New Mexicans Conspire?

In a stealth move, New Mexican Senators Domenici and Bingaman inserted unlimited loan guarantees for nuclear power in the Senate Energy Bill. This provides the ability to obtain very low interest loans for the construction of new nuclear power plants. You might think that this is just standard corruption, a quid pro quo for financial support from the industry. But is it? None of the proposed new reactors is intended to be sited in New Mexico. You'd think that covertly adding such a thing to the legislation would at least have some kind of benefit for New Mexico like construction contracts or other pork. What is going on here?

We should not forget that the Governor of New Mexico is a former Secretary of Energy. While the Arizona Corporation Commission dithers about net metering, the Governator fumbles the million solar roof project, the Nevada legislature can't meet for long enough to keep up with technology and Utah is lulled by Northwest hyrdo, he is cornering the market on big solar. Why shouldn't he? New Mexico is right in there in the best resource. But, how to preserve the market in electricity? That is tricky. Texas has wind that is getting too cheap to meter, the Northeast states are implementing renewable energy standards. It is just the South and Midwest that are complacent in their coal use. What is needed to keep them off their own Real Energy long enough for his efforts to make them dependent on New Mexico and it's ultracheap solar power? Remember, once you go renewable, there is no reason to switch again, so if there are going to be non-local renewables, the markets have to be developed NOW.

Bait and Switch is an old game. Promise nuclear power, then just run it out of business with the taxpayers taking the fall. A single high-voltage high-capacity direct current transmission line from New Mexico to Georgia puts twelve of the proposed new plants out of business only a quarter of the way into their design lifetime with only a quarter of the very low interest loans paid off. Upon default, the taxpayers take the fall and the Richardson Solar Power Monopoly is in place for the next two centuries at least. Make no mistake. The Department of Energy has always been all about playing hardball, beating the Soviets in bombs, running weapons labs in complete disregard of nuclear safety, and crushing foreign uranium markets. For DOE, civilian nuclear power has always been a useful idiot rather than a real priority. Richardson is looking centuries ahead in the solar power projects he is supporting in New Mexico. Just look at this small sample:


Solar Reduction of Carbon
Pueblo of Pojoaque / SolareC - $363,000
This innovative development effort will test a full-scale concentrating solar power system. This system uses sunlight to break down CO2 and allows direct production of electricity and hydrogen, which can either be burned at night to provide electricity or to produce synthetic fuels. If successful, this technology could revolutionize the solar energy world by providing an innovative means of storing solar energy power for later use.


Solar Combined Heat and Power Project
New Mexico State University / Heliodyne--$280,000
This project will provide a demonstration facility that uses solar energy to produce electricity for a large building while using the waste heat from the system to heat and cool the building. This approach could provide a highly efficient system that could be employed in commercial and state buildings across New Mexico.


Utility Scale Concentrating Solar Project
UNM / SkyFuel--$226,000
This project will develop an improved capability to produce efficient concentrating solar power panels at a lower cost than is presently available. It could result in development of megawatt scale solar power installations in New Mexico and elsewhere along with new manufacturing facilities in New Mexico.

The question is, does this count as a conspiracy or is Richardson just making convenient use of the state delegation's penchant for pampering their funders? It may be hard to tell. What is for certain is that Richardson is preparing for a future of large scale dispatchable solar power at costs that will drive new nuclear power plants right out of business because base load is just not going to matter anymore. Convenient corruption or sly scheming, it is the taxpayers who will foot the bill for keeping competitive local renewables out of Richardson's intended market. Even the Sunshine state, with it's 10 kW limit on net metering, should watch out for the trap. At least, if we are lucky, giving the nuclear industry enough rope to hang itself, even at tax payer expense, will be a less ignominous end than another Three Mile Island. Have you run your evacuation drill lately? Did it work? Just like New Orleans?

Richardson is running for President, and he might be a good one depending on his ability to look past New Mexico's interests to those of the country. But this development should give even his staunchest supporters second (or third of fourth) thoughts.

