Energy & Power Generation

Not Good

by

This report suggests that so many skimmer vessels are being deployed to fight the BP oil spill that there are not enough in reserve to meet the required contingency levels for any future oil spills–and, hence, that the Obama administration may able to legally justify its desired drilling moratorium.

Are the skimmer deployment levels really that high? I’ve seen other reports asserting that there are large numbers of skimmers sitting around doing nothing because of bureaucratic confusion and waffling. I wonder if—anywhere in the country, in any government or private organization—there is a list of all skimming vessels and their current status.

Regardless of the truth about the severity of the skimming-vessel shortage, you can bet that the Obama administration and the “progressives” will use this as ammunition to shut down offshore oil drilling, as part of their generalized hostility toward all practical energy sources and their desire to punish the American people for what they see as our excessive prosperity and energy use.

The Myth of Alternative Power and Hydroelectric Storage

by

Every time I get into a debate about “alternative” energy I point out it can’t be used for baseline power because it can’t provide reliable power, and it can’t provide reliable power because you can’t store the electricity that it episodically generates.

Immediately, someone will say, “We can use hydraulic storage!”

Hydraulic storage is basically a hydroelectric dam on a small or large scale, except instead of using water brought by a watershed, the water is pumped up behind the dam with pumps powered by the generator whose energy output you want to store. For example, you would have electric pumps powered by solar panels or wind turbines, the idea being that when the wind or cloud-free days produced a surplus of power (or you built in surplus capacity) the pumps would pump water from a lower reservoir uphill into a higher storage reservoir. The electricity would be stored as the potential energy in the elevated water. When you needed the power back, you would drain the water back downhill through turbines just like a hydroelectric damn.

Now, this certainly works and it has been done on a small scale. However, it will never, ever be a real-world, large-scale solution that can make alternative power work.

Why? Well, let’s just do some back-of-the-envelope calculations.

Read more

Oil: The New Tobacco

by

John Gapper,writing in the Financial Times about Obama’s arm twisting-of BP to put $20 billion into an “escrow” fund:

It has echoes of the 1986 tobacco settlement in which industry paid $246bn to states following legal action by their attorneys-general. Only 5 percent of that money was spent on tobacco-related initiatives with Virginia, for example, investing in higher education, fibre optic cables and research into energy…Willie Sutton, the robber, sagely observed that he raided banks because that was where the money was, and US politicians know this lesson well.

and

The tactics of Congress and President Obama against BP are reminiscent of tort lawyers, who are big funders of the Democrats.

Read more

“Oil Addiction”

by

The phrase “oil addiction” has come into common use…in his speech the other night, Obama generalized this to “addiction to fossil fuels.”

A little historical perspective…

Before we were addicted to oil, we were addicted to coal. This fuel was used to heat homes, to drive locomotives and steamships, to power steam engines in factories, and for many other things in addition to its present-day uses in power generation and iron/steel production. While coal has many positive qualities as a fuel, the age of coal had its drawbacks. Coal mining was dangerous and often injurious to health. Stoking of furnaces involved backbreaking labor…although automatic stokers were developed for locomotives and power plants, the firing of steamship boilers still required the round-the-clock effort of large numbers of human beings. (See Eugene O’Neill, The Hairy Ape.) And coal was and is heavy and bulky in proportion to its energy, so that it could not enable the development of such things as airplanes, automobiles, and farm tractors. All of these factors were changed by the large-scale availability of oil. The need for human beings to serve as Hairy Apes was greatly reduced.

Read more