RE: [asa] $4 gas is here to stay

This is for George and Iain,

George wrote:

>> Perhaps you've forgotten the Lutheran Partners column I did on
> this
> back in 2004,
...
But let me ask you then, do you have any positive suggestions for
> future
> energy sources? & if you do, do you think what I said about railroads
> would
> be a good way to make use of that energy?

I am sure that I reviewed it for you, but I don't recall. I get so much
email, and review many things, that it all becomes a blur after a while and
generally don't think much about the past, so forgive me if I have
forgotten.

Positive suggestions...that is one of the problems with my mother's
advice--'if you can't say anything postivie, keep your mouth shut."

For a long time I was in charge of reservoir simulation for Kerr-McGee. That
is fluid flow through the rocks. Since I am a geophysicist not a reservoir
engineer, I was sent to several schools. At one school Shell put up a chart
that showed (in 2004) that the world was producing 80 million per day and in
2020 those fields would only be producing 40 million. But the demand was
estimated to be 120 million per day, meaning we needed to put online 80
million bbl/day in the next 16 years. That is what we had which took 150
years to put on line. I raised my hand and said I didn't think that was
possible. No one in the room thought it was possible. What will happen is
that demand will be destroyed by price and if the politicians get involved
to damp down the price they will make the situation worse.

Unfortunately, when I was director of technology for Kerr-McGee oil company
I looked at all the alternatives. I couldn't find any and one thing I know I
am, is creative. My job was to figure out what we needed in the future and
get it into Kerr before we needed it. Hydrogen needs coal, oil, natural
gas, hydro or nuclear. If genetic engineering could create a bug to give off
hydrogen via photosynthesis that might work. Problem? We don't have that
now.

Nuclear. Problems of having enough uranium in the medium term

Fusion. No one has made break even yet and the countries were squabbling
for a long time over where ITER would be built. In any event, we will need
it by 2015.

Natural gas. Well there is lots of gas but it is in places where one must
give it away for free to allow the transportation company to make a profit.

Hydro--the US is all dammed up. China got so much flack for the 3 gorges dam
that the strategic planner of china told me personally that there was
unlikely to be more projects like that. Besides, hydro will never be a major
contributor to energy.

Coal. In the short term, great. But I calculated that if we used coal to
replace oil coal would be turned into a 44 year supply not that mythical 200
year supply everyone talks about--by the way that 200 year number comes from
dividing production into RESOURCE, not into RESERVES. The USGS which gets to
talk about energy but doesn't have to put their money where their diarrheic
mouth is, used coal seams too deep to mine in their estimate of the US coal
reserves. Government at its best.

Oil--well you know my thoughts about oil.

Solar--I saw a guy claiming that we could put solar cells on 400,000 km^2
and generate the world's energy. Fine, I said, but buddy can you spare a
mere $235 trillion dollars? That is how much it would take at the price of a
square meter and a half panel (a Mitsubishi that I looked up). I bought a
ranch last year and wanted to get a green energy source. To generate the
electricity for what is used in a modern house from wind would cost about
$88,000 (four turbines Sky stream) and for solar, I figured it would take
about $240,000. I could do either but when I spoke with a solar guy he told
me to forget the numbers given by the solar cell maker. Those numbers are
for a cell in a 70 deg F lab with direct orthogonal light. In other words,
the rating is a theoretical number. If you put the cells outside in Texas
with 100 deg F temperature you get a whole lot less electricity. I told him
that I had calculated a 30 year payout. He said forget that. It was a 50
year pay out, but the solar cells have a 30 year life. All is not as your
favorite journalist tells you. And to top it all off. If you want to sell
electricity back to the grid, it is the law that if the grid goes down, your
equipment has to have automatic shut off switches. This means that when you
really really need the power, you don't have it. Why is this? Well if your
equipment continued to work when the rest of the grid was down, you could
electrocute the workers fixing the problem.

Wind--too few places where one can get efficient use of blades. They must
be maintained and the bugs washed off so operating costs are high. In East
Texas where my ranch is, one must get at least a 60 foot tower to get above
the trees. So, if you have trees near you. Forget wind power without high
towers. I actually tried to get wind power put on my ranch. I talked with
several dealers. Everytime I said, give me a bid for putting a tower on my
land, tell me what I need to buy and point me to someone who can install the
tower (I certainly can't do it), they ceased answering emails. Don't think
this was one guy. I spoke with 5 different wind power distributors. They all
disappeared at the point of sale. I was ready to fork over my money. Good
thing they disappeared cause the tax man took that money and more.

wave power. Scotland tried this. It was a great success until the first
really windy day generated waves which ripped all the equipment off the
ocean floor. Other places don't have enough wave energy and the barnacles
would have to be kept off the equipment.

