DebateGate
General Category => 3DHS => Topic started by: Amianthus on June 14, 2008, 08:04:46 PM
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By Robert X. Cringely
bob@cringely.com External Link
When this column first appeared in 1997, the price of oil in 2007 dollars was about $20 per barrel. This week it is $122 per barrel -- more than six times as high. Many things besides the price of oil have changed in those 11 years. Thanks to Moore's Law a new PC today is typically 25-30 times as powerful as the machines we had in 1997 yet costs less than half as many dollars to buy. Consider inflation and the cost of computing is even lower. Our new PCs are substantially more energy-efficient on a per-MIPS basis, too. Though the bigger shift of attitude might simply be that now we care about how much power our computer is using versus simply not noticing a decade ago. Back then data center power consumption was inconsequential compared to the cost of Internet bandwidth. Today Google builds its data centers where the power is, not where the fiber or even the users are. Power is everything in modern computing and is becoming ever more important to our lives in general. The high cost of energy is starting to cause real pain in our society and real pain is, unfortunately, about the only incentive strong enough to make us change our ways.
I know a little bit about the oil business, which is at the root of our energy crisis today. At one point my job was to write about the international oil industry. I worked off and on in the Middle East back then and attended OPEC meetings in Vienna and Geneva during an earlier oil crisis when prices went for a moment to $43 per barrel and we all held our breath then, too. I was sitting in the lobby of OPEC headquarters in Vienna that day when Carlos "The Jackal" came in the door, told the sleepy off-duty Vienna cop providing security that he was from "the Palestinian delegation" and walked right into the big meeting, taking the oil ministers hostage.
Given that I know a little bit about the energy business, then, and I still have friends in it, here is what's going to happen over the next 2-3 years. The price of oil is going to come down substantially, but probably never to pre-9/11 price points. At least half of the current price for crude oil is driven by speculation and market manipulation as it was during the original oil crisis of 1973 (I have an interesting story about that in this week's links). But unlike '73, today our flexibility is less and our excess capacity is less, too. High prices will cut demand, spur exploration, and force governments to open new areas for exploration, but it is doubtful that we will EVER see oil prices under $60 per barrel again.
This is not all bad. Just as high oil prices spur exploration they also encourage conservation. With $2.50-$3 gas with us probably forever, we're finally starting to learn to do things somewhat differently, though it isn't at all clear to me whether these lessons will stay learned after prices subside somewhat.
Which brings me to the moral of this story -- the importance of platforms and standards, and when and how to abandon or change them. This applies to ANY capital-intensive technology, whether it is computing or energy or transportation.
The life expectancy of a car in the U.S. is about 10 years, during which it will pass through an average of three owners. I use cars as an example because they are an intrinsic part of any American energy crisis and we generally all own one. This automobile life expectancy means that any technology improvement has to trickle into the market because only about 10 percent of the total fleet is replaced each year with new cars -- the only cars that are likely to have the latest technology. So if some car company comes up with a way to get 100 miles per gallon, it is likely that no more than 10 percent of us will be getting mileage like that a year from now. The rest of us are stuck with old technology until we can afford to change: we're on the old platform.
Platform, in this automotive example, means some significantly different technology that offers real advantages though usually at a cost. Hybrids, diesels, electric cars, fuel cells, hydrogen, and ethanol cars are all examples of platforms.
If we want revolutionary change -- change where nearly everyone moves to the new platform in short order -- that is usually going to require heroic action on the part of government or the occasional mad scientist. If the mad scientist were able to offer a car that got 100 miles per gallon, was safer than the current standard, yet cost substantially LESS to buy, then maybe more of us would transition more than the traditional 10 percent replacement model suggests. Governments, on the other hand, could simply outlaw the old cars and force us to upgrade, though it still might not happen if we couldn't afford the new cars.
What's key here is the push and pull of platform change. We see this all the time in computing where somebody comes up with a clever new idea but for that idea to succeed we all have to get new computers. How likely is that? Well it depends on how great the improvement being offered. With computers I can tell you that the improvement has to be pretty darned substantial to inspire us all to jump. That's because Moore's Law is going to give us a 100 percent improvement anyway on our next PC without having to throw away any software or peripherals. So inspiring a revolution in computing generally requires a performance improvement of 10X or more.