Facile Fables

Here it is, the report that will put us all at ease about fossil energy: Facing the Hard Truths about Energy.

Again, it is necessary to thank Alan Kelly for acknowledging that global warming may be a problem, or at least regulations related to controlling global warming could be a problem for oil companies. First, let's just note that factual errors of the most significant kind seem to be present in the report. The loudest howler seems to be this: on the core question, "Can incremental oil and natural gas supply be brought on-line, on-time, and at a reasonable price to meet future demand without jeopardizing economic growth?" they seem to have misquoted those who have tried to answer this question independently by a factor of two. Misquoting in that way seems just the sort of thing they like to do, so at least we know we are in for more of the same.

So, let's take their key findings in turn to see it there is anything worth knowing:

Findings:

1) Coal, oil, and natural gas will remain indispensable to meeting total projected energy demand growth.

As we have seen here, we can dispense with coal rather quickly and while achieving the efficiency to use photosynthesis to meet our current liquid fuel use is not possible, advances in this area suggest that meeting a good fraction can be done. The improved efficiency that comes with shifting the rest to wind and solar far outpaces the moderate efficiency measures they are calling for.

2) The world is not running out of energy resources, but there are accumulating risks to continuing expansion of oil and natural gas production from the conventional sources relied upon historically. These risks create significant challenges to meeting projected energy demand.

Here we may agree, to a point, we are only just beginning to participate again in real energy and there is more than enough, but what they mean is that the world is not running out of coal, oil and gas, and on this, it is very hard not to laugh. The world is always running out of these things so long as they are being used. Perhaps they are admitting that "conventional sources" the kind they have always said there are plenty of, are depleting to the point where they can't meet demand.

3) To mitigate these risks, expansion of all economic energy sources will be required, including coal, nuclear, renewables, and unconventional oil and natural gas. Each of these sources faces significant challenges—including safety, environmental, political, or economic hurdles—and imposes infrastructure requirements for development and delivery.

Of the sources listed, only renewables are economic and have the capacity to expand, everything else is more expensive and hastens depletion. It is also interesting that safety, the environment, politics and the economy are considered hurdles rather than just the things we want to sustain. I guess when you are in the business of creating oil spills, everything looks like a beach to defile.

4) “Energy Independence” should not be confused with strengthening energy security. The concept of energy independence is not realistic in the foreseeable future, whereas U.S. energy security can be enhanced by moderating demand, expanding and diversifying domestic energy supplies, and strengthening global energy trade and investment. There can be no U.S. energy security without global energy security.

We must hitch our wagon to dictatorships. Almost all of the projected growth of supply (yes the report projects growth) comes from the Middle East. Brazil, on the other hand, may seek energy independence since they are a smaller portion of the the market and so are less important to the National Petroleum Council's business interests. Oh well, who would expect any patriotism from multi-nationals? Best to cut them out of the energy supply entirely. We're not dipping too deeply into the report here, but it should be noted that their idea of security seems to include the notion that strategic reserves allow for Venezuela or Iran to be taken off-line for more than a year each (ES p. 27). More wars for oil would seem likely to do for US security what the current oil war does. Multi-nationals may not be the best source for advice on these kinds of issues. They would like us to provide security services for them but this does not enhance our security.

5) A majority of the U.S. energy sector workforce, including skilled scientists and engineers, is eligible to retire within the next decade. The workforce must be replenished and trained.

Apparently we need to encourage students to train for jobs in a dying industry. Now, if this industry can't fund it's own training program then they must know they are cooked. But, we should look to bar the treasury doors since the retirement of this work force that they warn of here may, in part, be insured through the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation even as these types of companies move their assets offshore. Renewable energy is where the job growth potential is.

6) Policies aimed at curbing CO2 emissions will alter the energy mix, increase energy-related costs, and require reductions in demand growth.

