Posts Tagged ‘energy’
oil, black gold, texas tea: riding the long decline
the volatile oil price, based on Brent Crude
Canto: The price of oil, if you’re looking at Brent Crude, is just over $35 per barrel. That’s today, February 4 2016. But what’s Brent Crude, and whose dollars are we talking about, and who if anyone controls the oil price?
Jacinta: Don’t look at me. So we’re going to talk OPEC and Saudi Arabia, and gluts and reserves and peak supply and peak demand and carbon emissions and oil geopolitics now are we?
Canto: Why not? The oil price has just picked up slightly from a 12-year low of just under $30 a barrel, and nobody seems to know what’s causing the volatility, because there are so many players and factors affecting the global market. The uncertainty is as much long-term as short-term. It’s probably fair to say that the glory days of oil, that ineluctably diverse commodity, are behind us, but the decline will be slow, and we’re still a long way from finding a viable alternative in the transport sector.
Jacinta: Well, especially in air transport. So it’s hard to know where to start, but what’s OPEC?
Canto: Well you probably know that it’s an organisation of the major petroleum exporting countries, an organisation with a slightly shifting membership but always centred around the principal exporter, Saudi Arabia. It was founded in 1960, at a time when it was becoming clear that oil was the world’s most bankable commodity, and that most of that commodity was to be found in the Middle East – in Saudi in particular.
Jacinta: Right, and of course OPEC was formed to protect the interests of suppliers, and to ensure sovereignty over supply, against a background of exploitation and corruption. Not that the new ‘owners’ of the oil are any less corrupt than the previous ones.
Canto: I don’t know how useful it is for us to go into all this, I mean surely we don’t want to get caught up in the labyrinthine politics of the Middle East and its antagonists…
Jacinta: No no you’re right, though I do find it all very intriguing. I mean, this oil dependence we have is a recent phenomenon, essentially a 20th century issue, and it has had extraordinary consequences. To take just one example, it is the absolute basis of the wahabist Saud dynasty’s stranglehold on power, and I think it’s fair to say that this hasn’t been a good thing – particularly for the women of the region. I know I’m not alone in finding it demoralising that the rise to riches of Saudi Arabia in recent decades has seen no increase in freedom or in education outside of some narrow technical areas.
Canto: Yes, it’s depressing, so shall we instead focus on the commodity itself, and its future?
what this graph doesn’t tell you is most of this new oil is costly, dirty, hard-to-extract oil, from fracking, tar sands, ocean drilling etc
Jacinta: Fine well its immediate future was secured in the past with the invention of the automobile and the aeroplane. Before that the stuff was mostly used for kerosine, for heating.
Canto: And don’t forget plastics.
Jacinta: Absolutely but as I’ve said, it’s the transport sector that’s most dependent on oil, so how do we solve that problem, assuming we want to wean ourselves from the stuff?
Canto: But are there really any serious alternatives? I mean you mentioned air travel. We’ve heard of electric cars, solar cars, hydrogen cars, but air travel? Remember the Hindenburg?
Jacinta: Well I heard one expert put it this way. The world is largely tooled for liquid fuel – that’s petrol, LPG, diesel etc. That’s an investment of multi-trillions of dollars, an investment that continues every day. And there’s no viable alternative ready to go now or in the foreseeable, and even if there was, trashing all this perfectly functional machinery and all the ancillary technology and business that connects to the oil and gas industry – the consequences need to be realistically considered. You can’t be too simplistic about this stuff. So it is going to be incremental change no matter what.
Canto: So you mean a continual tinkering with current fuels to minimise their environmental impact while experimenting with new forms of fuel which we might be able to exploit without too much retooling.
Jacinta: Yes, at least not in the short term.
Canto: So how does LPG compare with petrol in terms of viability and environmental impact? I know there are those in the oil and gas industries who point to gas as a ‘green’ alternative, while others like Naomi Klein dismiss it as just another fossil fuel. Is it plausible or sensible to aim for LPG as the predominant road fuel while developing renewable alternatives?
Jacinta: Well there seems to be quite a few problems with LPG technology in cars – lots of extra plumbing and wiring, things to go wrong, high costs to fix problems, no doubt largely due to it being a minority system. And that’s the main problem – LPG has been around for a long time now but has never really taken off and been seriously competitive with petrol. That means availability is limited – a major inconvenience – and maintenance costs will be higher. That doesn’t look like changing.
Canto: How about biofuels? They were all the rage a while back but they seem to have gone out of fashion. Something about wasting good food, or grain or whatever, and the precious land to grow it on, on something so trivial as travel.