There is a similar effect to be seen in the adoption of new energy technologies. That list of platforms I rattled off a few paragraphs back offer advantages but not without cost. Hybrids and diesels are the easiest to accept, but both are a bit more expensive. Electric, fuel cells, hydrogen, and ethanol are more expensive, too, but they also require infrastructure changes like finding new ways to manufacture, transport, store, and sell fuel. You won't go on a long road trip in your electric car until there are reliable places to plug in and recharge, for example.
This is our dilemma: we want to make radical energy improvements but these typically require expensive platform changes and platform changes can take a decade or more to happen.
A better solution would be to leave the platform alone and find a single variable that could be changed for everyone practically overnight.
Cars are the key to U.S. energy consumption. The dominant automotive platform here, whether you drive a truck, a car, or a motorcycle, relies on gasoline-fueled internal combustion engines. That's the platform we are unlikely to change quickly. So how do we leave that platform intact and unchanged, ask nobody to significantly sacrifice, yet still achieve the noble (and Nobel) goals of lower fuel consumption, lower greenhouse gas emissions, lower pollution levels, dramatically lower oil consumption, lower cost, and lower geopolitical vulnerability for our country? There's only one way I know to accomplish this: change the fuel.
This happened to a certain extent in Brazil during the '70s and '80s by embracing ethanol. But ethanol has less energy per gallon so fuel consumption goes up and mileage goes down. Ethanol can't be shipped in pipelines also used for oil. Cars have to be modified to run on it and even then there are issues about internal corrosion. Ethanol is far from perfect. What's needed is a replacement for gasoline that looks and feels and tastes just like gas to your car but isn't made from oil. Then the platform could remain completely unchanged yet my 1966 Thunderbird (and the world) could benefit starting with the very next tankful.
There is such a fuel, developed by a husband and wife team of scientists working in Indiana in cooperation with Purdue University. This new fuel, called SwiftFuel, is right now intended for airplanes, not cars, but the lessons are the same.
Piston-powered airplanes have a unique fuel problem. Their high-compression air-cooled engines require higher-octane fuel to avoid destructive engine knock. This higher octane is achieved through the use of tetraethyl lead as a fuel additive. Remember lead was outlawed from car gas in the U.S. more than 30 years ago to good effect: we all have significantly less of the toxic metal in our bodies than we used to. But lead is still used in aviation fuel, which accounts for an infinitesimal portion of total U.S. gasoline consumption. Lead is on its way out for aircraft use, too, with international treaties scheduling its demise in 2010.
If we aren't going to retire all the little airplanes in America -- force a total platform change -- we'll have to come up with a replacement for tetraethyl lead. The additive used most for this is ethanol added to gasoline to bump up the octane number. But ethanol does a number on seals and hoses typically used in aircraft to an extent that it is specifically prohibited by the Federal Aviation Administration from being used in certified aircraft. At the same time, U.S. energy policy is moving toward the mandated use of ethanol in ALL motor fuel, meaning there may be nothing available two years from now to fuel your Piper Cub.
Enter SwiftFuel, the Splenda of motor fuels because it is made from ethanol yet contains no ethanol. SwiftFuel is the invention of John and Mary Rusek from Swift Enterprises in Indiana. To your airplane SwiftFuel looks and tastes just like gasoline. It has an octane rating of 104 (higher than the 100 octane fuel it replaces) yet contains no lead or ethanol. SwiftFuel mixes with gasoline, can be stored in the same tanks as gasoline, and be shipped in the same pipelines as gasoline. It is made entirely from biomass, which means it has a net zero carbon footprint and does nothing to increase global warming. Its emission of other polluting byproducts of burning gasoline are significantly lower, too. SwiftFuel has more energy per gallon than gasoline so your airplane (or your car) will go 15-20 percent further on each gallon.
Oh, and based on an average $1.42 per gallon wholesale cost for the ethanol used as its feedstock, SwiftFuel costs $1.80 per gallon to produce, meaning that it ought to be able to sell for $3 per gallon or less no matter what happens in the Middle East.
Heck of a deal.