This statement seems nowhere supported by facts. What we know is that wind is cheaper than gas wholesale and solar is cheaper than coal retail except very close to the mines. The only place where wind and solar compete directly now with oil (which is too expensive to really compete with coal except on a few islands) is in home heating. In most places, geothermal heat pumps make wind and solar the better deal. While it is silly to burn coal at a power plant and lose more than half the energy up the stack to run baseboard heaters, running efficient electric heating with wind or solar, which are not heat engines, makes loads of sense. So, yes the energy mix will alter, but costs will come down. Supply growth can lessen because wind and solar are not nearly as wasteful as combustion. Requiring reduction in carbon demand growth will reduce energy related costs (except for oil, coal and gas shareholders) rather than increase them.

Now, let's just run through those findings one more time: 1) We have to have oil, coal and gas to meet demand. 2) We're not running out but we are. 3) So, need to rely on other sources. 4) US security is hostage to oil company security: need a hand-out. 5) Need another hand-out to handle retirement of work force. and 6) Global warming is expensive so demand can't be met.

Laughter is the best medicine: Hope you'll see the humor in this even through the bathos.

Closets

The closets of ghost energy are crammed full of skeletons. It is long past time to clean them out and as it turns out, real energy may need the storage space, not for skeletons, but rather to smooth the transition to full participation in and celebration of real energy.

Two newspaper articles are out talking about storage of real energy. Both articles fail to notice that the US grid already runs on about 20% stored real energy through hydroelectric power. About 24 GW of that capacity can run backwards rather than just throttle so we already have quite a lot of what we might need. And, the articles don't notice that distributed renewable power is not very intermittent. The wind is always blowing somewhere and clouds rarely cover all of a continent. The trick is to shuttle the power from where it is produced to where it is needed. If you have enough capacity to meet the peak use, then you don't really care about storing the extra power you don't need when you are using less, you just find something fun and interesting to do with it. Remember, real energy is extravagant. Think of the amazing fecundity and diversity of a rain forest. It is about prosperity not scarcity.

But, before we get to the point where we produce more energy than we use most of the time, methods of storage can help to retire ghost energy plants more quickly. So, lets just list the kinds of storage that are covered in the articles and here on the real energy blog so we know a few of the options. We'll organize it in the types of energy physicists like to use.

Thermal:

Hot or cold, thermal storage adds a certain amount of extra time to use the energy. In some cases like the high thermal mass house, you are just avoiding using energy that you don't really need. The daily fluctuations of external temperature are not important with good insulation and a high heat capacity. In one article ice is used to shift electricity use from day time to night time and also save on over all use while in the another, molten salts are used to keep solar energy for use at night. You can see how these might work together.

Chemical:

Batteries have the potential for large scale storage and are mentioned in both articles. The anticipated sizes run up to 6 MWh. The batteries mention in the article are not exactly flow batteries which are also used together with wind farms and run up to 12 MWh. We have also looked at using ammonia as a chemical storage method and producing hydrogen for later use is also a chemical method though it experiences high thermal loses. Aluminum can also be used for chemical storage and used to produce hydrogen on demand.

Mechanical:

Here we have two choices, potential energy or kinetic energy. Both articles mention gas pressure storage, essentially a form of potential energy similar to damming a river. The size of the facility mentioned is about 100 MW and presumably can run for a day or two. About half the energy comes from compressed air and half from natural gas. One article mentions flywheels which store kinetic energy. In this case the flywheel stores 18 MWs or 5 kWh. One can reduce the tensile strength requirements for a flywheel and increase its capacity by usinging a magenetic track. Then the strength requirements are compressive and, so, much simpler.

Electrical:

Capacitors are used to store power when very large currents pulses are needed as for example in inertial confinement fusion. These capacitors store about 3 kWh. Super capacitors are less bulky and are being developed for transportation applications.

Magnetic:

Superconducting Magnetic Energy Storage is used in some applications with capacities moving toward 20 MWh.

Electromagnetic:

For very high energy density, excited nuclear states might be used. This is actually a new listing, but not very practical just now.

