Yet more substitutes: Natural Gas from Shale powered delivery vehicles

Continuing on the theme of viable substitutes:

Many in the doomer camp say "we're screwed because we can't possibly replace all of our current oil production before we peak".

First of all, we don't need to replace ALL of our current oil production.

We ONLY need to blunt the decline rate.

Given that we can do this by substituting away some of the demand for the likely 1-2% decline rate the challenge seems much less insurmountable and great strides have been made so that we no longer have a need to destroy demand by 1-2% a year as we may have needed to do if peak oil had come say, in 2000-2002 when many of the substitutes we now have were not technically available.

One such substitute that is effectively a snap-in is the huge reserves of shale gas which have been developed in the United States through the progressive development of increasingly sophisticated horizontal drilling methods combined with advanced fraccing technology. This has led to the lowest prices for natural gas in the US and Canada in more than a decade because there is frankly a glut of supply.

This couldn't have come at a better time. We now have an arbitrage opportunity (read money-making opporutinty) whereby natural gas joule per joule is cheaper than oil. All that's required is to shift some of the demand from oil to natural gas.

I've been saying for some time that some enterprising auto or truck manufacturers will likely start to shift production of their vehicles to natural gas which is a drop in to existing fueling infrastructure (many gas stations already have natural gas pumps).

Now one of the major automobile manufacturers has released a natural gas powered version of their delivery vans (Daimler-Chrysler with their newly released natural gas powered Sprinter).

I expect other van manufacturers to soon follow suit. What this means is that we now have a second leg of the logistics delivery infrastructure shored up both by natural gas and battery electric.

Like I said before, I'll be ordering pizza from dominoes delivered by unconventional fuel powered vehicles while the doomers cower in their MRE filled basements awaiting the zombie apolcalypse.

Peak Oil? Yawn.

Yet more large format energy storage solutions

I've written before about the energy storage solutions being developed by the many innovative companies working to solve our pressing energy challenges and here is yet another:

Corvus technologies has developed an advanced lithium ion battery with 20% higher energy density than the current best-of-breed batteries. The quality engineering has been increased to such a high degree that the battery has a working life of 20+ years as compared to 8 years for previous generation batteries.

In addition, the process engineering involved has reduced the cost to a level where it's inexpensive enough to enable energy storage to become competitive enough to enable storage for wind as the battery packs come in megawatt sizes, which is a breakthrough.

Those who say renewable energy is a non-starter because of intermittency are just dead wrong and given that up to 65% of available wind is currently dumped means we could more than double capacity usage of wind turbines, thus further increasing the cost competitiveness compared to fossil fuel powered plants.

Yet more substitutes: Asphalt and Cement

Korean scientists have developed a biotech method for producing cement and an asphalt substitute.

The method works by harnessing a specialized bacteria which secretes an enzyme which rapidly turns sand into sandstone, with properties which can be tweaked to match either pavement on highways or else cement for buildings.

For our purposes this is yet another die off killer (as we all know, dieoff rests on there being no viable substitutes to oil). In this case asphalt competes directly with petroleum derived from tar-sands. i.e. with this process we won't need to use valuable oil to pave our roads. Instead we can used this bio-engineered sandstone.

Additionally, cement is very energy intensive and with this process the energy requirements will come directly from the sun without any artificial energy requirement whatsoever.

By my reckoning we use about a million barrels a day between cement and asphalt in North America alone. So given that we use about a quarter of the worlds oil on a daily basis I reckon thats 4 million barrels a day potentially could be saved.

If we calculate a decline rate of 2% a year then this alone pushes peak oil back 2 years or cuts the decline rate in half for four years (which is *plenty* of time to assist with bringing online substitutes - remember the Hirsch report says we need a crash program lasting ten years to give us breathing room).

Electric Cars: Inches away from the Goal

Only inches away from the goal.

So some good news on the electric car front.

It's my position that when we achieve the ability to produce an electric car more or less comparable in size and interior space to todays vehicles which can drive for 8-10 hours at a reasonable speed (say 60 miles an hour) and be fully recharged in a reasonable time (say less than an hour) then we have hit 100% substitution.

Well we're close to that goal.
Recently the German Electricity company Lekker Energie converted a full size Audi A2 without taking up the trunk (i.e. a fully functional Audi A2) to an all electric car. The battery was a high efficiency polymer battery produced by German company DBM Energy. What makes that battery special is that it can be recharged fully in less than 10 minutes.

The test driver, Mirko Hanneman took the car for a pretty chunk ride of 375 miles without recharging at a speed of 55 miles an hour. He did the ride in just under seven hours. He drove from Munich to Berlin and when he reached Berlin he drove around a little and did a few chores before re-connecting.

Now call me a techno-cornucopian or whatever other slur you want but I reckon that covers about 90% of the anti-electric-car whining I have heard over the last ten years.

I'll go further than that: I declare this to be victory. Given that the charging time is less than an hour we have de facto achieved 100% substitutability. Not every vehicle on the market is capable of driving 400 miles without having to refill the tank. I'd say, in fact, that nobody realistically drives until their tank is completely empty in practise either. Most people will stop after say three to four hours driving and take a rest-room break or eat something and while they're doing that likely top up the gas tank. In this case the same paradigm would apply: take a rest-room break and maybe eat something while the battery is being topped off.
You could effectively drive round the clock to the maximum realistic human ability, same as you can now, assuming of course the availability of charging points.
The point is, now all the hard technical R&D has been done.

