What is Behind the Oil Crisis?

[GostHacked]

Solar and wind, as they exist today, can never be more than bit players because they don't provide power when it is needed. No reduction in capital costs are going to change that basic limitation. The majority of power has to come from dispatchable power sources and no government mandate can change that.

Then a rethink of how we produce power and store the energy until it is needed. Something I have been advocating for some time. The tech is there, the investment is lacking. We can continue to rely on so called 'green nuclear' energy (the only thing green is the glow from the reactors) or we can head into a new era where we can have a robust decentralized grid.

There is a lack of investment (due to the oil lobby) and political will to do much about it. I'd hate to see the day where we have a nuclear plant meltdown in North America that puts events like 3 Mile, Fukushima and Chernobyl to shame.

We use batteries in our every day lives. Why can't this be scaled up to be a solution for a home?

[Bonam]

We use batteries in our every day lives. Why can't this be scaled up to be a solution for a home?

It's simple, do the math. People can equip homes with batteries but that doesn't really make a dent in the overall dynamics of the power grid, so to be able to rely primarily on transient energy sources like solar and wind, you need enough energy storage to smooth over the variations on a grid scale (whether that storage is centralized or if it's a bunch of individual installations in people's homes and businesses doesn't change the end result of how much storage is needed). The numbers have been posted here before, but they don't really strike home until you look through the math yourself. Here's what you should do to answer your own question:

1) Calculate how much energy needs to be stored to, for example, provide power to the US grid for 1 hour when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. You can look up US annual or daily usage energy using google. Convert the result to kWh.

2) Look up the costs of batteries per kWh. Divide the number from (1) by the cost / kWh and you will get the total cost of the needed energy storage.

3) For the amount of battery capacity needed in (2), calculate how much lithium you would need to build all these batteries. Compare this amount to current world production of lithium.

That said, you CAN store energy on grid scales with current technology, just not with batteries. You can store the energy using pumped hydro systems. Unfortunately, no one is lobbying for these, despite the fact that they can be built today, for a tiny fraction of the cost compared to batteries per kWh stored, and are far more efficient in energy storage and recovery compared to charging and discharging batteries. In many areas, the needed systems can be retrofitted onto existing dams, while in other areas terrain would have to be modified. But even the necessary large scale terrain modification is still far cheaper than trying to store relevant amounts of energy in batteries.

[bush_cheney2004]

It's simple, do the math. People can equip homes with batteries but that doesn't really make a dent in the overall dynamics of the power grid, so to be able to rely primarily on transient energy sources like solar and wind, you need enough energy storage to smooth over the variations on a grid scale (whether that storage is centralized or if it's a bunch of individual installations in people's homes and businesses doesn't change the end result of how much storage is needed). The numbers have been posted here before, but they don't really strike home until you look through the math yourself. Here's what you should do to answer your own question:

That's a good starting point, but as I'm sure you are aware, there are many other considerations for designing and maintaining a large scale primary storage battery (with many cells), regardless of battery chemistry. Simply stated, there is not direct storage efficiency or a duty cycle that will support power demand on the margins yielded by just the power consumption math. Excess capacity, charging profiles, individual cell variances, environment (e.g. temperature), life cycle efficiency, etc. would all have to be considered when scaling for a large primary storage battery intended for the existing power grid. More storage capacity and redundancy would be required. Large storage batteries are used by power companies to level load demand.

Edited September 10, 2015 by bush_cheney2004

[TimG]

Large storage batteries are used by power companies to level load demand.

Over minutes or a few hours. Having enough capacity to deal with 2-3 day lull in wind power is a problem that is much harder to solve.

[cannuck]

Then a rethink of how we produce power and store the energy until it is needed. Something I have been advocating for some time. The tech is there, the investment is lacking. ...There is a lack of investment (due to the oil lobby) and political will to do much about it.

We use batteries in our every day lives. Why can't this be scaled up to be a solution for a home?

It is not the "oil lobby" that is preventing you from investing in your own solution (I hope you don't expect me to do it for you). The problem is the greed and profligate waste of energy of our typical Western life style. If you think this is such a good idea, why haven't you done it? We have a cabin in the mountains that is WAY off grid, and if you want to do so, the technology as you mentioned IS there. We use a combination of solar and wind, store it in glass jar cell lead acid batteries and have all of the comforts of home - just with minimal energy waste in the process. BUT: don't for one minute think this is cheap. It would be a tiny fraction of the cost if we could just plug in - but if we weren't "inspired" by the costs, we wouldn't have devised the strategies and equipment to be sufficiently energy efficient.