The complaint in the articles is that power storage adds cost to the the electric power distribution system. But, pretty clearly, the decreasing cost of renewable energy is making storage more attractive to utilities. Thermal storage in solar plants that work with thermal energy anyway is a natural extension to their capabilities. Similarly, those that work using chemical energy are designed to store energy from the beginning. It is clear that flywheel and magnetic storage are already being used for power conditioning. Very shortly, the cost of renewable power will drop well below the cost of other sources. For wind, it is already the cheapest way to produce power in many places. As it turns out, once we're ready to chase the skeletons our of the ghost energy closet, we'll be able to put in a great new closet organizer with slots for all kinds of storage that will make the exorcism of the ghosts all the more rapid. Energy storage is not an Achilles' heel for real energy, but rather a stepping stone to full abundance. Daniel Arvizu should know better.

Toadstools

When forests meet industrialization, they lose and along with the loss go the noble woodland professions in a romantic mist. Deep ecologists like Gary Snyder make us aware that this loss is unacceptable and at least on post-industrial Turtle Island forests are making a bit of a comeback. So, if you can work with the strengthening poison ivy you have more opportunities to get close to the forest floor and look at the various kinds of fungi that grow there.

The cursed report we have been anticipating is due out this week and since it seems that its conclusions have been predetermined since at least February it should come as no surprise at all that we'll be hearing that we can make poison ivy even itchier to our heart's content. So, with plentiful ghost energy sources and constant attacks on the idea that their use is dangerous we might think that an effort to replace ghost energy with real energy from forests would be completely pointless. But, these grave robbers have shown themselves to be untrustworthy so checking up on them makes some sense.

Dave Rutledge at Caltech, has tried to compare what they say with what they do to try understand just how much more carbon dioxide can be added to the atmosphere if we try just about as hard as we are trying now. His talk attempts to figure out what profile of emissions should be used when calculating the amount of temperature and sea level rise we might expect in the next 400 years. Based on the way that ghost energy companies have actually behaved rather than on what they say they can do, he finds that none of the scenarios used in the climate reports we have been following seem realistic because they all over estimate the amount of carbon available to further pollute the atmosphere. If his analysis is accurate, then this is pretty good news on the climate front, we just barely avoid the so-called dangerous climate change through no effort of our own. All of the economists will have to revise their models, but they would have needed to do that anyway because they have, for the most part, missed the prosperity real energy sustains.

Dave's analysis, like the ones we have already looked at that point in this direction, will need more checking but we can see a little motivation for looking to the forests for fuel. Now, just as in Brazil, the issue of cutting forests to make fuel needs careful attention. The new effort in Georgia intends to use forest products that are produced anyway in the lumber and paper industries there. They are competing (at the industrial level) with a method that uses enzymes to accomplish the same goal. So far, the enzyme method is pretty expensive, while the method to be used in Georgia could be considered wasteful since so much heat is needed to turn the wood waste into a gas. Both processes involve restrictive intellectual property. If Dave's analysis is correct, we may want to get this sort of thing going faster than patents might allow. So, I'm going to throw this out into the public domain:

The enzymes needed to break down wood or straw are naturally occurring is some kinds of fungi. Lentinus tigrinus in particular can grow quickly in straw because of the enzymes it produces. A mushroom is mostly protein but it also contains fiber and carbohydrate, the last of which is fermentable. So, one could produce protein from straw or sawdust and at the same time draw off the carbohydrates to produce fuel. A bit of reprocessing of the fiber may also yield further fuel. The process might even be made recursive. Most importantly, they do not require any extra sunlight, so they do not compete for real energy input. The fungi can be grown in old mines or in tall buildings so that forests or hay fields that collect the real energy need not be displaced to process the real energy. Suppose you have an unused 40 ft silo with a 14 ft diameter. You rig it up so that an interior scaffold can hold growing trays that pack at a typical square bale density leaving a similar space for fruiting. Then you can use the hay from a single cutting of about 16 acres to grow a mushroom crop. But since the mushrooms mature in under 15 days, you can do four crops before the next hay cutting. So a single silo of this size can service 60 acres or more if the silo use is extended past the hay growing season. Compared to about 8 ton of carbohydrate per acre per year for corn, we might expect about 1 ton of carbohydrate per acre per year (three cuttings) but the protein yield will be a bit larger than for corn and without a high nitrogen fertilizer input. The used mushroom mash should have a good value as chicken, hog or fish feed. (Talapia scraps can be used to make biodiesel.) To get started though, making a portion of the crop gastronomic would help to pay for the scaffolding costs. At about a dollar per pound wholesale, mushrooms easily beat corn on price even at $4 per bushel by factor of 1.5 adjusting for yield.

