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Next
Event
Friday, October 24, 2008, 07:00 PM: Life Extension with Jerry Emanuelson
Jerry will be talking about his 25+ year experience with life extension treatments, including hormone injections, his longevity doctor, what treatments to ask a doctor for, how to find and guide a doctor, an interesting example of the 'medical priesthood vs. empowered patient' conflict as more healthcare treatments are about prevention/enhancement, getting his DNA scanned with deCODEme and opensourcing his genome on the SNPedia.com, and more.
More...
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Energy
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America's elder statesman of finance, Alan Greenspan, has shaken the White House by declaring that the prime motive for the war in Iraq was oil.
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"The Planet"
is a Swedish
campaign to enhance public awareness of the planet Earth; to show its limits, wonders, possibilities.
It is produced by Swedish public service television.
This is a Flash app -- when you use it, make sure you hit the back arrow inside the app, otherwise if you use the browser's back arrow, you will get popped outside of the app completely.
To get started, I suggest you click on "The Big Picture", then "The Current State", then "Great Acceleration". You can see many of the trends we talk about at the future salon there.
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Underlying nearly all discussions of the oil price is a standard economic concept: supply and demand. It seems so elementary that there is no doubt of it. It says that demand has been growing more rapidly than supply recently and that at some point the world will reach Peak Oil and the price will zoom northwards.
But the reality is more complex. Peak oil is not just a point in time or even a plateau when oil supply becomes unable to expand to meet demand. We need a more nuanced model for oil prices that includes several other factors.
First, there is the role of speculators.
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 The World:
An invisible soldier? A space elevator to the stars? Transmit the inventory of the Library of Congress via laser beam in seconds? What are the real fuel sources of the future? Learn about technological quantum leaps that will shape our planet in 50 years.
What would you see and experience if the clocks rolled forward 50 years? In a unique blend of drama and science, this three-part series shows you the world of tomorrow. Will we have flying cars? Will advances in medicine help us stay young forever? What about "printing" custom-made vital organs? What will our cities look like? What will tomorrow's wars be about? Will we have robots helping around the house? Will solar power be the new oil?
Supported by the world's leading scientists and research institutes, we embark on a quest to answer some of society's most fundamental questions and reveal the dramas of tomorrow's world along the way. State-of-the-art computer graphics in combination with a dynamic story line will create a world usually only seen in feature films, but with the accuracy and relevance of a documentary. This series is all about opening the window of our future based on science fact, not science fiction.
Hosted by Michio Kaku
Video, 43:00
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Solar power produces, per unit of energy, only about one-tenth as much carbon dioxide and other harmful emissions as does conventional power generation, a new study shows.
Solar panels don't release harmful gases during use, but making the solar cells does consume materials and energy—mainly from conventional power sources such as coal-fired power plants, which in turn produce emissions. Industrial techniques for making glass and other materials in solar panels also produce gases such as carbon dioxide.
In the 1970s, manufacturing a solar cell required about as much energy as the cell could produce over its 20-year lifetime, so using solar power provided little if any energy gain.
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Iraq’s oil reserves — thought to be the second largest in the world — have always been high on the corporate wish list. In 1998, Kenneth Derr, then chief executive of Chevron, told a San Francisco audience, “Iraq possesses huge reserves of oil and gas — reserves I’d love Chevron to have access to.”
A new oil law set to go before the Iraqi Parliament this month would, if passed, go a long way toward helping the oil companies achieve their goal. The Iraq hydrocarbon law would take the majority of Iraq’s oil out of the exclusive hands of the Iraqi government and open it to international oil companies for a generation or more.
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Konarka demonstrated manufacturing solar cells by highly efficient inkjet printing. They are highly efficient organic bulk heterojunction solar cells
The demonstration confirms that organic solar cells can be processed with printing technologies with little or no loss compared to "clean room" semiconductor technologies such as spin coating.
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China is to begin constructing on Saturday its first-ever nuclear power plant in its northeastern Liaoning province, a key heavy industrial base of the country.
Located in city Wafangdian on the Liaodong Pininsula, the planned nuclear power project, named Liaoning Hongyanhe Nuclear Power Plant, will involve a total investment of 50 billion yuan, or some 6.5 billiion dollars. Its first phase project is expected to be completed in 2014, with four-set milllion-kilowatt turbine generators put into operation, producing each year at least 29 billion kilowatt hours of electricity.
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Bacteria in the world’s oceans can efficiently exploit solar energy to grow, thanks to a unique light-capturing pigment. "It was long thought that algae were the only organisms in the seas that could use sunlight to grow." Many marine bacteria have a gene in their DNA that codes for a new type of light-capturing pigment: proteorhodopsin.
