Powering the Future: A Scientist's Guide to Energy Independence

by Daniel B. Botkin

  Endnotes

  Preface

  1 Dr. John H. DeYoung, Jr., Chief Scientist, Minerals Information Team, U.S. Geological Survey.

  Introduction

  1 Unless otherwise noted, the material in quotation marks throughout this section is taken directly from Behr, Peter, and Steven Gray, “Grid Operators Spotted Overloads but Ind. Controllers Couldn’t Force Power Companies to Cut Output,” Washington Post, 5 September 2003, E01.

  2 Accuweather records for August 14: high 91, low 75, average 83; normal temperatures for those dates: high 83, low 68, average 76; rain on August 14: zero.

  3 U.S. Census Bureau, 2000 Census of Population and Housing, Population and Housing Unit Counts PHC-3-1 (Washington, D.C.: 2004).

  4 1 horsepower (HP) = 745 watts, or 0.75KW. A 100HP car engine, therefore, is a 75KW engine. An Olds Cutlass 88 with a 365HP motor had the equivalent of 365 × 0.75 KW = 274KW engine.

  5 Behr, Peter, and Steven Gray. “Grid Operators Spotted Overloads but Ind. Controllers Couldn’t Force Power Companies to Cut Output,” Washington Post, 5 September 2003, E01.

  6 Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Open Hearings about the August 14, 2003 Blackout, 2004; and Behr, Peter, and Steven Gray, “Grid Operators Spotted Overloads but Ind. Controllers Couldn’t Force Power Companies to Cut Output,” Washington Post, 5 September 2003, E01.

  7 U.S.–Canada Power System Outage Task Force 2004 Final Report on the August 14th Blackout in the United States and Canada, April 2004. https://reports.energy.gov/.

  8 Kilpatrick, Kwame M., Mayor, City of Detroit, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Open Hearings about the August 14, 2003 Blackout, 2004, p. 94.

  9 Hanson, Holly, et al., “Everyday Chores Are Test of Ingenuity,” Detroit Free Press, 16 August 2003.

  10 Ibid.

  11 Renewable Energy Industry website, www.renewable-energy-industry.com/news/newstickerdetail.php?changeLang=en_GB&newsid=1097.

  12 Kilpatrick, Kwame M., Mayor, City of Detroit, Open Hearings about the August 14, 2003 Blackout, 2004, p. 94.

  13 www.seco.cpa.state.tx.us/re_wind.htm, accessed 30 April 2008. Consider some other ways to think about energy. One megawatt (MW) is enough electricity to serve 250–300 homes on average each day. That works out to 3KW–4KW a house, or 30–40 100-watt bulbs burning continually.

  14 This section is based on Botkin, D. B., and E. A. Keller, Environmental Science: Earth as a Living Planet (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2009).

  15 Butti, K., and J. Perlin, A Golden Thread: 2,500 Years of Solar Architecture and Technology (Palo Alto: Cheshire Books, 1980).

  Section 1

  1 From DOE EIA Table ES1. “Summary Statistics for the United States, 1994 through 2005.”

  2 Energy is the work done by moving an object of known weight a unit distance. For example, when you work out at the gym and lift 25 pounds in a curl, moving the weight, say, 3 feet, you have done 75 pound-feet of work. Power is energy used (or generated) per unit of time. So if you do one curl in 3 seconds, your power output is 25 pound-feet per second. Power plants are rated in terms of power. The energy output depends on how long they run. Typically, the energy output is written per hour, day, or year.

  3 To be precise, annual U.S. energy use is equal to 9,267 100-watt light bulbs burning for each person all the time. Another common unit in which energy is expressed is the British thermal unit (BTU). This is an old-fashioned term: the amount of heat to raise 1 pound of water from 60°F to 61°F (at one standard atmosphere of air pressure). Often discussions of global or national energy use are expressed in BTUs. But since a single BTU is so small, the energy used by a nation or the world is written down as quads. A quad is a quadrillion BTUs (a million billion BTUs) or 293 billion kilowatt-hours. In these terms, the United States’ energy use is about 100 quads; worldwide, people use 462 quads a year.

