Mach 5 = 3800 mph

Do you need lithium-ion batteries that can survive Mach 5? I had no idea that we were creating (unmanned) planes capable of flying at 3800 mph...

Link

Solar update

First Solar's factory in Frankfurt. Note the reels of flexible solar material.

Less than 5 weeks ago, I did a post on Solar's Great Leap Forward. In the meantime, the manufacturing cost of Chinese conventional PV has dropped from $1.28 to $0.85/W (source). This is a 77% reduction in 6 years.

And today I saw that First Solar have reduced the manufacturing cost of their thin-film PV from $1.08 to $0.76/W (source: Big Gav). This is an 83% reduction from the price 6 years ago.

These are really significant price drops! Hopefully Lomborg (and ironically George Bush) will be proved right and renewables will cost less than fossil fuels by 2035.

Who are we? What are we?

“The more we delve into genomics the more we become uncertain as to who and what we are,” said Lipkin. “Fragments of retroviruses represent up to 10 percent of the human genome. The number of bacteria on and in our bodies outnumber human cells by 10 to 1. These are not silent passengers.”

 Wired Science

Sea level rises

Update 20 Jul 2011:
Latest figures are back to 3.2mm per year (+/- 0.4mm). 32 cm (12.6 inches) per 100 years.
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Update 17 Jun 2011:
Latest figures are  still 3.1mm per year (+/- 0.4mm).
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Update 14 Nov 2010:
Latest figures are  3.1mm per year (+/- 0.4mm). Down from 3.2mm in July
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The latest figures from Colorado University show a trend in sea level increase of 3.2mm per year (+/- 0.4mm). This is 32cm (or 12.6inches) per 100 years.

How damaging is just over one foot increase in a century? What are the odds it will be more than this, ie that the rate of increase will accelerate?

Warmest June since record keeping began

Dr Jeff Masters' weather blog reports:

June 2010 was the warmest June since record keeping began in 1880, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA's) National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), and was the fourth consecutive warmest month on record.

Ouch!

CO2: the rate of increase is increasing

Not only is the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere increasing every year, but the amount by which it increases is increasing. It took approx 37 years to increase from 1.0 ppm to 2.0 ppm. At this rate, the trend line will hit 3.0 ppm in 2044.

Biomass (especially wood) for power generation

The Oil Drum today has a post by Luis de Sousa on the three types of electricity generation: base load, intermediate load and peak load. A guy named Hoover offered a considered response on the role of biomass for intermediate load. I particularly liked the fact that a ship-load of wood chips from the USA to the UK uses about 1.2% of the energy of the wood chips (assuming the ship returns empty). Here is Hoover's comment :

Hi Luis, thank you for that post. The role of mid merit plant (what you call intermediate load) is of course central in grid dispatch and is becoming ever more so with the rate of penetration of wind and other intermittent renewables. No grid can possibly hope to be stable without it, bearing in mind that mid-merit plant also provides most of frequency response and spinning reserve which is essential to match loads on a second to second basis - again ever more challenging with greater wind penetration.
In the UK, mid-merit has tended to be provided by mainly pulverised coal plant and older gas CCGT, and it has required most mid merit plant to go much further than simply ramping up and down. With a couple of exceptions all UK coal plants run 2-shift regimes (i.e. turn on and off every day) for 6 - 9 months of the year. In fact this year several coal plants 2-shifted right through winter although that has partly to do with running restrictions under the Large Combustion Plant Directive.

In a post fossil world, large circulating fluidised bed (CFB) boilers running on biomass are very well suited to perform this role. Due to the large inert mass of sand in these boilers they are very well suited to retaining heat during a 6-12 hour shutdown and re-starting quite easily. An appropriate fuel for these boilers is wood chip as it is low in chlorine, ash and heavy metals which make certain types of biomass challenging to combust.

You lightly dismiss "biofuels" as having a low EROI and being subject to land constraints, and these are both genuine worries with regards to certain types of biofuel, especially those that rely on primary agricultural outputs such as cereals or oilseeds. However they simply do not stack up for solid wood biomass, let me take the two points individually:

EROI:
The largest scale biomass boilers being contemplated are about 300MW net capacity, at this level these plants can achieve 40-42% net conversion efficiency, depending on the cooling that's available. There is not a lot of difference between a biomass plant and a hard coal plant, except that no boiler manufacturer today will go supercritical on biomass because it is a step too far to deal with alkali ash melting and corrosion at those temperatures at the moment. However, once they have more experience on with big boilers they will get there, probably by using additives to control the chemistry. A port based 300MW biomass CFB burning imported wood chip from North America (where there is massive surplus potential) has an EROI which is roughly similar to our current coal plants (burning Russian coal at an average net efficiency of 36%) and very slightly lower than an average aged CCGT burning Qatari LNG Siberian piped gas. As a rough rule of thumb the energy required to ship the wood chip (using panamax class wood chip carriers) is about 1.2% of the biomass energy in the hold assuming the ship returns empty. The energy consumed in harvesting, chipping, transport to port, loading and discharge is about the same again.

