Environmental thinking and Nuclear Power

[96Qowner]

I found a nice graphic of where each barrel of crude goes:



http://www.eia.doe.gov/bookshelf/brochures/diesel/

Gasoline and diesel comprise only 30%. All distillates combined are only 44.68%, meaning over 55% is used for other things like fertilizers, plastics, etc. The economy is going to require ever increasing amounts of crude for those uses as well, until it can convert to other processes.

The problem with long-haul shipping and transportation is physics. A given amount of weight requires a given amount of power to move it. There are really not many efficiencies still to be found. Internal combustion gas and diesel are what works best. Hybrid works for city errand-running because you can run electric most of the time. You can even go full electric, because you can store 50-100 miles worth of electricity. But you can't do that for a semi that has to run 8 hours per day. The weight of the batteries becomes counterproductive.

So the problem we have is shipping. We can all drive less. We CAN'T have our present economy with less shipping. And as the economy grows, it will require even more fuel for shipping. Since gas and diesel are only 30% of the problem, looking for savings in the other 55% non-distillates is probably more productive.

All those plastic water bottles, for instance:

Producing the bottles for American consumption required the equivalent of more than 17 million barrels of oil, not including the energy for transportation

http://www.pacinst.org/topics/....html

[Marenta]

Well, that's assuming that you actually get a pure barrel of straight hydrocarbons and not full of other heavy minerals and junk that comes along with crude.

But, I reuse those plastic bags like mad, I have drawers and drawers full of them, the're bank.

[96Qowner]

Heheh, had to edit my post - plastic bags come from natural gas, not crude. Oops. Water bottles are a better example.

[AZhitman]

Heheh, had to edit my post - plastic bags come from natural gas, not crude. Oops. Water bottles are a better example.

...and how many of these "sky-is-falling" dimwits who freak out over anything related to oil, are doing so while swilling on a $4 bottle of filtered water in a disposable plastic bottle?

Yeah. I thought so. More hypocrisy.

FWIW, I bought a fridge that has a replaceable filter. Or, I just guzzle straight from the tap.

How about convenience stores and fast-food restaurants that sell you a soda in a plastic cup? What was wrong with paper? Paper at least bio-degrades eventually... Or can be incinerated... Those plastic Big Gulp cups are gonna be laying around 500 years from now.

[rn79870]

Heheh, had to edit my post - plastic bags come from natural gas, not crude. Oops. Water bottles are a better example.

And as a side note, they are outlawing them (bags) like mad here is SoCal, or at least trying to. Other plans are for up to a 20 cent recycling deposit on them. (Geesh, Conservatives and their save the earth crap.)

[96Qowner]

And we import just under 10 million barrels a day, so that's almost two days worth of our imports, or 0.55%.

We consume 20 million barrels/day, so that means water bottles cost us almost one day's TOTAL consumption.

Just one product - ONE product. (And that doesn't include the cost of shipping it all over the country - water is heavy).

[96Qowner]

And as a side note, they are outlawing them (bags) like mad here is SoCal, or at least trying to. Other plans are for up to a 20 cent recycling deposit on them. (Geesh, Conservatives and their save the earth crap.)

It wouldn't be so bad if they'd load 'em up a little. I get home with a big ol' wad of bags. They'll put, like, three items in a bag. Grrr.

[96Qowner]

Ah, crap!

I've been doing some more research, and it turns out I screwed up. The numbers on that graphics are gallons, not percentages. COMPLETELY different. The entire premise that most of a barrel goes into non-distillates is wrong.

There are 42 gallons in a barrel.

19.15 gallons for gas = 45.6%9.21 gallons diesel = 22%Etc.

So gas and diesel are 67.6%, not 28.36%.

Here's another list of how it breaks down:

While oil from various regions have varying properties, on average, a barrel of crude contains about 19.4 gallons of gasoline, 8.9 gallons of fuel oil (used for home heating oil, diesel fuel, and commercial fuel oil), 4.2 gallons of jet fuel, 2.7 gallons of resid (used as industrial fuel), 2.0 gallons of still gas (used for marine transportation or power), 1.8 gallons of coke (mostly exported as industrial fuel), 1.8 gallons of liquefied gas (think propane, butane, etc.), 1.4 gallons of petrochemical feedstock, 1.3 gallons of asphalt, 0.5 gallons of lubricants, and 0.3 gallons of others.

The total of these products is 2.3 gallons more than 42, due to reprocessing.

http://blogs.oilandgasinvestor...makes/

My apologies.