  4 Consider two more useful numbers: The U.S. has the capacity to produce 978,020MW of electrical energy. Of this, 754,989MW are from fossil fuel power plants. Remember, this is capacity, not actual output. That is, if all these generators ran at full capacity for one hour, they would produce 978,020 kilowatt-hours of electricity. If they did this for a day, they would produce 978,020 × 24 kilowatt-hours. DOE EIA Table ES1. “Summary Statistics for the United States, 1994 through 2005.”

  Chapter 1

  1 Heywood, John B., “Fueling Our Transportation Future,” Scientific American special issue, “Energy’s Future: Beyond Carbon” 295 (2006): 60–63.

  2 Bockstoce, J., “On the Development of Whaling in the Western Thule Culture,” Folk 18 (1976): 41–46; and Bockstoce, personal communication with author, September, 2008.

  3 UCSB Geography Department slide presentation, “Introduction to Air Photo Interpretation Slides,” no. 7. www.geog.ucsb.edu/~jeff/115a/jack_slides/page7.html.

  4 U.S. Energy Information Administration, U.S. Crude Oil Supply & Disposition (2007). http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_sum_crdsnd_adc_mbbl_a.htm. This reports states that the U.S. used 20 million barrels of oil a day, importing 55% of it.

  5 Different sources give slightly different values for the amount of total energy and electrical energy provided by petroleum and natural gas.

  6 www.energy.gov/energysources/fossilfuels.htm.

  7 Heywood, John B., “Fueling Our Transportation Future,” Scientific American special issue “Energy’s Future: Beyond Carbon” 295 (2006): 60–63.

  8 EIA, http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=electricity_in_the_United_States.

  9 Botkin, D. B., and E. A. Keller, Environmental Science: Earth as a Living Planet (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2009).

  10 EIA slide presentation, “Long-Term World Oil Supply, 2000.” www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/presentations/2000/long_term_supply/sld009.htm. Accessed 7 May 2008.

  11 Some argue against the idea of peak oil production, among them Michael Lynch, former director for Asian energy and security at the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: (See Lynch, Michael, “‘Peak Oil’ Is a Waste of Energy,” New York Times, August 25, 2009.) His argument is simple, and one comes across it often via advocates of petroleum: Experts disagree on how much oil exists and new finds change the estimate, so peak oil is not known with any certainty. Therefore, we should “be happy, don’t worry.” This is an argument without substance. Any business planner—or careful planner of any kind—would use the mean and variance of estimates of total peak to create a statistical useful estimate of the time to peak oil, which has to happen.

  12 Saleri, N. G., “The World Has Plenty of Oil,” Wall Street Journal, 4 March 2008, A17.

  13 Ibid.

  14 Botkin and Keller, 2009; and British Petroleum Company, BP Statistical Review of World Energy, (London: British Petroleum Company, June 2007).

  15 British Petroleum Company, 2007.

  16 Ibid.

  17 Gibbon, G. A., U. S. Energy Sources and Consumption PowerPoint presentation, sent to the author as a personal communication, June 2007.

  18 Botkin and Keller, Environmental Science, 2009.

  19 Baskin, Brian, “Northern Exposure: As the Arctic gets warmer, oil and gas producers see the chance for a big expansion. But plenty of technological hurdles remain.” Wall Street Journal, 11 February 2008, R12.

  20 Ibid.

  21 The forecast Arctic addition to petroleum is an amount that would increase the present known reserves by 40% and, at the rate of use of 50 billion barrels a year, would provide eight years of oil use worldwide.

  22 Baskin, “Northern Exposure,” 2008.

  23 Peterson, G., “New Statute for Canadian Oil Sands,” Geotimes 48, no. 3 (2003): 7.

  24 Approximately 1.0 to 1.25 gigajoules of natural gas are needed per barrel of bitumen extracted. A barrel of oil equivalent is about 6.117 gigajoules, so this produces about five or six times as much energy as is consumed. From “FAQ: Oil Sands,” 2008. http://environment.gov.ab.ca/info/faqs/faq5-oil_sands.asp.

