water efficiently, but should have a bandgap that is not so large that it prevents most of the solar spectrum from being absorbed; the material should also operate stably for many years in harsh sunlight. The CSU group believes that a nanostructured oxide semiconductor will be the ultimate practical material; it will be deposited on the backside of a glass substrate--allowing for back illumination, which reduces scattering of sunlight. The material, they also believe, will contain multiple metals that, when added together, will create stability, high absorption, and efficient catalysis.

Such a system could be a more efficient way to store solar energy than batteries, such as is done now. It might also be able to generate enough hydrogen to fuel the family automobile, something that should appeal to just about everyone that drives.

Let's hope the folks at CSU succeed in their efforts.

Hmm. I wonder how easy it would be to retrofit my boat for hydrogen tanks, a fuel cell, and that big honkin' electric motor I've had my eye on....

Leland Teschler reminds us it's deja vu all over again, to quote Yogi Berra. In this case our struggle with rising energy prices, or more specifically, rising oil and gas prices is not new. As he writes, it's Back To The Future Of The 1970's It starts off with an old joke that's new again.

For our anniversary my wife wanted to go someplace expensive, so we went to a gas station.

There are a lot of things about the 1970's besides jokes that would have a familiar ring. For instance, take the well-known straits of the US automakers. It's nothing new.

During the Arab Oil Embargo after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, oil prices spiked and supplies became tight. Many gas stations ran out of gas, partly because of hoarding and partly because there wasn't enough gas to go around. Gas lines were long and an impromptu gas rationing system sprang up in many states to help alleviate the shortages and the gas lines. The price of regular gas back then was as high, if not higher, than it is now, taking into account 35 years of inflation.

A lot of the proposed solutions to the problems back then never came to fruition, either due to fear, shortsightedness, or plain stupidity on the part of our leaders and the interference of special interests. If we had taken action back then many of our energy problems wouldn't exist today. We wouldn't have to scramble in order to squeeze every bit of useful energy out of our existing supply. Our vehicles would be more fuel efficient, and many of them wouldn't be running on fossil fuels. Few, if any, of our power plants would use oil, natural gas, or coal.

My question: Will we learn the lessons of the 1970's or will we make the same mistakes again and miss yet another opportunity to move past fossil fuels that presently power our civilization? If history is any indicator, the answer is probably not. Never mind the still unproven and ever more questioned theories of anthropogenic global warming. It's not the environment that will drive the change over to less carbon intensive means of generating power. It will be the economic forces that will do so. That is, of course, unless the cost of oil plummets and those forces slacken, weakening the incentives to do so.

Frankly, oil has much better uses than burning it to make electricity or to use as a fuel for our cars, trucks, boats, planes, etc. It's time to move away from the fossil fuel era, regardless of how much oil there is still out there waiting to be discovered.

This is a two-fer tonight.

First, it appears it was quite cool in the month of May , one of the cooler ones on record. As Instapundit reminds us " [T]hat's just weather, not climate." Indeed. But there's also a growing consensus among solar scientists the Sun is entering a quiet period, with longer sunspot cycles, lower maximum sunspot numbers, and the cooler temperatures on Earth that go along with it.

The last time we saw something like this was during the Little Ice Ages, which occurred during the Maunder and Dalton Minimums (circa 1300 AD to 1750 AD), periods when the 11-year sunspot cycles were longer and the maximum number of sunspots were at their lowest point.

It could be the increased CO₂ levels might help mitigate the colder temps, preventing us from reliving the disruptions suffered by our ancestors during the last round of solar minimums.

Second, speaking of higher CO₂ levels, there's more activity coming to the Bakken oil field in Montana and North Dakota.

While in the past the recoverable reserves were estimated at 3.6 billion barrels, but that was based upon the drilling and oil recovery technologies in existence in 1995. Since then, newer technologies could make almost all the oil recoverable, estimated at 413 billion barrels. That's almost twice that of Saudi Arabia.

Should it come to pass we would then be able to tell oil exporting nations in the Middle East, as well as Venezuela, to keep their oil.

All of this is assuming the Democrats and their friends, the Watermelon Environmentalists, don't find some way of making it illegal to drill for oil anywhere on the continental US. I figure they'll try, keeping us in thrall to unfriendly foreign governments while telling us it's for our own good.