Cellulosic ethanol with no intellectual property to slow down implementations. Maybe Gary will write us another mushroom poem to celebrate.

"So here's to the mushroom family
A far-flung friendly clan
For food, for fun, for poison
They are a help to man."

Necromancers

Hecate, the queen of ghosts, is sometimes considered to be Agamemnon's daughter Iphigeneia who was sacrificed to get a favorable wind to invade Troy. This was the seed that eventually led to Agamemnon's murder by his wife Clytemnestra. She was later killed by Iphigeneia's brother Orestes. Out of these stories came the birth of tragedy as a dramatic form. This form, together with comedy have fascinated us ever since. Consideration of Real Energy leads us to to look on the modern devotees of Hecate, the ghost energy necromancers, in a comic light. Their Petroleum Council report on how much more ghost energy they insist we need has been haunting these pages along with the secretive offices of government like bad penny. So, it was with much mirth that the imminence of their report was the occasion for a fairly elaborate joke.

The Yes Men volunteer to give presentations on behalf of corporations that take themselves a little too seriously. The have, for example, announced that Dow Chemical will liquidate Union Carbide to pay for the clean up of the Bhopal disaster. To get the joke, you need to understand that corporations are not allowed to behave ethically or take responsibility for the harm they cause because this could harm the stockholders' financial interests. Corporations, however they may feel, must wait for a legal authority to assign responsibility and they are pretty much required to defend themselves from being assigned that responsibility through legal arguments and political influence or else they fail in their prime fiduciary responsibilities. So, in the case of an unintended accident like that in India or the big oil spill in Alaska, they must make every effort not to accept blame. So, when the Yes Men announced that Dow took full responsibility for the disaster in India, it gave us all a good laugh.

The joke the Yes Men perpetrated in the middle of June was to present a new product on behalf of ExxonMobil called Vivoleum. Vivoleum is a biofuel rendered from human corpses, the supply of which is increased by global warming. They were invited to present before a meeting of oil people in Canada because the group was lusting after news of a report being prepared by the Petroleum Council that is going to say that the outlook for oil is very cheerful, at least this is what I took away from Alan Kelly's presentation in February. So, when a speaker's agency offered the Yes Men volunteers, they were happy to take them, no questions asked.

How far they were able to carry off the joke is pretty amazing. They gave a slide presentation on the new corpse rendered biofuel, and then got attendees to light candles purportedly made from the body of and ExxonMobil worker who volunteered to be sacrificed. Iphigeneia was tricked into her sacrifice by the promise of marriage to the hero Achilles, who, if he knew of this, really was a heel. The meeting began to cotton on when they watched this memorial video for the ExxonMobil worker. After that, the Yes Men were escorted from the building by police officers at the insistence of the meeting organizers.

But, the devotees of Hecate can't seem to laugh off a good joke. The access to the Yes Men's web site was shut down, and only allowed to be restored after ExxonMobil's name was removed. Since there was never going to be any real confusion over the use of their name, one needed to be licking ones chops for the Petroleum Council's report to be taken in to begin with, the use is protected fair use as parody. For Hecate's minions to force the removal of the web site under color of law is very likely to be a crime. But, what more can be expected of this family, so like that of Atreus. May we just hope that Hermione will somehow escape the tangles of fate and emerge from the dark times that drive them to such excess as a purveyor of lubricants rather than fuel.