What else is there? Oh yeah there are several people who claim to make a
car run on water. I haven't evaluated that energy source.

The real problem I see is that fertilizer uses 1% of the world's energy. As
energy prices go up, fertilizer use goes down. That means crop yields go
down and people will starve to death. We are already seeing it with the
silly use of corn for ethanol. I love the moral certitude that the greenies
went into ethanol with--that it would solve our problem. But they can't seem
to do If this...then that calculations. It was very easy to see that if you
put your food in your gas tank, you won't have much to eat, but these
genius' didn't seem to think much about that. You might want to look at what
happened to North Korea when it couldn't get oil.
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/ag-korea.htm

> -----Original Message-----
> From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On
> Behalf Of George Murphy
> Sent: Friday, June 06, 2008 4:07 PM
> To: Glenn Morton; asa@calvin.edu
> Subject: Re: [asa] $4 gas is here to stay
>
> Glenn -
>
> Apparently you think I disagree with you about the current oil
> situation. I
> don't. Perhaps you've forgotten the Lutheran Partners column I did on
> this
> back in 2004, a column which you kindly reviewed for me before I sent
> it in.
> You can find it at
> http://archive.elca.org/lutheranpartners/handiwork/past/040910.html .
>
>
>
> Shalom
> George
> http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/

Iain wrote:
>>>Please note that I wasn't saying that there is a commercial fusion
reactor running right now. I was simply questioning the credibility of the
quotation you gave. After some Google searching on Michael Dittmar (and
having found at least one blog "In praise of Michael Dittmar" from someone
evidently in the anti-nuclear lobby), I found the PDF of his ASPO talk.
Concerning the point about Lithium breeding, I found the following points
made in the PDF:<<<

I know you weren't saying that there is a commercial fusion reactor running
right now. My point, which you apparently missed, is that if you don't have
one running in the next 2-5 years, it won't matter a dingy. As energy
prices rise, so do construction costs. I will point you to a chart of
Mexican Production. They are one of our biggest sources for oil.
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/MexicanProduction.jpg. At the rate they are
dropping by 2012 or so they might not be an exporter at all.

And you know, I simply HATE this constant use of informal logical fallacy of
ad hominem (abusive). So the blinking what if Ditmar is from an ant-nuclear
lobby????? His mother might be a dog as well. But all of that is totally
and utterly irrelevant to whether or not his arguments are right. Your
comment is more attuned to that of a politician than of a scientist. Deal
with the argument, not whether or not the guy's mother is a canine. The
level of argumentation now seems to be more about name calling. Yesterday
someone said that we don't' need to listen to Hannity because he teaches
right wingers, and we don't have to pay attention to Forbes because he is a
GW listener and now we don't have to worry about Dittmar because he is an
anti-nuke guy. This is frankly argumentation which is beneath the dignity
of people here.

Does someone have to have the correct and approved political point of view
to be listened to here????

I have little doubt one can find things wrong in any paper. The point is I
cited certain facts. And the fact that he might be wrong about one fact
doesn't make him wrong about the facts I cited. So, in some sense, below
this is a non sequitur--like looking for one's keys under a streetlamp
because it is light there and one can see clearly, when one lost them in the
dark alley where one can't see clearly.

But, I would be interested in getting that article. I can't find it on the
internet.

>>>>. A 1000 MW reactor "burns" 56 Kg of Tritium per year.
. Only a few Kg per year can be supplied from fission reactors! (
Exclamation mark his) . Real fusion reactor must achieve tritium
sufficiency!

(Yes, we knew that already; that's why scientists, including former
colleagues of mine have been researching and developing the technology for
years, and expect it to be tested in the ITER reactor).

Dittmar:

. More tritium must be made and extracted than burned!
. Proposed tritium breeding reaction (every neutron must be used!) [Comment
and exclamation mark are Dittmar's]:

n + lithium => tritium + neutron + 4.8 MEV

.. then in the next slide (highlighted in red):

. The impossible self-sustained tritium breeding chain!

Now on the face of it this is cast-iron; the arithmetic shows that the DT
fusion reaction is D+T => 4He + n, and hence it would see that to regenerate
a T needs to use every neutron, and since 100% efficiency is unachievable
this implies self-sustained breeding is impossible.

However, what Dittmar has omitted to tell you (and since he is a nuclear
physicist who works on CERN, I can only assume that he has deliberately
omitted this vital bit of information) is that Beryllium is also used in the
breeding blanket and acts as a neutron multiplier via intermediate nuclear
reactions. Hence breeding ratios > 1 are indeed possible.