The ethanol used to make SwiftFuel can be any type, according to Mary Rusek, president of Swift Enterprises. The pilot plant they are building in Indiana will, interestingly, make ethanol from sorghum, not corn. The Ruseks claim that sorghum, which isn't a typical U.S. crop, can produce six times the ethanol per acre of corn, turning on its head the argument that ethanol production consumes more energy than it produces. China, the third largest producer of ethanol after Brazil and the U.S., is switching entirely to sorghum for its ethanol production.
The FAA is already testing SwiftFuel with the goal of approving it for use without modification in all aircraft, leaving the platform unchanged while improving its impact on almost any scale. Hopefully by the 2010 cutoff for tetraethyl lead SwiftFuel will replace the 1.8 million gallons of 100LL aviation fuel used every day.
"But what about cars?" I asked Mary Rusek. "We don't say much about that," she replied. "The aviation fuel market is tiny and has a real need we can fulfill so everyone wants us to succeed. Cars are different and we don't want to make any enemies."
I hope that SwiftFuel is a success. I hope it fulfills all Mary Rusek's claims. But if SwiftFuel doesn't succeed, I also hope that isn't because entrenched oil interests kill it. Yet I don't think many of us would be surprised if that is exactly what happens.
Original Article (http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080606_005036.html)
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They grow a lot of sorghum in NW Missouri. Anything that can be used as avgas can be used in a gas engined car.
I think there are a variety of solutions to the energy crisis, and the main thing holding them up is Big Oil, that wants to squeeze every cent out of us before it tries anything even slightly new.
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I think there are a variety of solutions to the energy crisis, and the main thing holding them up is Big Oil, that wants to squeeze every cent out of us before it tries anything even slightly new.
The big problem will be distribution, not necessarily Big Oil
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I think there are a variety of solutions to the energy crisis, and the main thing holding them up is Big Oil, that wants to squeeze every cent out of us before it tries anything even slightly new.
The big problem will be distribution, not necessarily Big Oil
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If they can make it cheaply enough, there will be plenty of fuel to distribute it by truck, or wherever possible, by rail tankcar.
If it can be used anywhere gasoline is used, and it does not corrode metal as E-85 does, then it could be shipped through gasoline pipelines.
Big Oil controls many of the pipeline companies though outright ownership or interlocking directorships, and they would probably refuse to allow shipment of anything not produced by Big Oil.
I use Biodiesel, the last tank was made from rendered animal fat. It comes here by tankcar if it comes from up North or on small oil tankers when it's from South American palm oil.
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If they can make it cheaply enough, there will be plenty of fuel to distribute it by truck, or wherever possible, by rail tankcar.
So Big Oil can't stop it.
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So Big Oil can't stop it.
Being as Big Oil has interlocking directorships (where the same guy that gett $300K on the board of ExxonMobil gets $100K for bring on the board of this trucking company, that finance bank and this other insurance company, they have a lot more power than it seems they do on the surface.
It took 40 years to end the railroads' monopoly on transportation. Eventually, perhaps they can't stop it. They are not worried about biodiesel, as they know that it can't be a threat to their monopoly.
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>> ... and the main thing holding them up is Big Oil, that wants to squeeze every cent out of us before it tries anything even slightly new.<<
"Big Oil" is in the oil business. Not "something new." Also, since "Big Oil" doesn't control the price of crude oil it's hard to imagine how they are to blame for the price they pay for oil. If you want to blame anybody, blame the do-nothing democrats in Congress. It's they who are determined to squeeze your last dime.
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"Big Oil" is in the oil business. Not "something new."
Actually, oil companies own a lot of alternative energy sources too, from wind farms to biodiesel facilities. It's called diversification.
And there's plenty of blame to go around.
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Actually, oil companies own a lot of alternative energy sources too, from wind farms to biodiesel facilities. It's called diversification.
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There are rather modest efforts, compared with the total investments Big Oil makes. Much of this is for show. You know when the oi companies are makig pout like bandits, it's when they start advertising.
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blame the do-nothing democrats in Congress. It's they who are determined to squeeze your last dime.
You are an utter dolt. When we get screwed out of $2.50 more per gallon, not a dime of the increase goes to any part of the government. And McSame wants to LOWER corporate taxes, so we can pay a bigger share.
