Friday, April 18, 2008

End Bio Fuels Now

Using food as fuel is insane, as the global food crisis brutally demonstrated. There are plenty of not food alternatives, but really, when the price of oil is entirely driven by market speculation based on media hysteria and not on actual shortages this sort of thing is downright insane.

Global food prices have risen because food grains are in short supply. Another strong reason given for this is the shift to biofuel, which are promoted as a green alternative to conventional fuels, like petrol and diesel.

The use of food for fuel started when the energy crisis forced the world to look for alternatives. Scientists turned to biofuel for energy solutions. The biofuel are made from food grains like corn.

But using food for fuel started the debate - Does the biofuel boom mean bust for food grains?

The European Union has said that at least five per cent of oil used in automobiles must be biofuel by 2010. But that directive is now being looked at again in the wake of global food crisis.

Most of the countries in Europe are now cutting down on generous subsidies for biofuel crops.

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Peak Oil My Ass

As I’ve stated many times, peak oil, as defined by its proponents is bunk. We haven’t even begun to find all the oil on this planet. This is yet another example of what I’m talking about.

A U.S.-based company that has controversially laid claim to nearly all of the Arctic Ocean’s undersea oil said Thursday that new geological data suggests a “potentially vast” petroleum resource of 400 billion barrels.

That figure is backed by a respected Canadian researcher who recently signed on as the firm’s chief scientific adviser.

This report came out last week, so that’s not an April Fools joke. We’re a long way from being out of oil. The only problem is extraction and rights. Many environmentalists want to block any oil drilling anywhere. But as long as there’s a demand, they’ll be overruled. 

Sunday, March 09, 2008

Peak Oil is a Myth part 3

I’m sure there’s a lot more undiscovered oil in the US. This is probably the tip of the iceberg.

America is sitting on top of a super massive 200 billion barrel Oil Field that could potentially make America Energy Independent and until now has largely gone unnoticed. Thanks to new technology the Bakken Formation in North Dakota could boost America’s Oil reserves by an incredible 10 times, giving western economies the trump card against OPEC’s short squeeze on oil supply and making Iranian and Venezuelan threats of disrupted supply irrelevant.

In the next 30 days the USGS (U.S. Geological Survey) will release a new report giving an accurate resource assessment of the Bakken Oil Formation that covers North Dakota and portions of South Dakota and Montana. With new horizontal drilling technology it is believed that from 175 to 500 billion barrels of recoverable oil are held in this 200,000 square mile reserve that was initially discovered in 1951. The USGS did an initial study back in 1999 that estimated 400 billion recoverable barrels were present but with prices bottoming out at $10 a barrel back then the report was dismissed because of the higher cost of horizontal drilling techniques that would be needed, estimated at $20-$40 a barrel.

Tuesday, March 04, 2008

There’s Plenty of Oil

A few months ago I was arguing with some visitors on here about Peak Oil. I believe the conventional wisdom espoused by these people is wrong. Peak oil believers have been proved wrong time and time again. Yet they still persist.

Here is one view from someone in the oil business which is much more optimistic. 

The current prices of oil are artificial and they can come down very easily. They probably will in the next year or so.

UPDATE: Read this and see why Democrats have been standing in the way of real energy independence and want to make things worse. 

Saturday, January 26, 2008

10 Myths About Nuclear Power

Nuclear power is one of the cleanest forms of energy we have. And with our regulations and reactor designs, one of the safest. There have been no significant accidents with US nuclear power plants in 50 years (Three Mile Island was not significant. The media made a big deal over nothing). The only real issue with nuclear power is nuclear waste. And we have perfectly sound ways of dealing with it, and places to store it like Yucca Mountain in Nevada. But the greens have tried to stop that from going live. (Hillary makes stopping it one of her campaign promises.)

Now that countries are turning to nuclear power, some so called green groups are spreading lies and propaganda to try to stop them.

Here are ten reasons why their lies are wrong. More here.

Tuesday, January 08, 2008

No Corn For Oil!