[bush_cheney2004]

Over minutes or a few hours. Having enough capacity to deal with 2-3 day lull in wind power is a problem that is much harder to solve.

Agreed...and that is exactly how we used such technology for nuclear and diesel submarine main storage batteries....minutes or hours...not days. Days means shedding load down to the bare minimum, and ultimately snorkeling on the diesel which can run much longer on fuel oil stored in large tank(s). Even if we could run on the battery for days, it would take a long time to recharge it and replenish the available capacity.

Scale that up to the needs of an entire city....you would need a power consumption management plan that sheds all but the most vital loads.

[Bonam]

It is not the "oil lobby" that is preventing you from investing in your own solution (I hope you don't expect me to do it for you). The problem is the greed and profligate waste of energy of our typical Western life style. If you think this is such a good idea, why haven't you done it? We have a cabin in the mountains that is WAY off grid, and if you want to do so, the technology as you mentioned IS there. We use a combination of solar and wind, store it in glass jar cell lead acid batteries and have all of the comforts of home - just with minimal energy waste in the process. BUT: don't for one minute think this is cheap. It would be a tiny fraction of the cost if we could just plug in - but if we weren't "inspired" by the costs, we wouldn't have devised the strategies and equipment to be sufficiently energy efficient.

Now if only the world's population density was low enough that everyone could live in cabins in the mountains...

Edited September 10, 2015 by Bonam

[cannuck]

Now if only the world's population density was low enough that everyone could live in cabins in the mountains...

With that I can strongly agree. Population is the very thing that puts our sustainability in question.

Worse yet, cities are little more than a$$hole factories these days.

Edited September 10, 2015 by cannuck

[cybercoma]

I am still not saving a lot at the pump, or in any other sector where oil products are used.

The refineries are making record profits. That's why. It's not the pump operators and it's not the extractors making money now (except for the fact that the extractors own refineries too). Edited September 10, 2015 by cybercoma

[-1=e^ipi]

That said, you CAN store energy on grid scales with current technology, just not with batteries. You can store the energy using pumped hydro systems.

This. Sometimes the best solution is the simplest.

Storing energy as gravitational potential energy is very cost effective.

[cannuck]

I guess I have found where "the line" is, and managed to step over it, so I will re-post edited version:

Yes, $46 WTI today is a b1tch, but people seem to forget that that price a mere 15 years ago was $12 +/- = $10 at the wellhead for sweet light and as low as $2 for heavy sour. The people who are hurting are the small independents who have very high cost of producing mature fields, and the huge mass of johnny-come-lately investors sucked into very high cost shale plays.

To put the Canadian side into perspective: we are far more damaged by OBAMA blocking the pipeline for Ft. Mac oil to flow to Cushing than anything else. When oil was well over $100, typical wellhead prices for Rainbow blend were around $55. The big boys in the oil sands are not juniors, they are majors in it for the long haul. They can weather out as many years of whatever price. Break even on operating cost is a lot lower than you might think - and their capital is mostly patient. These are strategic investments, not Wall Street flash-in-the-pan crap. Still, it hurst us as an exporting nation at a time when we really can't afford it.

The US real world is another story. Production peaked at around 11mm bbls/day just before the 73 crash. It had slipped down under 7mm until Haliburton learned to frac very long horizontals in shale, and now is back up over 10mm. Unfortunately, consumption over that same period went up just a little to nearly 20mm a day, so one way or another, the US has to import a LOT of oil. While they have NOT reached anything near self-sufficiency, they have reduced their imports a fair bit with shale boom. The reason to really screw up the market probably has a lot to do with the DEMOCRAT lack of favour with big oil, or maybe the opposite for their support of the newcomers sticking their money into shales. Bottom line here is that while some of the new production is very expensive, there is a lot of oil coming out of the ground at historic average costs - probably close to today's wellhead values. So, big oil can wait this one out too.

Saudi is NOT the ultra-low cost producer they once were. While their rates of production are quite flexible, their lifting costs are much higher these days since most of their fields are mature and in secondary or tertiary recovery. They are also a country who's revenue is very largely dependent upon crude oil exports (less so refined product, as they really only started exporting on a large scale a few years ago).

That's the background. Now for the scoop:

The Du....DEMOCRATS can crap on oil by dumping prices and looking like heros to their voter base for bringing back lower fuel prices, achieve their laudable goal to de-fund both Russia and ISO and come out not too bad overall.