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From The Times
June 14, 2008
Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol
Silicon Valley is experimenting with bacteria that have been genetically altered to provide 'renewable petroleum'
?Ten years ago I could never have imagined I?d be doing this,? says Greg Pal, 33, a former software executive, as he squints into the late afternoon Californian sun. ?I mean, this is essentially agriculture, right? But the people I talk to ? especially the ones coming out of business school ? this is the one hot area everyone wants to get into.?
He means bugs. To be more precise: the genetic alteration of bugs ? very, very small ones ? so that when they feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something extraordinary. They excrete crude oil.
Unbelievably, this is not science fiction. Mr Pal holds up a small beaker of bug excretion that could, theoretically, be poured into the tank of the giant Lexus SUV next to us. Not that Mr Pal is willing to risk it just yet. He gives it a month before the first vehicle is filled up on what he calls ?renewable petroleum?. After that, he grins, ?it?s a brave new world?.
Mr Pal is a senior director of LS9, one of several companies in or near Silicon Valley that have spurned traditional high-tech activities such as software and networking and embarked instead on an extraordinary race to make $140-a-barrel oil (?70) from Saudi Arabia obsolete. ?All of us here ? everyone in this company and in this industry, are aware of the urgency,? Mr Pal says.
What is most remarkable about what they are doing is that instead of trying to reengineer the global economy ? as is required, for example, for the use of hydrogen fuel ? they are trying to make a product that is interchangeable with oil. The company claims that this ?Oil 2.0? will not only be renewable but also carbon negative ? meaning that the carbon it emits will be less than that sucked from the atmosphere by the raw materials from which it is made.
LS9 has already convinced one oil industry veteran of its plan: Bob Walsh, 50, who now serves as the firm?s president after a 26-year career at Shell, most recently running European supply operations in London. ?How many times in your life do you get the opportunity to grow a multi-billion-dollar company?? he asks. It is a bold statement from a man who works in a glorified cubicle in a San Francisco industrial estate for a company that describes itself as being ?prerevenue?.
Inside LS9?s cluttered laboratory ? funded by $20 million of start-up capital from investors including Vinod Khosla, the Indian-American entrepreneur who co-founded Sun Micro-systems ? Mr Pal explains that LS9?s bugs are single-cell organisms, each a fraction of a billionth the size of an ant. They start out as industrial yeast or nonpathogenic strains of E. coli, but LS9 modifies them by custom-de-signing their DNA. ?Five to seven years ago, that process would have taken months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars,? he says. ?Now it can take weeks and cost maybe $20,000.?
Because crude oil (which can be refined into other products, such as petroleum or jet fuel) is only a few molecular stages removed from the fatty acids normally excreted by yeast or E. coli during fermentation, it does not take much fiddling to get the desired result.
For fermentation to take place you need raw material, or feedstock, as it is known in the biofuels industry. Anything will do as long as it can be broken down into sugars, with the byproduct ideally burnt to produce electricity to run the plant.
The company is not interested in using corn as feedstock, given the much-publicised problems created by using food crops for fuel, such as the tortilla inflation that recently caused food riots in Mexico City. Instead, different types of agricultural waste will be used according to whatever makes sense for the local climate and economy: wheat straw in California, for example, or woodchips in the South.
Using genetically modified bugs for fermentation is essentially the same as using natural bacteria to produce ethanol, although the energy-intensive final process of distillation is virtually eliminated because the bugs excrete a substance that is almost pump-ready.
The closest that LS9 has come to mass production is a 1,000-litre fermenting machine, which looks like a large stainless-steel jar, next to a wardrobe-sized computer connected by a tangle of cables and tubes. It has not yet been plugged in. The machine produces the equivalent of one barrel a week and takes up 40 sq ft of floor space.
However, to substitute America?s weekly oil consumption of 143 million barrels, you would need a facility that covered about 205 square miles, an area roughly the size of Chicago.
That is the main problem: although LS9 can produce its bug fuel in laboratory beakers, it has no idea whether it will be able produce the same results on a nationwide or even global scale.
?Our plan is to have a demonstration-scale plant operational by 2010 and, in parallel, we?ll be working on the design and construction of a commercial-scale facility to open in 2011,? says Mr Pal, adding that if LS9 used Brazilian sugar cane as its feedstock, its fuel would probably cost about $50 a barrel.