Given the superficial nature of Dittmar's argument here, one is also bound
to question what he says about fission.<<<

I am aware that even in fission reactors fuel is created, but even with
that, we don't have a system of perpetual energy generation out of even
breeder reactors. And I am aware that breeding ratios greater than one
exist. But those were not points I raised from Dittmar's speech. What your
argument here seems to be saying is that because Dittmar is wrong here, he
must be wrong there, which is silly on the face of it. And frankly, your
argument isn't so interesting to me because even if he got all the details
correct about breeder reactors, we don't have many of them working either
and we are unlikely to have enough of them working in time to meet the
coming problem. So, as far as I am concerned from both a societal and
investing position, all this is a red herring (or other suitable pink fish).

One other thing one needs to think about. Many of the nuclear plants are
close to their retirement age and so, over the next few years they will
start having to be retired, meaning we need an even greater nuclear plant
building binge than most people are anticipating. And this just when the
cost of fuel for construction equipment rises through the ceiling. For at
least a while it will be that we build one and retire one.

>>His main point here is that the world's supply of Uranium will run out in
short order. This is largely due to the fact that only 0.7% of naturally
occurring Uranium is U235 and fissile whereas 99.35 is U238 and non-fissile.
However, the U238 can be converted into Pu 239, which is also fissile. It
happens in conventional reactors faster than it happens in "fast" breeder
reactors. (The "fast" refers to the energy of the neutrons, not the rate of
breeding, so the anti-nuclear lobby's chant "the only safe fast breeder is a
rabbit" is based on ignorance).

However, Dittmar doesn't seem to mention that there exist huge stockpiles of
Plutonium as a legacy of the existing nuclear industry, and that it is
possible to burn this fuel in conventional reactors (not fast reactors). In
fact it is expedient to do so, because of the vulnerability of these
stockpiles to terrorist action, because much of it is weapons grade.<<<

So, exactly when do we start our mega construction project turning out
breeder after breeder and burning our plutonium in other reactors? The NRC
is reviewing 8 applications, the first since Three-Mile Island, but they
haven't approved any yet.
http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-licensing/new-licensing-files/expected-new-r
x-applications.pdf

How many years away is the actual generation of new energy??? I know that
there is a 24 month environmental review time (construction costs will go up
during that time), there is a 4 year design review (construction costs go
up) Westinghouse submitted plans in March 2002 and got final approval in Jan
2006. There will probably be one or two lawsuits before one can build
(construction costs go up). If it takes 10 years to actually get energy out
of what is being reviewed now, we will already be experiencing the energy
problems I have foreseen all these years ago.

The reality Iain, is that if we never build breeders, Dittmar will be
correct--we will be without fuel when he says we will. And if we do build
breeders to supply the world with energy, every country which has them will
be able to make nuclear bombs. And at least with the sodium cooled ones one
has to be careful not to let the hot sodium see the sky. If it contacts air,
it burns rather explosively I am told.

 Do we want Iran, Syria and or every tin-horn dictator to have at his
disposal a reactor capable of giving him nuclear weapons? One can't count
on the UN to stop illicit nuclear activities--example--North Korea and Iran.
As a heavy investor in the energy sector, and someone who evaluates the
options based upon what WILL happen rather than what could in some
alternative universe, I would bet my money that we will never allow the
proliferation of breeders around the world so therefore, they won't save our
cookies and yes, I am dismissive of them. The specter of a rogue government
giving a bomb to terrorists with us waking up to a nuclear cloud over
Houston is something that most politicians would be unwilling to favor.

So, in my mind, the existence of an unused technology doesn't change the
fact that this unused technology won't change the ultimate outcome with
regard to uranium supplies.

>>Again, this appears to be an important fact that his talk omits to
mention, perhaps because it doesn't suit his case.

You started off by being extremely dismissive of Nuclear saying "Don't look
at nuclear". Unfortunately your chief witness seems to me to be somewhat
selective in the evidence he chooses to present. It seems it's not only
YEC's that get up to this kind of trick.<<

And it seems that you both ignore that there aren't enough plants being
built to help us in the next 10 years, the political realities of this
technology, and it seems that people here decide whom to listen to based
upon their political viewpoint rather than the argument. Plain fact-- if we
don't actually BUILD the dad-goned COMMERCIAL breeder reactors it is nothing
more than a exercise in feel-goodism to even speak of that which will never
be built! In case you haven't noticed, the fuel component for the
construction equipment has almost sept-tupled over the past 5 years and by
the end of the year it might have oct-tupled. See
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/oilpriceApr08.jpg. What do you think this will
do to the economics and construction costs of these wonderful non-existent
nuclear plants?

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Received on Sat Jun 7 11:34:54 2008