Jacinta: Well yes, there are those problems but there’s a new, or newish idea being worked on re biofuels – the use of algae. But I plan to write about that, and other possible solutions, on our other blog, Solutions OK.
Canto: Yes, and that’s also the place to consider the future of autonomous vehicles, and even autonomous electric vehicles, because it’s quite likely, isn’t it, that if these vehicles eventually take off (and I don’t mean flying vehicles, though they’ve also been developed), they could revolutionise our road usage, and why wouldn’t we use a better source of energy, such as electricity – already a proven technology for road transport, pre-dating the infernal combustion engine, or at least its use in motor vehicles.
the future – vehicles so autonomous they refuse to have passengers
Jacinta: Yes, so talk about future energy solutions is verboten here, and talk about geopolitics is obviously beneath us, so what’s left?
Canto: We’ll think of something, next time.
the reveries of a solitary wa*ker: wa*k 4 (universal matters)
could someone be spreading BS over the internet?
The universe is more turbulent than we imagined. It’s a quantum computer. It’s nothing but information. Where’s all the lithium? Is it really spinning, and are we anywhere near the axis? What was in the beginning? Pure energy? What does that mean? Energy without particles? The energy coalesced into particles, so I’ve read. Sounds a bit miraculous to me. The fundamental particles being quarks and electrons. Leptons? But quarks aren’t leptons, they’re fermions but leptons are also fermions but these are but names. Quarks came together in triplets via a strong force, but from whence this force? Something to do with electromagnetism, but that’s just a name. I’m guessing that physicists don’t know how these forces and particles emerged, they can only deduce and describe them mathematically. Quarks and leptons are elementary fermions, that’s to say particles with half-integer spin, according to the spin-statistics theorem. Only one fermion can occupy a particular quantumstate at one time, that’s according to the Pauli exclusion principle. Fermions include more than just quarks and leptons (electrons and neutrinos), they can be composite particles made up of an odd number of quarks and leptons, hence baryons made up of quark triplets. Fermions are often opposed to bosons in the sense that they’re associated with particles (matter) but bosons are more associated with force, but the intimate relation between matter and energy blurs this distinction. Anyway this strong force pulled quarks together to form protons and neutrons, while an electromagnetic force pulled together protons and electrons and voila, hydrogen atoms. All this in the turbulent immediate post-bang time. Hydrogen fused with hydrogen to form helium and so on all the way up to lithium, but that’s not far up because lithium comes after helium in the periodic table. The amount of hydrogen and helium in the universe fits precisely big bang expectations, and in fact is bestevidence for that theory but where’s all the lithium? There’s only a third as much lithium isotope 7 (with four neutrons) as there should be, but that’s okay cause there’s a superabundance of lithium-6. No, not okay. Some argue that it’s a big problem for the big bang theory, others not, surprise surprise. The period of creation of hydrogen and helium is called the primordial nucleosynthesis period, and it covers the time from a few seconds to 20 minutes or so after the bang. More precisely, the heavier isotopes of hydrogen, as well as helium and some lithium and beryllium, the next one in complexity, were created then and everything else was created much later, in stellar evolution and dissolution. Obviously the big bang released a serious amount of energy, and then things quickly cooled, permitting somehow the creation of elementary leptons such as electrons and electron neutrinos. During these first instances there was also a huge degree of inflation. The earliest instants of theuniverse are referred to as the Planck epoch, and it’s fair to say that what we know for certain about that minuscule epoch is equally minuscule, but it’s believed that the different fundamental forces posited today were then unified, and gravitation, the weakest of those forces in the present universe, was then much stronger, and maybe subject to quantum effects, which is interesting because though I know little of all this stuff largely due to mathematical ignorance, and of course inattention, I do know that gravity and the quantum world have proved irreconcilable since first theorised. Needless to say the Planck epoch is very different from ours, and it’s at this scale that quantum gravitational effects may be realised. We can’t test this though even with our best particle accelerators. It’s one for the future. Meanwhile, the renormalisation problem. Well actually renormalisation began as a provisional solution to the problem of infinities.