Are Americans ready to be putting genetically modified bug excretion in their cars? ?It?s not the same as with food,? Mr Pal says. ?We?re putting these bacteria in a very isolated container: their entire universe is in that tank. When we?re done with them, they?re destroyed.?
Besides, he says, there is greater good being served. ?I have two children, and climate change is something that they are going to face. The energy crisis is something that they are going to face. We have a collective responsibility to do this.?
Power points
? Google has set up an initiative to develop electricity from cheap renewable energy sources
? Craig Venter, who mapped the human genome, has created a company to create hydrogen and ethanol from genetically engineered bugs
? The US Energy and Agriculture Departments said in 2005 that there was land available to produce enough biomass (nonedible plant parts) to replace 30 per cent of current liquid transport fuels
Contact our advertising team for advertising and sponsorship in Times Online, The Times and The Sunday Times. Search globrix.com to buy or rent UK property.
? Copyright 2008 Times Newspapers Ltd.
This service is provided on Times Newspapers' standard Terms and Conditions. Please read our Privacy Policy.To inquire about a licence to reproduce material from Times Online, The Times or The Sunday Times, click here.This website is published by a member of the News International Group. News International Limited, 1 Virginia St, London E98 1XY, is the holding company for the News International group and is registered in England No 81701. VAT number GB 243 8054 69.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article4133668.ece
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You are an utter dolt. When we get screwed out of $2.50 more per gallon, not a dime of the increase goes to any part of the government.
Last I checked, Government gets 28+% of every dollar for..............doing nothing. They refine nothign, they ship nothing, they reseach nothing, they build nothing related to increasing our supply or decreasing our demand for oil. They just collect $$$$, and launch committee after committee, investigation after investigation, and still no price gouging, still no collusion, still no illegal manipulation of oil prices. Zip, nada, zilch
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No part of the $2.50 per gallon rise n gasoline prices went to any state or federal government.
The average combined state and federal tax on gasoline is 47 cents per gallon, and 53.2 cents on Diesel.
These taxes are mostly used to build and maintain highways and roads.
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don`t forget our technology uses up alot of power.
I read somewhere a plasma screen uses more power than a fridge and most items uses quite abit of power when it`s turned off.
the difference between a vcr or dvd, on and off (powerwise) is not much different.
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...snip...
They (the Government) refine nothign, they ship nothing, they reseach nothing, they bulding nothing related to increasing our supply or decreasing our demand for oil. They just collect it, and lauch committee after committee, investigation after incestigation, and still no price gouging, still no collusion, still no illegal manipulation of oil prices
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The average combined state and federal tax on gasoline is 47 cents per gallon, and 53.2 cents on Diesel.
Many states charge tax as a percentage of the total sale (it's just another sales tax to them). Those states would have increased taxes for higher fuel prices.
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The average combined state and federal tax on gasoline is 47 cents per gallon, and 53.2 cents on Diesel.
Many states charge tax as a percentage of the total sale (it's just another sales tax to them). Those states would have increased taxes for higher fuel prices.
Even though XOs estimate of the States tax take strikes me as too low , it still represents a greater purportion of the price than the company profit .
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Precisely.....company profit is a mere 5%, to the Government's taking of 28+%. So, who's gouging who?
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Precisely.....company profit is a mere 5%, to the Government's taking of 28+%. So, who's gouging who?
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Oil company profits are not any 5%. That is just absurd. Only small children and idiots would believe that.
The same companies own the port facility tanks, sail the tankers, insure the tankers, offload it into pipelines and tanker trucks that they own, and even own a number of gas stations. This is done through a series of companies that ate officially unconnected, but in reality, all belong to the same people . They make the highest profits overseas, where, it they even keep books, do not reveal them ever to the IRS.
The Saudis, the Kuwaitis, the Emiris and whomever owns the oil are also gouging us. It costs no more to pump oil out of the ground in 2008 than it did back when the retail price was under 90cents a gallon.
Just look at the prices of oil company stock. They have gone up a whooooole lot more than 5%.
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You're right Xo, it's a staggering 6-7cents per dollar. My bad Government still gets 28+cents, and they do squat. The rest of that dollar goes into shipping, refining, transporting, marketing, research, development, and new technologies.
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You're right Xo, it's a staggering 6-7cents per dollar. My bad Government still gets 28+cents, and they do squat. The rest of that dollar goes into shipping, refining, transporting, marketing, research, development, and new technologies.