Tabby

Some people think cement is boring and just soldier on anyway. They consider the considerable amount of ghost energy that is used in making cement and try to figure out ways to reduce it. The proposed solution, geopolymeric cement actually has historic, folkloric and even quasi-automotive aspects so it is puzzling why it would be considered dull. Monbiot is single minded in his effort to find ways to reduce carbon dioxide emission while preserving a civilized life. In converting from temperamental Portland cement to more durable geopolymeric cement he finds an 80% reduction in emission.

Owing to natural gas supplies from Russia, Monbiot tends to support the the idea of pumping carbon dioxide into deep saline aquifers to store it in a relatively stable liquid form while still using ghost energy. He runs into difficulty though when considering home heating because he needs two sets of pipes, one to bring in the gas and one to return the carbon dioxide to a central location for liquification. He feels that the timescale for reducing emissions is so short that a complete transition to real energy may not be possible before a 90% reduction in emissions is required. There are actually three sets of pipes connecting a typical British home and it seems to me that Monbiot has overlooked this. One set brings in natural gas, one set brings in water and one set carries water away. If Monbiot is looking for an extra pipe, it seems to me that the last set would work just fine for his purposes. A slight negative pressure would draw flue gas from his boilers and an application of this technology at the egress would condense the carbon dioxide in the manner he desires. With a high carbon dioxide partial pressure in the pipe a couple of other benefits occur. Anoxic bioprocessing of the sewage on the trip through the pipe will produce methane which can be mixed back with the natural gas while the carbonated water is just about perfect for biofuel production using algae and light. In gloomy England, he may want to use wind powered artificial light, but it does get around the land use issues that worry him. Deficiencies in the third set of pipes for this purpose would really be a matter of maintenance to correct rather than new infrastructure so that his timescale could be met.

But, let's not deal further with such spirits and turn to real sequestration using real energy (note to George: Klaus has cost estimates here, drop me a line if you don't have a subscription). In order to counter-act our interference in the geological carbon cycle we need to return carbon to the ground. But, as Lackner points out, there is not really enough room in the ground whence we have summoned the carbon to put it all back. Thus, he considers harvesting metal ions from silicate rocks in order to produce carbonates which can be left exposed on the surface of the Earth for very long periods without risk of the carbon returning to the atmosphere. He would have coal burned at rock quarries (it takes about five or six times the mass of rock to convert the carbon dioxide to carbonates so you bring the carbon to the rock) to produce power without releasing carbon dioxide. Like Monbiot, he still flirts with ghosts. But it seems a little silly to do for ourselves what real energy does for us, and surely the weathering of rock on the continents produces an abundant supply of the metal ions Lackner requires throughout our oceans and estuaries. Calcium ions, together with carbon dioxide are the raw material our of which corals and shellfish form their exoskeletons. Weathering of rock is a real energy process and the growth of these creatures is a real energy process and both are the real geological carbon cycle. Ghost energy is largely an accident that is only significant because it has had such a long time to accumulate. Most carbon sits in carbonates.

How can we participate in this real energy process while also reducing our reliance on Portland cement? This also turns out to be interesting in historic, folkloric and quasi-automotive ways. The only puzzle is: how did we killed our oysters? The answer is that we have overfed them. Historically, the Chesapeake Bay produced about 700,000 tons of oysters each year and since the wet flesh weight is less that 10% of the total weight, most of this was a harvest of calcium carbonate. Folklorically, you could walk across the bay on oyster reefs. And, in a quasi-automotive manner, crushed oyster shells once made permeable driveways near the Bay though now they are used for chicken feed and oyster restoration.