 
25 Freight statistics are from Department of Transportation, Table 2-1: “Weight of Shipments by Transportation Mode: 2002, 2007, and 2035.” http://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/freight/freight_analysis/nat_freight_stats/docs/08factsfigures/table2_1.htm. Accessed 2 September 2009.

  26 Vardi, Nathan, “Crude Awakening,” Forbes, 27 March 2006.

  27 Wikipedia, as of 2006–2007 (the most recent data available). In metric, 420km2 have been affected.

  28 “FAQ: Oil Sands,” 2008. http://environment.gov.ab.ca/info/faqs/faq5-oil_sands.asp.

  29 Ibid.

  30 “The Most Destructive Project on Earth: Alberta’s Tar Sands,” Celsias website. www.celsias.com/article/the-most-destructive-project-on-earth-albertas-tar/. (Note that this is a discussion of and reference to the report by Hatch and Price listed below.)

  31 Hatch, Christopher, and Matt Price, “The Most Destructive Project on Earth” (New York City: Environmental Defense, 2008). Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are a group of ring-compounds, February 2008. http://www.environmentaldefence.ca/reports/tarsands.htm.

  32 Ibid.

  33 Ibid.

  34 Birger, Jon, “Oil from a Stone,” Fortune, 1 November 2007. http://fortunemagazineng.com/enzineport/content.asp?contenttype=maincontents.

  35 Sengupta, Somini, “Indians Hit the Road Amid Elephants,” New Delhi Journal, 11 January 2008.

  36 “China,” in Encyclopedia Britannica. www.britannica.com/eb/article-257894. Accessed 11 March 2008.

  37 “Investing in China’s Booming Automobile Sector: Japanese Cars a No Go,” Seeking Alpha website, posted 19 March 2007. Seeking Alpha website available at http://seekingalpha.com/article/29954-investing-in-china-s-booming-automobile-sector-japanese-cars-a-no-go.

  38 © 2008 Associated Press. The information contained in the AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of the Associated Press. Active hyperlinks have been inserted by AOL (captured 3 March 2008, 6:11 a.m. EST).

  39 Zhao, Jimin, “Can the Environment Survive China’s Craze for Automobiles?” School of Natural Resources and Environment, University of Michigan, (Submitted to Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment.) www.cebc.org.br/sites/500/522/00000349.pdf.

  40 EIA Table 5.3, “Average Retail Price of Electricity to Ultimate Customers: Total by End-Use Sector, 1995 through May 2009,” gives the value in the text. (Sources: Energy Information Administration, EIA-826, “Monthly Electric Sales and Revenue Report with State Distributions Report: 2006–2008”; and EIA-861, “Annual Electric Power Industry Report: 1992 - 2005.”)

  According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the average delivered cost for coal, petroleum, and natural gas used for electricity generation increased between 2004 and 2005. The average cost of natural gas to electricity generators increased from the previous record high of $5.96 per million BTU (MMBTU), established in 2004, to a new record level of $8.21 per MMBTU in 2005. For the third year in a row, natural gas costs experienced a double-digit percentage increase, 37.8% from 2004 to 2005. As a result, the cost of natural gas for electricity generation in 2005 was 130.6% higher than in 2002.

  The average delivered cost of coal increased 13.2% for the year, in part due to increases in coal mining operations and the cost of electricity and diesel fuels for that mining. The average delivered cost for all fossil fuels used for electricity generation (coal, petroleum, and natural gas combined) in 2005 was 114.5% higher than in 2002 (reported at www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epa_sum.html on 21 March 2007).

  41 “Aramco, Dow Chemical sign huge deal,” Wall Street Journal, 15 May 2007, International Edition, 30.

  42 Campoy, Ana, and Leslie Eaton, “Chemical Prices Jump, Fueling Fear of Inflation,” Wall Street Journal, 29 May 2008, A1.