Oesearchers collected 20 marine bacteria from different ocean areas and mapped their genomes. Several of them proved to contain the pigment proteorhodopsin. This made it possible to run a series of experiments that clearly show that the pigment converts solar energy to energy for growth.
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A full superconducting experimental Tokamak fusion device, which aims to generate infinite, clean nuclear-fusion-based energy, will be built in March or April in Hefei, capital city of east China's Anhui Province.
Experiments with the advanced new device will start in July or August. If the experiments prove successful, China will become the first country in the world to build a full superconducting experimental Tokamak fusion device, nicknamed "artificial sun".
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When bad things happen, it's always nice to have a scapegoat. So, with Americans furious about soaring oil prices, Congress has gone in search of someone to blame. There are a number of usual suspects to choose from, depending on your politics—OPEC, greedy oil companies, lily-livered environmentalists opposed to oil drilling—but now Congress has seized on another set of villains: commodity speculators. "Excessive market speculation," in the words of Senator Joseph Lieberman, has supposedly inflated the price of oil and other commodities beyond reason. Curb speculation, as a raft of proposed laws intend to do, and oil prices will soon return to earth.
Speculation has been a favorite target of politicians looking to mollify anxious voters since the time of ancient Greece, when the orator Lysias protested that wheat traders had reduced Athens to a "state of siege."
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This Monday Congress agreed to guarantee loans for up to 80% of construction costs for new nuclear reactors. The legislation directs the Department of Energy to provide $20.5b for nuclear energy, $10b for renewables and $8b for “clean-coal” technology.
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Most folks are surprised to learn that the world’s second largest oil field is not located in Saudi Arabia. Nor even in the Middle East. In fact, it is located offshore Mexico, in the Bay of Campeche, Gulf of Mexico. This “giant” field, with an ultimate recovery which may reach 20 billion barrels, was discovered in 1976 by Rudesindo Cantarell. Sr. Cantarell was not a geologist, nor a geophysicist, but rather ... a fisherman. It seems that the natural oil seeps were playing havoc with his nets! PEMEX, the national oil company of Mexico, finally investigated it and the rest, as they say, is history.
Cantarell Field, as it turns out, is a real freak of geology.
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Placing a film of silicon nanoparticles onto a silicon solar cell can boost power, reduce heat and prolong the cell’s life, researchers now report.
"Integrating a high-quality film of silicon nanoparticles 1 nanometer in size directly onto silicon solar cells improves power performance by 60 percent in the ultraviolet range of the spectrum."
A 10 percent improvement in the visible range of the spectrum can be achieved by using nanoparticles 2.85 nanometers in size.
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We don't think much of ugly, power-sucking billboards, but this one from South Africa's Eskom delivers its message.
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This is a detailed research paper. I'm posting it because the question of the relationship between oil and democracy, free markets, and wealth was a topic discussed at great length at the Bay Area Future Salon. Japan has no oil, but the world's 2nd largest economy (after the US), think about it.
PDF, 41 pages
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Is anyone developing solar energy farms? I live next to a city with its own municipal utility for electricity and I have a south-facing hillside that could be used for a solar energy source. I have read about energy development in Germany where individuals work with governmental agencies to create energy farms.
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An experimental gas turbine simulator equipped with an ultralow-emissions combustion technology called LSI has been tested successfully using pure hydrogen as a fuel – a milestone that indicates a potential to help eliminate millions of tons of carbon dioxide and thousands of tons of NOx from power plants each year.
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The cost of filling up a Honda Civic's 50-litre tank varies hugely around the world. Where some countries subsidise, others tax heavily. Pity Turkish drivers, who fork out $93.83. Re-nationalised oil companies and heavy subsidies keep Venezuelan motorists happy, though those in Turkmenistan fare even better, paying only $1.06 a tank. Despite protests over rising prices, filling up in America is relatively cheap at $31.06. Indeed, this may explain the country's enormous daily petrol consumption, which in 2003 was more than the next 20 biggest consumers combined.
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A few years ago, we referred to the large potential for the production of bioproducts and next-generation biofuels from the waste biomass that accumulates at palm oil plantations and mills. The palm oil tree is one of the most productive plants on the planet.
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It is already the world's biggest country, spanning 11 time zones and stretching from Europe to the far east. But yesterday Russia signalled its intention to get even bigger by announcing an audacious plan to annex a vast 460,000 square mile chunk of the frozen and ice-encrusted Arctic.
According to Russian scientists, there is new evidence backing Russia's claim that its northern Arctic region is directly linked to the North Pole via an underwater shelf.