[Marenta]

Man, I must be a freak.. I reuse like.. everything. I think I've been reusing the same waterbottle when I workout like.. for the last 4 months.. it's a gatorade bottle.. kinda dingy, I suppose I should change it out.

[96Qowner]

.. kinda dingy, I suppose I should change it out.

LOL, yeah, um ... don't go checking out how they harbor and nourish bacteria and leech stuff into your water - it''ll gross you out.

[Marenta]

By the way.. I posted this in GC in the random thread on there, too.. but this is also relevant on here as well, sorry to revive a dead thread, but, you know.. I <3 my job!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGhjlLLyWPQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...lated

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...lated

[audtatious]

A 1.5 MWe wind tower costs about $2 million. You get some economies of scale when you combine them into wind farms - substations, transmission lines, etc. Most are sited in areas with 25-30% wind per day. So that's roughly $5/MWe? Still have that storage problem, but sheesh, one-tenth the cost?

A typical 50-MW wind plant can deliver power at 5 cents/KWh but could be 3.5cents/KWh if an investor-owned utility (IOU) owned and financed the facility instead. So, prices _could_ be cheaper than they are now. Current wind turbine technology is magnitudes better than it was when the frist ones were implemented and as technology advances so does the amount of energy that can be produced.

From a price perspective, it's currently going up. Per Treehugger, there has been an Increase of 74% for Land-Based, and 48% for Offshore Wind Turbines. So, while technology seems to be better the cost of the product itself is more expensive to implement. You would think supply and demand would lower the prices but that has not been the case.

To produce the amount of power required to have that 5 cents/KWh price point, the wind farm must receive constant wind speeds at 11-13mph. This limits the locations where we can have land-based wind farms. Additionally, since you can't store power they are creating then there must be a non-wind electrical grid available to take over when they are not producing. Since these other "providers" would be nuke or coal (or whatever) plants, they must be constantly up and running or you have a grid failure and no power. Why? It takes a while for one of these plants to come online. So in effect, you still need the same amount of current electrical plants available and running all the time to ensure they are available to take over.

What other negative issues are there with wind power? I hear it takes electricity from "the grid" to even get them going to the point that the wind can begin driving them as well.

[96Qowner]

There aren't many negatives to wind power.

It's basically siting issues. Almost the entire Great Plains provides enough wind to run a wind farm. The land is relatively cheap, and the towers don't disturb the ecology. There are some objections about migratory flight paths, but the farms really don't cover much ground and are in groups at 300 ft high or so - pretty obvious obstruction. The main thing is transmission lines to connect them to the national grid. Those cost around $500,000 per mile for the big trunk lines, and $250,000/mile for branch lines. So when you find a good spot to locate the farm, you have to consider how far it is from the nearest line capable of taking the power. The other big problem, as you point out, is how to store the power, since it isn't steady or reliable.

I love the way wind can become a distributed power source. An average household requires about 4KW of power, so a 1.5 MW tower can supply enough electricity for 200 homes at a conservative 26% wind efficiency. You can put about 40 1.5MW towers on each square mile. So 640 acres of land can supply 8000 homes, and all but 2% of that land can still be used for grazing or farming. Puts new meaning into farming, eh? Farm the land, farm the wind. All you need is the transmission line and a substation. The entire State of ND has only 300,000 households. That would only require 30 farms of 100 towers each. It's about $10,000 per household - not a bad capital cost. I have this wild idea (never gonna happen, but just imagine) - picture every farm, or even just lots of farms, with a barn, a silo, and a 1.5MW wind tower. Widely distributed power generation. What if the State or Feds offered a Gov't-backed loan program to get them going? Beats the efficiencies of ethanol, I bet. That's some Populist Socialism I could support.

All we need are two things: Transmission lines and storage. Storage really only becomes an issue if you intend to rely solely or heavily on wind power (no one is proposing that), otherwise it can be distributed across the grid and used elsewhere to supplement baseload generation. And if you can diversify the farms widely enough across the country, there's wind blowing somewhere almost all the time - better baseload reliability.

Here's a wind energy map of the USA. Look at how much of the Plains is rated fair to excellent(orange, pink purple - the pdf file has more detail).

http://www.eere.energy.gov/win...s.asp

And here's a good forum thread I ran across:

http://greenhome.huddler.com/f...es=27

[telcoman]

Fascinating.

This is better than fighting over candidates for sure!