Don't forget employee pay !
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Oil company profits are not any 5%. That is just absurd. Only small children and idiots would believe that.
The published profits are just under 10%. Part of those are reinvested in R&D.
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The published profits are just under 10%. Part of those are reinvested in R&D.
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This is probably true. The word of interest here is "published".
As I said, if the oil is imported, then the highest profits are made by the subsidiary companies offshore, where taxes are nonexistent, low, or simply easy to avoid through bribery and other forms of corruption.
I suggest that "slightly under 10%" is a whole lot more than 5 cents per gallon.
Perhaps seven times that.
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Who ever said 5cents per gallon??
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>>Actually, oil companies own a lot of alternative energy sources too, from wind farms to biodiesel facilities. It's called diversification.<<
Fine. Let me know when "Big Oil" gets out of the oil business entirely. See biodiesel is a two part word. Bio and diesel. You know what diesel is, correct? Are oil companies dumping the oil business in favor of windmills? Solar energy? No. They're in the oil business.
Call your democrat congressman and ask them why they're doing nothing about the price of oil and alternative such as ANWAR, nuclear power, and coal. They might not be available right now what with all the sweetheart mortgages they're getting at the moment. They're diversifying too.
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Big oil companies, however, say they are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to research and develop alternative and renewable power sources ? not only as part of the green movement, but with serious hopes of cashing in when the technologies are broadly commercialized...
In 2007, BP spent $750 million, or 10 percent of its U.S. capital budget, on developing alternative and renewable technologies, which include solar and wind energy and biofuels. The company has said it will spend $8 billion from 2005 through 2014.
"By the end of this year, we expect to have 1,000 megawatts of U.S. wind power capacity on line, increasing to 2,400 megawatts by the end of 2010," BP American chairman Bob Malone told the House Select committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming last month, according to a transcript.
BP is a partner on a $480 million, 300-megawatt wind farm in Weld County that began operating in November.
Chevron is also accelerating its investments in the renewable field. The company has earmarked $2.5 billion for renewable- and alternative-energy development through 2009 after spending $2 billion from 2002 to 2007.
Chevron Energy Solutions, which launched in 2000, generates about $300 million a year and is growing 20 percent annually, according to Jim Davis, the division's president...
ConocoPhillips plans to spend $150 million in 2008 on the development of unconventional oil and gas resources and the development of new energy sources. The company recently purchased a 432-acre campus in Louisville that will serve as a hub for its alternative-energy research.
The company is more focused on developing liquid fuels from renewable sources, rather than wind and solar generation that other major oil companies such as Shell and BP are embracing. Shell co-owns a wind farm in Lamar and is involved in 11 wind projects in the U.S. and Europe...
In 2002, Exxon committed $100 million over 10 years to Stanford University to fund the research and development of cleaner power sources.
Why should I call my Congressman? I do support drilling in ANWR and always have, though I do have concerns with offshore drilling with fisheries being in the shape that they're currently in. What's ANWR drilling going to do though, drop the price of gas a nickel in 6 years when it comes online? I don't know if anyone saw it, but I was leafing through the Time 100 the other day in the doctor's office, and there was a blurb written by the chief economist for Tesoro, saying essentially that the high prices aren't based on low crude supply, but on rabid speculators and low refining capacity. That sounds about right since someone can throw a rock at an oil tanker and see gas rise a dime a gallon. I'm also in line with clean coal and nuclear power, but evidently your side hasn't done a good job of convincing the American people that this is the direction that we need to head.
And I don't buy for a second the notion that Democrats are any more guilty of corruption that Republicans. That's a disease that seems to afflict the powerful, no matter what the party.
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See biodiesel is a two part word. Bio and diesel. You know what diesel is, correct?
Biodiesel is not made from petroleum, and the process by which it is made, called transesterfication, is unlike anything anyone does in a refinery.
Big Oil will always be involved in petrochemicals, like plastics and aniline dyes.
High oil prices are not mostly based on the cost of production as much as they are on factors like the number and versatility of refineries, speculation and the cost of insuring giant oil tankers in a dangerous part of the world, or at least one that everyone considers dangerous.
Opening up Anwar would probably not lower the prices we pay at all.