  43 Graham, Sarah, “Environmental Effects of Exxon Valdez Spill Still Being Felt,” Scientific American 292 (2003):12–19.

  44 The history of litigation over the Exxon Valdez oil spill is interesting because of its length and the failure for it to provide much of a payment to those who suffered from the spill. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Valdez_oil_spill.

  Chapter 2

  1 In this image made from video provided by KHOU-TV on May 7, 2008, a large tank, center, falls into a sinkhole near Daisetta, Texas (AP Photo/KHOU-TV, Bobby Bracken).

  2 Krauss, C., “Natural Gas Has Utah Driving Cheaply,” New York Times, August 30, 2008.

  3 “The Pickens Plan” at www.pickensplan.com/theplan/. Accessed 21 September 2008.

  4 Krauss, “Natural Gas Has Utah Driving Cheaply,” 2008.

  5 Annual use of natural gas in the United States in 2007 totaled 23,055,596 million cubic feet. Ray Boswell, Ph.D., Manager, Methane Hydrate R&D Programs, U.S. Department of Energy—National Energy Technology Laboratory. Dr. Boswell provided much of the basic information about natural gas reserves and rate of use, and discussed with me at length how these quantities are estimated.

  6 Mouawad, Jad, “Estimate Places Natural Gas Reserves 35% Higher,” New York Times, 18 June 2009.

  7 U.S. EIA, “Worldwide Look at Reserves and Production,” Oil & Gas Journal 106, no. 48 (22 December 2008): 22–23. www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/nat_gas.html.

  8 Geological Survey of Canada. http://gsc.nrcan.gc.ca/gashydrates/canada/index_e.php. Modified 12 December 2007.

  9 Dillon, Dr. William, and Dr. Keith Kvenvolden, Gas (Methane) Hydrates—A New Frontier (Washington, D.C.: USGS, September 1992. http://marine.usgs.gov/fact-sheets/gas-hydrates/title.html.

  10 Botkin, D. B., and E. A. Keller, Environmental Science: Earth as a Living Planet, 7th edition (New York: John Wiley & Sons: 2009). See Chapter 18, on fossil fuel energy.

  11 Gold, R., “Gas Producers Rush to Pennsylvania: Promising Results for Wells There Spur Investment,” Wall Street Journal 2 April 2008, A2.

  12 Krauss, C., “Drilling Boom Revives Hopes for Natural Gas,” New York Times, August 24, 2008.

  13 Ibid.

  14 Casselman, B., “Texas Sinkhole Puts Spotlight on Oil, Gas Drilling,” Wall Street Journal, May 19, 2008, A3.

  Chapter 3

  1 Brady photograph plate 113; Washington, D.C. streetlamp, 1865; Library of Congress. Also National Park Service Publication, “Gas Lighting in America: A Guide for Historic Preservation.” www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/hcrs/myers/plate12.htm. Accessed 25 March 2008.

  2 FutureGen Alliance website, www.futuregenalliance.org/news/response_to_doe_rfi_030308.stm. Updated January 2008. Accessed 25 March 2008.

  3 Sherman, Mimi, “A Look at Nineteenth-Century Lighting: Lighting Devices from the Merchant’s House Museum,” APT Bulletin of the Association for Preservation Technology International Lighting Historic House Museums 1 (2000): 37–43.

  4 “Coal Gasification,” FutureGen Alliance website, www.futuregenalliance.org/technology/coal.stm. Accessed 25 March 2008.

  5 Anonymous (2010). “Exelon joined FutureGen in January.” Reuters News Service. (New York, Reuters News Service.)

  6 Skinner, B., S. Porter, and D. B. Botkin, The Blue Planet (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1999). Many popular references get the time when coal formed wrong.

  7 Some of the basic facts about coal come from the American Coal Foundation; see www.teachcoal.org/aboutcoal/articles/faqs.html. Accessed 19 March 2008. Other facts come from DOE EIA and the World Coal Institute.