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We are entering the Peak Oil era. The growth of oil production is slowing, driving up oil and gasoline gas prices, firing inflation, driving unemployment, straining our global economy, and threatening to collapse our entire system. We are reaching Peak Oil and we are unprepared. Teacher Aaron Wissner, in a compact 10 minutes video summary, details Peak Oil, the evidence, the impacts, and the solutions.
Video, 10 min
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First Solar's thin-film technology is now challenging silicon panels at large-scale solar-power facilities.
The low manufacturing cost of photovoltaics that employ thin films of cadmium-telluride semiconductor have long been seen as having the potential for lifting solar power from its niche status as a very expensive power source, delivering less than a twentieth of 1 percent of U.S. electricity.
Now, after two decades in which cadmium-telluride technology was dogged by low power output and reliability problems, it's suddenly elbowing its way into renewable-energy markets and competing with today's dominant solar technology: silicon solar panels. The company behind this technology turnaround is Phoenix-based First Solar, which says that the technology could eventually be cost competitive with conventional fossil-fuel sources of electricity.
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In the near future (till 2020), according to the planning, China should give priority to technologies to save energy, raise its efficiency and cut down its pollution. In the mid-term (around 2030), importance should be attached to the development of nuclear and renewable energy sources. And in the long-term future (about 2050), the country is expected to set up a sustainable energy system to basically meet its overall needs of energy sources across the country.
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The uranium spot price has fallen $5 from $110/lb to $105/lb.
Uranium analyst Sam Kirtley of The Uranium Stocks Newsletter said: "The fundamentals for uranium remain very bullish as the world is still going to switch from burning fossil fuel to using nuclear technology, and this switch requires a great deal of uranium. Even at current prices, uranium stocks stand to make a fortune as extraction cost are only about $30/lb on average for uranium. Therefore in the long term we remain very bullish on uranium and uranium stocks."
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A secretive Texas startup developing what some are calling a "game changing" energy-storage technology broke its silence this week. It announced that it has reached two production milestones and is on track to ship systems this year for use in electric vehicles.
EEStor's ambitious goal, according to patent documents, is to "replace the electrochemical battery" in almost every application, from hybrid-electric and pure-electric vehicles to laptop computers to utility-scale electricity storage.
The implications are enormous and, for many, unbelievable.
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Iraq's massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days.
The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.
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This is a powerpoint presentation (in PDF form) from 2005 covering the giant oil fields of the world and their relation to the question of "peak oil".
PDF, 18 pages
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Giant Oil Fields and Their Importance for Future Oil Production. By Fredrik Robelius.
PDF, 168 pages
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During the Sixth annual ASPO conference in Cork, Ireland in 2007, Nate Hagens and I were interviewed.
Video, 13 min 34 seconds
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This week European Energy Commissioner, Andris Piebalgs, moves the debate onto the key issue of bio-fuels. Andris Piebalgs drives a Saab 9-5 that runs on bio-ethanol. By my estimation, the energy efficiency of this vehicle is a meagre 5%. Andris no doubt believes he is doing the right thing and I believe he cares a great deal about European energy. And yet he is driving one of the least energy efficient vehicles ever produced - and he is a physicist. How on Earth have these totally bizarre circumstances come about?
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The price of crude oil has doubled, from $50 to $100, within months. The increase cannot be attributed to the fundamental data, which have hardly changed. And the looming recession ought to drive the price down. So why is oil getting more expensive?
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The future of green solar-powered energy may actually be pink, US boffins reported today.
Researchers believe that new pink dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs), which get their pink colour from a mixture of red dye and white metal oxide powder, could be used to produce next-generation low-cost solar panels.
The researchers report that, currently, the best of these new pink materials convert light to electricity with only half the efficiency of commercially-available silicon-based solar cells – but they do so at only one quarter of the cost.
"The major advantage of DSSCs is that the cost is low. That is why DSSCs are so interesting to us, and so important."
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The United States and the world need to find new sources of clean energy. Space Solar Power gathers energy from sunlight in space and transmits it wirelessly to Earth. Space solar power can solve our energy and greenhouse gas emissions problems. Not just help, not just take a step in the right direction, but solve. Space solar power can provide large quantities of energy to each and every person on Earth with very little environmental impact.
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Higher energy prices are feeding through to rampant consumer energy price inflation. And yet the authorities and many investment houses still see energy prices falling in the future. This naive view of global energy supplies is starving energy markets of the capital required to expand conventional and alternative energy supplies.
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 The current model of oil doomsters is derived from K. M. Hubbert. The model is conceptually simple, but based on several assumptions. The first is that the geological structure of our planet is well known and thoroughly explored, so that discovery of unknown oil fields is highly improbable. Second, to resolve problems connected with erratic distribution and production from thousands of oil fields and uncertainty of future discoveries, production is assumed to follow the "Central Limit Theorem" from statistics. This theorem states that the sum of a large number of erratic variables tends to follow a normal distribution and assumes a bell-shaped curve (see figure above).