Land constraints:
The underutilised resource from existing European and Eastern North American working (i.e. not protected) forests that could be sustainably harvested or collected and supplied to a European port is around 250m tonnes (depending on who is doing the estimating, we have seen much larger figures used, but this one is much closer to what is realistically practicable). That would comfortably supply about 100 of the large 300MW boilers that I mentioned earlier or about 30GW if they were running baseload. However if they were 2-shifting with say a 40% loadfactor (typical of mid-merit coal plant in the UK today) that would be about 60 GW of plant. A very respectable % of Europe's mid merit needs.

However the real resource potential is South America and Africa where huge areas of degraded land (typically used for a short period for agriculture and then abandoned) exist which would be used for sustainable forest plantations. Brazil alone estimates about 110 m Ha of abandoned or unutilised agricultural land that would be suitable for forest plantations (i.e. there would be enough rainfall), energy optimised plantations (as opposed to the pulp fibre optimised variety where thee genetics are pushed to produce as much cellulose as possible) can easily achieve 60 tonnes per net planted Ha today (and likely much more in the future). Assuming 50% net to gross planted area on 110m Ha of land that would equal enough fuel for almost a terrawatt of 40% LF mid-merit biomass plant. That alone would be far more than enough to cover the mid-merit needs of the whole of Europe and South America, and doesn't take into account other vast areas of potential in South America and Africa.

I stress that this is all land that would literally benefit from having trees grown, even though it may be a mono-culture and therefore not environmentally perfect it would still prevent soil erosion and economic depredation on a massive scale (which usually leads to overexploitation of soils and other natural resources such as high biodiversity forests) and preserve the value of the land for the long term. Most of this land is not suitable for arable crops, or at least would take massive energy-intensive inputs to be so. Soil preparations are mainly potassium and phosphorous and other micronutrients, i.e. not heavy nitrogen. They can mainly be recycled from biomass ash. By the way, North America could already produce enough from existing sustainable forestry to meet its mid-merit needs.

Biomass is not "the answer" to future power needs. Rather it has a role to play role along side baseload nuclear, variable wind and solar, and flexible hydro. Although due to subsidy regimes, the first generation of large dedicated biomass plant will be baseload (the grid has all the mid-merit it needs for now with coal and gas and not enough low carbon generation) the future of biomass is to fill the mid-merit niche, while providing traditional “thermal” spinning reserve and frequency response. It is a vital role if we harbour any hope at all that power grids can be kept stable at acceptable prices in the future, and does not deserve to be so lightly dismissed.

Original post: http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/6720
Comment: http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/6720#comment-684137

BP's non-compliance and other stories

The US Coast Guard and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement are holding hearings into the Deep Horizon oil rig explosion. The Times-Picayune reports:

"The Deepwater Horizon's blowout preventer -- the key device for shutting off a wild oil well -- had a leak in the days before it failed to operate and BP did not comply with a federal regulation requiring the rig to suspend operations, a BP company man testified Tuesday."

- source: NOLA.com

And a followup comment from the Oil Drum:

"John Guide, BP's Well Team Leader, appears to be auditioning for criminal charges if anyone is. He not only failed to report the leaking BOP. He is the guy who over-rode BP engineers and Haliburton on the cement job and ordered them to proceed with 6 centralizers instead of the 21 Haliburton said was needed to ensure safe cement job.

BP's Drilling Engineering Team Leader Gregory Waltz was so concerned with what Brial Morel was about to do with his idea that the pipe would hang straight in the hole under gravity that he brought the issue to Guide's attention advising that they go with 21 centralizers. Waltz even went to the trouble of lining up all the needed centralizers and a plane to fly them to the rig the next day. Waltz noted that given their choice of casing design, they needed to listen to Haliburton to honor thier own risk modeling.

Guide did not care. All he cared about was saving a few bucks."

- source: The Oil Drum

I would not like to be in John Guide's shoes!

More on metal prices

I've revisited the graphs I produced for the post on Lomborg and Metal Prices and added trend lines to them. When Lomborg published in 2000, the trend was obviously down:

However, the trend for the ten years since then is definitely in the opposite direction, as the following graph shows:

Combining the two still shows an overall downward trend; Lomborg would argue that this will continue..

Civic involvement via the Internet

Clay Shirky gives a 13 minute talk on cognitive surplus (available spare time for creation) and how it can be used to create entertainment and civic value. His first example is from Kenya...

Lomborg on metal prices

Lomborg has a graph on page 138 of Skeptical Environmentalist showing metal prices since the mid 1950's. I have reproduced the essence of his graph below:

As you can see, prices are trending lower and support Lomborg's thesis that in the long run commodity prices fall. The picture is a little different though if you look at IMF metal prices since 2000:

IMF Commodity Metals Price Index Monthly Price

Combining 2000-2010 data with the original graph gives:

We can see that in the last decade, prices have exceeded and still exceed the highest values of the previous four and a half decades. Which way next?