We describe space-time as a continuum. So there are three dimensions of space, what we call Euclidean space, and a dimension of time. But how does that actually work? Perhaps not very well. I’m talking about a classic-mechanical picture, but in relativistic contexts time is enmeshed with space and velocity and gravity. Cosmologists combine the lot into a single manifold called a Minkowski space. All I know of this is that it involves an independent notion of spacetime intervals and is mathematically more complicated than I can begin to comprehend, though supposedly it’s a relatively simple special case of a Lorentzian manifold, which itself is a special case of a pseudo-Riemannian manifold. I’m engaging in mathematics, not humour. Or vice versa. All this is beside the point, it’s just that trying to reconcile quantum theory and relativity is impossible without the creation of infinities, and infinities are much disliked by many cosmologists, being far too messy, and time is out of fashion too, the quantum world simply ignores it. And we still don’t know what happened to the lithium.
Mathematics has so far been absolutely central to our understanding of the universe. So is the universe or multiverse no more than a mathematical construct? If it is, it’s one that we’ve not yet figured out, and it’s unlikely that we ever will, it just gets more complicated as we develop more sophisticated tools to examine it. I’ve always suspected that the universe/multiverse is as complex as we are capable, with our increasingly ‘precise’ tools and increasingly sophisticated maths, of making it, and so will continue to get more complex, but that’s a sort of sacrilegious solipsism, isn’t it? The universe as increasingly complex projection of an increasingly complex collective consciousness? Is that what they mean when they say it’s a hologram? Probably not.
One more point about infinity. Max Tegmark says that the idea of a finite universe never made sense to him. How could the universe have a boundary, and if so, what’s on the other side? Another way of thinking about this is, if the big bang involved an explosion or, more accurately, a massive, near-instantaneous expansion, what did it expand into? Did this expansion involve a contraction on the other side of the boundary? It’s said that space-time began with the big bang, so there’s no outside. How can we really know that though? Of course if you believe that absolutely everything began with the big bang, then you’ll believe in a finite universe, as the bang began with a particular mass-energy point-bundle, which would have to be finite, and could not be added to or subtracted from, according to what I know about conservation laws. Anyway, enough of all this paddling in the shallows. It’s funny, though, I’ve recently encountered people who are extremely reluctant to talk about such matters, even in my shallow way. They actually suffer from ‘cosmological fear’ (my invention). Something to do with existential lostness, and mortality.
a couple of controversial subjects
OUR NUCLEAR FUTURE?
Our state government has, surprisingly, ordered a Royal Commission into nuclear power, which will bring on the usual controversy, but everything I’ve read on the science and energy front suggests that our energy future will rely on a mix of sources, including renewables, clean coal (if that’s not an oxymoron), nuclear energy and perhaps even fusion. Fukushima scared everyone, but it was an old reactor, built in the wrong place, and nuclear technology has advanced considerably since then. I hope to write more on this, probably on my much-neglected solutions ok? blog.
PNG WITCH-HUNTING GOES ON AND ON
VLAD SOKHIN These men call their gang “Dirty Dons 585” and admit to rapes and armed robberies in the Port Moresby area. They say two-thirds of their victims are women. Photo taken from The Global Mail
I was shocked to hear the other day about people (mostly women, but also children) being accused of witchcraft/sorcery in PNG, right on our doorstep, over the past couple of years, and hunted down and brutally slaughtered, often in bizarrely sexualised ways. Somehow this story has passed me by until now. The country, or part of it, seems to have been gripped by a witch craze, like those that broke out in Europe from time to time, especially in the seventeenth century, not really so long ago. And they fizzled out as mysteriously as they burst into being. In fact the USA’s Committee for Skeptical Inquiry was reporting on these horrors from back in 2008, with some 50 victims claimed for that year. The article ended on an optimistic note:
Papua New Guinea is in dire need of skepticism, education, and legal reform. It appears that the latter is finally happening. These latest horrific killings, and no doubt the ensuing media outrage, have prompted the country’s Constitutional Review and Law Reform Commission to create new laws to prevent (or at least reduce) witchcraft-related deaths.
However, this 2013 article, from the sadly no longer extant Global Mail, indicates that the problem is far more deeply-rooted and long-standing than first thought, and it’s mutating and shifting to different regions of the country. Brutality is on the increase, fuelled by drugs and alcohol, but above all by massive social dysfunction, with children being regularly indoctrinated in methods of public torture. Sanguma, or sorcerers, are usually blamed for any deaths, and gangs of unemployed men (and almost all the men of the region are unemployed) go hunting for them amongst the most marginalised and unprotected women in the community. The article makes for harrowing reading, going into some detail on the suffering of these women, and highlighting the intractability of the problem. There are heroes too, including Catholic priests and nuns working at the coal-face. Unfortunately, tossing around terms like skepticism, education and legal reform won’t cut it here. This is a problem of deep social malaise, suspicion, superstition, poverty and despair that will take generations to resolve, it seems.