How does the carbon in 700,000 tons of oyster shells compare with the carbon in the 7 million tons of carbon dioxide emitted from home heating in Maryland in 1990? Well carbon is about 12% of the weight of the shells and about 27% of the weight of the gas so
a historic oyster harvest can sequester about 4.4% of a year's worth carbon from home heating. Or, 23 years of harvest can make up for each year we continue to use oil and gas for heating. This is not planting trees! This is permanent sequestration!

What could we do with all those shells? Tabby is a building material made from oyster shells that hearkens back to a day when we didn't use ghost energy. Returning to it's use may make some sense. But to do that, we've got to reduce the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus flowing into the Bay (and the Gulf on Mexico) because the anoxic conditions they produce, which might be useful in a sewer pipe (above), kill the oysters, crabs and other sea life that can help us in cleaning up our carbon mess. It is not enough to reduce the amount of carbon used to make nitrogen fertilizer, we also need to manage much more carefully where it ends up when we are done with it.

Three Cornered Ghost

Gas, oil and coal form ghostly triangles in a number of ways. Our necromancy for one affects our necromancy for the other two: as gas becomes harder to come by, we turn to coal, for example. Or, when the body count begins to rise in our efforts to secure oil supplies, thoughts again turn to coal.

There is one particular triangle that turns out to be very important and that is the shape of an oil fields production with time. When an oil field is discovered, its production increases as more and more wells are drilled to draw it out of its grave. But once one of these wells run dry, the rest soon follow and there a steep drop in production. This triangular shape forms the basis for an analysis which looks at the rate of discovery of oil fields to estimate future production integrated over all oil fields. Oil is the easiest (and most dangerous) of the three to transport so people generally look at the world supply in this case while local supplies are more important for the other two. The analysis of oil production is made difficult because oil companies tend to lie about what they have discovered to boost their share prices but it is thought that oil production has already reached its apex or soon will.

It is usually assumed that, at some expense, declining gas and oil supplies can be replaced by coal because there are centuries of reserves. Even George Monbiot, in his new book Heat makes this assumption though perhaps his goal of reducing energy use is reason enough to leave this unexamined. A new look at the available data throws this assumption into question. Using the same sort of predictive modeling that has been applied oil production, it could be that coal production will peak in fifteen years.

Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute gives an interesting summary and analysis of the report. Here, I want to look at its very suprising contention that coal production in the US has already peaked in terms of energy extracted.

Coal comes in various grades. The best, anthracite, contains the most energy and is the cleanest burning. Advertisers, attempting to displace a cleaner, more efficient and pleasant alternative used to say that a lady's dress would stay ghost white on a train ride through New York because the engine burned anthracite. Advertising is usually needed to get people to choose something so deadly.

Until recently the cost of coal in terms of mining deaths in the US has been declining owing to better regulation and, while the total mining deaths since 1900 still out number the oil war deaths, the numbers are becoming comparable. Grades of coal below anthracite are progressively softer and yield less energy. As can be seen in the last link, the number of miners has been growing recently (figures in include office workers) and, as might be expected, the amount of coal produced is also increasing, but what the German report says is that the amount of energy being produced from all this dangerous effort is going down. This is because softer coal is replacing harder coal. So, getting the number of mining deaths declining again is going to take a great deal of effort since more and more miners will be needed to mine more and more coal of lesser quality to just keep even on energy production.

It is not clear that the analysis applied to oil production works in just the same way for coal. In terms of energy extraction, the US is past its peak production for oil (1970s), gas (this decade) and now coal. But, whereas no amount extra fiddling gets an oil field to produce what is once did after it starts to decline, extra money could make coal production increase. We just have to pay more miners for less energy per miner as we have already begun to do. But, one thing looks to be similar, the cost in money should increase for coal just as it has for gas and schemes to replace gas or oil with coal will be more expensive as the trend towards less productive mining continues.

The triangles of ghost energy lead inevitably to disappointment. The shape of real energy is completely different. Striving is rewarded evermore richly as we hone our skills in participating in it. Costs come down as our efforts increase, reaching a sustainable plateau that is not set by some fixed lower limit on cost per unit energy but rather by what we will find satisfactory.