Saudi is very much co-operating with the US as they are still the driving force behind OPEC. Not only do they burn other OPEC members badly (such as Nigeria and Venezuela), it will cost them valuable political capital within OPEC to do so. It also slashes their own revenues. Much more so than the US (a net importer) the Saudis are paying a very big price to help out the US (and the rest of the world IMHO) in this case. They deserve our respect and gratitude.

And: for Harper to be selling military transport to them: more power to him (and us). Anything we export to an ally with value added is a big deal - and if it means keeping some of the details quiet - what's the harm. If it was YOUR job he earned by kissing up to KSA, I doubt you would be screaming foul for him agreeing to their terms (that cost us nothing to comply). Also: it truly amazes me that he pulled this off as his government has been a lot more of a slave to Tel Aviv than anywhere else.

[bush_cheney2004]

....To put the Canadian side into perspective: we are far more damaged by OBAMA blocking the pipeline for Ft. Mac oil to flow to Cushing than anything else.

If pipelines are so important to Canada, try building new capacity east and west for a change....maybe some refineries too.

[-1=e^ipi]

Wait... what if we damn up the great lakes and the St. Laurence Sea way, and use them as hydro storage for renewables? How viable is that?

[-1=e^ipi]

Okay, just as a hypothetical:

Suppose that a damn is constructed that floods the region between Montreal and Ottawa.

Lowest elevation in Montreal is 6m, elevation in Gatineau is 64 m, so 58 m difference.

The flow rate of the Ottawa river is about 1950 m^3/s.

Suppose this floods a region of ~10000 square kilometers.

In half a year, this means that a blocked damn would cause an increase of water height of about 3 m.

So a damn might be able to cause water to fall 55 m.

The power produced by 1950 m^3/s of water falling 55m is 1.051 GW.

Over the entire year, this corresponds to 9.21 TWh.

By comparison, Wind + Solar power generation per year in Ontario is about 6.8 TWh and total consumption is about 140 TWh.

[-1=e^ipi]

It probably makes more sense to actually look at currently constructed damns rather than theoretical nonsense. The three gorges damn has 22 cubic km of flood storage capacity. By comparison, 6.8 TWh of highly variable renewable energy could be smoothed by hydroelectric power with 4.54 cubic km of storage capacity (assuming water falls at 55m). Of course hydroelectric damns aren't 100% efficient. The 3 gorges damn has a flow rate of about 15000 m^3/s, a height of 181 m and produces 98.8 TWh (which suggests and efficiency of about 42.4%). So you would need about 10.7 cubic km of flood storage capacity in Ontario to deal with the current levels of renewable energy.

That's basically half a 3 gorges dam.

Ontario's hydroelectric power is 33.8 TWh per year, which is a third the power generation of the 3 gorges dam (and I doubt capacity per TWh of hydro is as large in Ontario as the 3 gorges dam).

So Ontario has already arguably exceeded a reasonable level of wind/solar based on hydro capacity.

Edited September 10, 2015 by -1=e^ipi

[TimG]

It probably makes more sense to actually look at currently constructed damns rather than theoretical nonsense.

if you want numbers:

https://scottishscientist.wordpress.com/2015/04/15/worlds-biggest-ever-pumped-storage-hydro-scheme-for-scotland/

critic:

http://euanmearns.com/the-loch-ness-monster-of-energy-storage/

Catch 1 ... The storage requirement for the 100% renewables system therefore grows to 50/3*472GWh = 7867 GWh. Strath Dearn is not large enough to guarantee supply.

Catch 2 The whole point of The International Energiewende is to get away from centralised power generation and to embrace distributed power. Strath Dearn is a pole away from that goal and would represent the greatest concentration of power generation anywhere in the world with a generating capacity 10 times that of the enormous three gorges dam in China.

Catch 3 follows on from Catch 2. 264 GW of generating capacity needs 264 GW of power lines to bring power into the pumps and to export power from the generators. The tentacles of environmental destruction would spread out across the whole of Scotland from Inverness. The controversial Beauly – Denny line that is nearing completion is rated at 2.5 GW. So we’d need 106 of those.

Catch 4 ... Loch Ness may become salty. Nessie would not like it.

[-1=e^ipi]

Wow, cool. So the UK could go 100% renewable if they are okay with killing the Loch Ness monster with salt water (and of course the large costs involved).

[TimG]

Wow, cool. So the UK could go 100% renewable if they are okay with killing the Loch Ness monster with salt water (and of course the large costs involved).