Starting from zero, production grows over time until it peaks when half of the recoverable resources have been extracted ("midpoint depletion"). Then, production irreversibly declines at the same rate at which it grew. The area under the curve shows the cumulative production of an oil field or the "ultimate recoverable resources" (URR) it holds and their life- span.
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Amid gusting winds and spinning wind turbines, officials Thursday unveiled a $2 million research project to use wind energy to produce hydrogen fuel. The technology proposes to take clean energy to a new level, using a renewable resource, wind, to make a nonpolluting fuel, hydrogen, in one of the nation's first attempts to combine the two energy resources.
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Colorado State University's method for manufacturing low-cost, high-efficiency solar panels is nearing mass production. AVA Solar Inc. will start production by the end of next year on the technology developed by mechanical engineering Professor W.S. Sampath at Colorado State. The new 200-megawatt factory is expected to employ up to 500 people. Based on the average household usage, 200 megawatts will power 40,000 U.S. homes.
Sampath has developed a continuous, automated manufacturing process for solar panels using glass coating with a cadmium telluride thin film instead of the standard high-cost crystalline silicon.
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A team of Korean researchers has developed a cutting-edge solar cell that might help reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. The discovery could make Korea a leader in the alternative energy industry as the research team plans to double the cell's efficiency and commercialize the technology by 2012.
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Researchers at New Jersey Institute of Technology have developed an inexpensive solar cell that can be painted or printed on flexible plastic sheets.
"The process is simple. Someday homeowners will even be able to print sheets of these solar cells with inexpensive home-based inkjet printers. Consumers can then slap the finished product on a wall, roof or billboard to create their own power stations."
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Energy from plastics is the goal in a new research initiative by BMBF and industry. The initiative aims to develop photovoltaic systems at lower cost, that are more versatile, lighter and for large surfaces than solar cells made from silicon.
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Crude oil prices from 1947 to 2006.
The only very long term price series that exists is the U.S. average wellhead or first purchase price of crude. When discussing long-term price behavior this presents a problem since the U.S. imposed price controls on domestic production from late 1973 to January 1981. In order to present a consistent series and also reflect the difference between international prices and U.S. prices we created a world oil price series that was consistent with the U.S. wellhead price adjusting the wellhead price by adding the difference between the refiners acquisition price of imported crude and the refiners average acquisition price of domestic crude.
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Research shows that silicon can wring two electrons from each photon of incoming light.
A typical solar cell generates only one electron per photon of incoming sunlight. Some exotic materials are thought to produce multiple electrons per photon, but for the first time, the same effect has been seen in silicon. Researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), in Golden, CO, showed that silicon nanocrystals can produce two or three electrons per photon of high-energy sunlight. The effect, they say, could lead to a new type of solar cell that is both cheap and more than twice as efficient as today's typical photovoltaics.
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A solar power project in Spain will get even bigger: The Spanish group ACS and German partner Solar Millennium announced that they have begun the second phase of a solar power project near the city of Granada.
The companies will invest 260 million euros ($360 million) in Andasol 2, a 195-hectare (480-acre) solar facility that they are calling "the largest solar power plant in the world."
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A San Francisco company said Friday it plans to build the world's largest solar power farm near Fresno, California.
The 80-megawatt farm is to occupy as much as 640 acres and upon completion in 2011 will be 17 times the size of the largest U.S. solar farm.
The farm will also be about seven times the size of the world's biggest plant and double the largest planned farm, both in Germany.
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Due to the destruction of refining capabilities by hurricanes, and an expectedly large decline in commercial oil reserves in recent days, the New York market, for the first time, closed on a price above 80 U.S. dollars per barrel on Sept. 13; and hit a new record in the history of nominal prices. As a matter of fact, oil prices have been rising since 2002 at a pace and with a lasting time rarely seen in "peace" time. So, what exactly is behind this round of price hikes?
Firstly, an increasingly short supply of oil in the world is the fundamental cause. Secondly, short-term speculations on oil futures by large amounts of funding also drive prices up. Thirdly, the U.S. government's pursuit of a weak dollar policy in recent years has also contributed, to a certain degree, to the hike in oil prices.
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Of the 65 largest oil producing countries in the world, up to 54 have passed their peak of production and are now in decline, including the USA in 1970/1, Indonesia in 1997, Australia in 2000, the North Sea in 2001, and Mexico in 2004.
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Apparently this is some old technology -- going back to Tesla -- being repurposed as a possible driver for fusion energy.
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