We really need to ban ethanol from corn, because there is a growing food crisis from two bad crop years and its driving up food prices. The idea of using food crops fior energy is a bad one to begin with. There are plenty of alternatives.

As I’ve said before, switchgrass is the answer. It’s cheaper to grow, takes less energy and less pesticides and fertilizer and it can grow on land unsuitable for farming. It’s really a win/win kid of fuel source. But how good is it? Better than I thought.

On paper, making biofuels from switchgrass and other perennials that need not be replanted seems like a no-brainer. Use the sun’s energy to grow the crop, and then convert it to liquid fuels to power our cars without the need for gasoline. But so far, experiments with these “cellulosic” crop-based fuels have only been conducted on small scales, leaving open the question of how feasible the strategy is. Now, the first large-scale study shows that switchgrass yields more than five times the energy needed to grow, harvest, and transport the grass and convert it to ethanol. The results could propel efforts to sow millions of hectares of marginal farmland with biofuel crops.

Previous studies on switchgrass plots suggested that ethanol made from the plant would yield anywhere from 343% to 700% of the energy put into growing the crop and processing it into biofuel. But these studies were based on lab-scale plots of about 5 square meters. So 6 years ago, Kenneth Vogel, a geneticist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Lincoln, Nebraska, and colleagues set out to enlist farmers for a much larger evaluation. Farmers planted switchgrass on 10 farms, each of which was between 3 and 9 hectares. They then tracked the inputs they used--diesel for farm equipment and transporting the harvested grasses, for example--as well as the amount of grass they raised over a 5-year period. After crunching the numbers, Vogel and his colleagues found that ethanol produced from switchgrass yields 540% of the energy used to grow, harvest, and process it into ethanol. Equally important, the researchers found that the switchgrass is carbon neutral, as it absorbs essentially the same amount of greenhouse gases while it’s growing as it emits when burned as fuel.

Now, you know I don’t put much stock (if any) in the whole carbon thing. But that doesn’t mean I’m not for reasonable alternatives. And this option is vastly more logical than using corn, which costs more to grow than the energy it produces.

More info on switchgrass here.

UPDATE: The BBC concurs

Sunday, December 16, 2007

New/Old Energy Source

I’m not sure if I’m watching a magic trick, or an invention that will make the cigar-chomping 64-year-old next to me the richest man on the planet. Everything that goes into Frank Pringle’s recycling machine—a piece of tire, a rock, a plastic cup—turns to oil and natural gas seconds later. “I’ve been told the oil companies might try to assassinate me,” Pringle says without sarcasm.

The machine is a microwave emitter that extracts the petroleum and gas hidden inside everyday objects—or at least anything made with hydrocarbons, which, it turns out, is most of what’s around you. Every hour, the first commercial version will turn 10 tons of auto waste—tires, plastic, vinyl—into enough natural gas to produce 17 million BTUs of energy (it will use 956,000 of those BTUs to keep itself running).

Popular Science

Friday, December 14, 2007

Thank You, Greens

For helping to block nuclear power plants, the most powerful clean energy source we have. Because of your uneducated antics, tons of nuclear waste gets pumped into the atmosphere each year. By coal plants.

Over the past few decades, however, a series of studies has called these stereotypes into question. Among the surprising conclusions: the waste produced by coal plants is actually more radioactive than that generated by their nuclear counterparts. In fact, fly ash—a by-product from burning coal for power—contains up to 100 times more radiation than nuclear waste.

At issue is coal’s content of uranium and thorium, both radioactive elements. They occur in such trace amounts in natural, or “whole,” coal that they aren’t a problem. But when coal is burned into fly ash, uranium and thorium are concentrated at up to 10 times their original levels.

If we hadn’t stopped building nuclear power plants in the 70s at the rate we were heading, coal plants would have all been replaced by now. Meanwhile, China keeps building more of them.

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Snappy Answers to Stupid Hippies

Funny, and it does provide good answers to dumb green memes. This is why I rag on this stuff so much. The greens really don’t think many of their arguments through or research them enough. They just repeat cant that’s been given to them. 

Monday, December 03, 2007

Pro-Nuclear Power Ad

via videosift.com