Well, this is more than just a flippant comment. It illustrates that the these kinds of massive engineering projects don't come without downsides and if people are willing to live with polluting fresh water with sea water then I don't see why they can't live CO2 emissions. Edited September 10, 2015 by TimG

[Bonam]

Actually the easiest way to implement pumped hydro storage in otherwise flat terrain that does not avail itself to natural hydro might be to find any old decent sized surface lake (or, I suppose, you can use seawater), go like 1-2 km down so you have a nice big height difference to maximize the potential energy, and detonate a high yield hydrogen bomb under ground to create a big cavern. The hydro generator can sit between the lake and the cavern and energy is extracted by letting water flow from the lake down into the cavern, and stored by pumping it back up.

A 20 MT device should produce a cavern about one cubic km in size. With an average height difference of 1 km between it and a lake, you can store 10^16 J which is ~ 2800 GWh.

Edited September 10, 2015 by Bonam

[-1=e^ipi]

Actually the easiest way to implement pumped hydro storage in otherwise flat terrain that does not avail itself to natural hydro might be to find any old decent sized surface lake (or, I suppose, you can use seawater), go like 1-2 km down so you have a nice big height difference to maximize the potential energy, and detonate a high yield hydrogen bomb under ground to create a big cavern. The hydro generator can sit between the lake and the cavern and energy is extracted by letting water flow from the lake down into the cavern, and stored by pumping it back up.

Wait, but where does all the debris that was in the cavern go? Won't it just sink down towards the cavern?

[Bonam]

Wait, but where does all the debris that was in the cavern go? Won't it just sink down towards the cavern?

Part of it is vaporized and escapes through a vent tunnel.

Also, much of the rock is made of oxides of various metallic elements. At high temperatures, these molecules are dissociated and the oxygen can escape, leaving denser minerals behind.

Also, much of the material in the ground isn't sitting at the maximum density that it can be at. The shockwave pushes material away from the center and densifies material around the shell of the newly formed cavern.

Here's a smaller scale test that was done:

http://www.wipp.energy.gov/science/ug_lab/gnome/gnome.htm

I'm making the assumption that excavated volume would likely scale linearly with the yield of the device.

Edited September 10, 2015 by Bonam

[-1=e^ipi]

Part of it is vaporized and escapes through a vent tunnel.

Also, much of the rock is made of oxides of various metallic elements. At high temperatures, these molecules are dissociated and the oxides can escape, leaving denser minerals behind.

Also, much of the material in the ground isn't sitting at the maximum density that it can be at. The shockwave pushes material away from the center and densifies material around the shell of the newly formed cavern.

Here's a smaller scale test that was done:

http://www.wipp.energy.gov/science/ug_lab/gnome/gnome.htm

I'm making the assumption that excavated volume would likely scale linearly with the yield of the device.

And would this cavern be geologically stable, especially if it is underneath a lake?

[Bonam]

And would this cavern be geologically stable, especially if it is underneath a lake?

Presumably some engineering would have to go into making sure that it is stable, both in initial site selection as well as potentially reinforcing the cavern after it is created.

It also doesn't have to be directly underneath the lake but can be offset by a considerable distance, as needed, at the cost of a very slight loss of efficiency of the system.

Edited September 10, 2015 by Bonam

[eyeball]

It's just too bad scientists and science have been so badly slagged for years and is now just one more institution the public doesn't trust. Otherwise really cool ideas like Bonam's might have half a chance of getting off the ground, or under it as the case may be.

In any case, would it be possible to contain the vented steam and radiation within a dome and condense it rapidly back into water and dealt with rather than just letting it go into the atmosphere?

Edited September 10, 2015 by eyeball

[Bonam]

It's just too bad scientists and science have been so badly slagged for years and is now just one more institution the public doesn't trust. Otherwise really cool ideas like Bonam's might have half a chance of getting off the ground, or under it as the case may be.

In any case, would it be possible to contain the vented steam and radiation within a dome and condense it rapidly back into water and dealt with rather than just letting it go into the atmosphere?

Anything's possible, and if there was sufficient interest/funding I'm sure an adequate way to contain the radiation could be devised. But you're right, the idea could never be implemented in the real world, not in Western countries anyway and probably not anywhere else either due to treaties regarding nuclear weapons.

In the 1960s, people investigated peaceful uses of nuclear weapons for terrain modification (Project Plowshare), but that was done without properly understanding the dangers in the way we do today. The project was scrapped after some tests. I bet it could be done much more safely and productively today.