All that's left now is process engineering and construction of a network of charging stations to get this down to a reasonable price (and process engineering is just the thing multi-national companies are expert at and given that multi-nationals are the ones with the money invested in this then I'd say what we're looking at is a slam-dunk).

So we can now say with some certainty that we have the technology available for the pieces to enable the current paradigm to continue.

So much for "dieoff".

LOL.

FYI The photo above is the Audi A2: kind of like a small-ish SUV. Other than die-hard pickup freaks, this would be more than adequate for the average North American driver and certainly surpasses the average rest-of-world vehicle.

Buses can be cheaply and easily converted to 100% electric grid powered TODAY

The Swiss company Furrer+Frey and Germany's Schunk have developed an overhead fast charging system which is similar in design to the overhead brushes you might find in electric streetcar applications. Combined with Altair-nano lithium batteries, the batteries can be kept topped up at the end of the bus route for 5 or 6 minutes at a time. This allows the bus to run all day long off of grid electricity. Which could of course be emissions free and peak oil defying wind power.


So sorry doomers, looks like the logistics infrastructure and the mass transit infrastructure isn't collapsing any time soon. Even if significant numbers have to take the bus in the interrim if we get a hard decline (unlikely) we will still be able to get our cheap plastic trinkets from wal-mart and be able to get there by bus.

Company spokesman Opbrid CEO Roger Bedell:
"It can be installed easily in any location, since it is unobtrusive and swings away from the road when not in use. Unlike building a tram or trolleybus system, the Bůsbaar can be installed in days at a tiny fraction of the cost.

With this system, it is possible to change most of the urban bus systems in the world from petroleum to electricity simply by changing diesel buses to fast charged hybrids and installing these charging stations. We can do this now."

Anyone else notice that? It can be installed in days.
Just let that sink in for a moment and then consider exactly how few of these we'd need to install under hard-crash conditions compared to how many charging points we need to keep all electric cars running.

Dieoff? Hit the snooze button.

The full story is here:
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/10/prweb4603564.htm

Yet more on algae oil : double to triple increased oil yields breakthrough

So it seems there has been yet another breakthrough. Montana State University researchers have discovered that the addition of a cheap common chemical, the oil yield of algae can be doubled and sometimes tripled. That cheap chemical is common baking soda and it needs to be dosed at a particular stage in the lifecycle of the algae. It works on both algae and diatoms.

Interesting. So if that works then we *almost* have feasible yields for this stuff.
That being true, I think we have a reasonable case to say that a viable fuel-substitute for commercial aviation fuel is gradually coming into view.

Oh and this also likely works to increase *food* yields from algae too. One has to ask the question: could the algae be gen-modded to produce *Omega-3* oil instead of diesel?

Original link is here: http://www.montana.edu/cpa/news/nwview.php?article=8895

First Jet flight usings 100% synthetic fuel

Though I have argued that jet flights are the one application that cannot be easily substituted out using electricity, we are not out of options.

Jet Fuel can be synthesized from natural gas, coal, biofuels or a number of other more esoteric processes.

It's likely, however, that the expense of flights will be higher than they are today because of a combination of demand and limited availability of jet-fuel compared to todays near ubiquity of the fuel.

Nevertheless, it's unlikely that jet-flights will disappear entirely because
1. We can still do it due to the ability to provide jet-fuel through alternative pathways
2. There are applications that require jets such as high-speed transatlantic (or transpacific) journeys where traveling by ship won't cut it.

In other land based use-cases, as stated elsewhere we could substitute regular rail, buses or personal electric vehicles. In applications that required fast transit times, at least in Europe and Asia there are high-speed rail links.

In any case, the coal-to-liquids application has just been demonstrated on a trial basis by SASOL of South Africa as below:

"Lanseria, Johannesburg – Sasol, the world’s leading producer of synthetic fuels from coal and natural gas, today flew the world’s first passenger aircraft exclusively using the company’s own-developed and internationally approved fully synthetic jet fuel.

The fuel, produced by Sasol’s proprietary Coal to Liquids (CTL) process, is the world’s only fully synthetic jet fuel to have received international approval as a commercial aviation turbine fuel.

Sanctioned by the global aviation fuel specification authorities the jet fuel is the first fully synthetic fuel to be approved for use in commercial airliners. This marks a significant development in the adoption of clean burning alternate fuels for the aviation industry. The engine-out emissions of Sasol’s synthetic jet fuel, are lower than those from jet fuel derived from crude oil, due to its limited sulphur content.

The historic flights, from Lanseria Airport in Gauteng to Cape Town, kicked-off Sasol’s 60th birthday celebrations, by staging a fly-past at the opening of the Africa Aerospace and Defense (AAD) 2010 exhibition at Cape Town’s Ysterplaat Air Force Base. "

Original story is here: http://www.sasol.com/sasol_internet/frontend/navigation.jsp;jsessionid=PQSDEWYJUK0WHG5N4EZSFEQ?articleTypeID=2&articleId=28500003&navid=1&rootid=1