Peter Newman: The beginning of the end for cars ?

The ABC's "Science Show" this weekend will feature Peter Newman talking about peak oil and the possible implications for transport - The beginning of the end for cars?. Are there any stats showing we have hit "peak cars" ? I might be able to believe this is true in OECD countries - but globally I find this stretches credibility...

Even in Gridlock Central, the city of Sydney, car numbers are falling. The same holds around the world, according to Professor Peter Newman of Curtin University in Perth. It's the price of petrol, changed urban planning, sheer inefficiency and much else. Prof. Newman tells The Science Show that following peak oil, we are now witnessing peak cars and the aftermath.

Australia expects to have first delivery of commercial geothermal power in 2012

Xinhua (!) has a report on optimism that Petratherm will commence operating Australia's first commercial geothermal power plant next year - Australia expects to have first delivery of commercial geothermal power in 2012. There were some snippets about this in a couple of local media outlets, but nothing worth quoting.

Australia can expect its first delivery of commercial geothermal power by the end of 2012 from Petratherm's Paralana project in northern South Australia, local media reported on Wednesday.

In January, Petratherm successfully completed an initial test at its Paralana-2 well, where an injection of a small volume of water detected micro-seismic event as far as 300 metres out from the well hole.

A more major test is now scheduled for June, using higher volumes of water at higher pressure. The test will be critical, and by achieving it will help determine the company's ability to get a commercial flow rate going between the injector and the eventual Paralana-3 production well. ...

Petratherm plans to drill the deep Paralana-3 production well in the second half of 2011 and complete the final tests during the first half of 2012. It said this would allow the commercial commissioning of the power plant by the end of 2012. If so, the company will commission a 3.75 megawatt power plant.

Cross posted from Peak Energy.

Protean power - affordable wave power ?

The Australian has an article on another wave power hopeful from Australia called Protean Energy, who are claiming dramatically low costs for their design - All’s swell for new wave energy.

THE Eureka moment for Perth inventor Sean Moore, 41, came when his Protean wave energy device achieved its sixth degree of freedom. The discovery gave Mr Moore's low-cost buoy system the greatest efficiency possible to generate electricity from harnessing the perpetual motion of the sea.

Unlike other wave power technologies that generate electricity from only one or two degrees of movement out of a possible six -- heave, surge, sway, yaw, pitch and roll -- Mr Moore's Protean device captures the lot. Based on well-known ocean buoy technology, it is easy to deploy, able to withstand rough seas and designed to operate on the surface, where the power of the ocean is greatest before falling exponentially with depth. ....

If the Protean buoy moves, it will generate electricity, desalinate water or perform a host of other functions for a lower cost than other wave technologies and solar and is comparable to other renewable energies.

A review of the technology by Sinclair Knight Mertz found the Protean system could generate electricity at 9.5c a kilowatt hour at the point of generation, which is competitive with wind. A five megawatt unit located in 150m of water 5km offshore can deliver electricity to shore at 17c a kW/h, which is competitive with offshore wind. This is still dearer than other baseload options such as coal or gas, but it is ideally suited for rapid deployment to remote areas and islands, which may now be paying as much as 60c a kW/h for electricity using diesel generators. ...

Protean chairman Paul Niardone said the firm would start selling the units to off-grid and fringe-of-grid applications. … "To a small coastal community, a 5-megawatt installation for 5000 houses can change the economics of the community. They can start new industry, they have got a means of revenue generation, they can sell back into the grid and subsidise other programs."

Cross posted from Peak Energy.

Peak oil highlights need for a unified policy

The focus of this week's Catalyst program (both videos and transcripts are now available online) on peak oil has resulted in another mention in the mainstream press, with Paddy Manning from Fairfax writing a column on the topic in this weekend's papers - Peak oil highlights need for a unified policy.

Peak oil is forcing its way to the top of the agenda with stark warnings from the International Energy Agency and others repeated on ABC radio and television this week, after an investigation by the Catalyst program. ...

In the lucky country, of course, we'll be fine. Rising income from coal and gas exports will help us pay higher oil prices, even as our oil trade deficit blows out and oil hits $US200 ($A183) a barrel, as is forecast often enough. Can we go back to sleep now?

Not when the climate implications are taken into account, says Ian Dunlop, a former Shell executive and deputy convenor of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil.

Dunlop says the manifestations of peak oil were temporarily masked by the financial crisis - itself partly triggered by high oil prices which hurt struggling homeowners in the US subprime mortgage belts - but are now confronting us as the developed world increases consumption. The world faces a 20-30 per cent reduction in oil availability by 2020, he says.

The problem with future oil production, Dunlop says, is the amount of energy you get out for the energy you expend - your return on investment - is dropping.

''Cheap oil is disappearing. A lot of major exporting countries in the Middle East are now finding they need more for domestic markets, and there's not as much available for export.''

While Australia must keep drilling for oil, Dunlop says standards for deep-water exploration will have to be rethought following the Gulf of Mexico and the Timor Sea spills, adding delay and cost to production, just as the Piper Alpha oil rig explosion in the 1980s, which killed 167 workers, led to a complete revamp of safety practices in the North Sea.

Alternatives such as conversion of gas or coal to liquids carry a huge penalty in terms of carbon emissions. Electrification of transport only works if there is a switch to clean energy.

Desperately needed, of course, is a policy to tackle both peak oil and climate change at the same time.

Last year, think tank Beyond Zero Emissions, with Melbourne University's Energy Research Institute, published its Zero Carbon Australia Stationary Energy Plan, which shook things up by calling for investment of $37 billion a year to switch the whole country over to 100 per cent renewable energy within a decade. The plan included enough installed energy capacity to power all our transport needs.

Beyond Zero has assembled a team of scientists, engineers and planners working pro-bono on a fully costed, national transport plan that will take in three streams: city passenger and public transport, freight, and intercity transport and high-speed rail. The report is due out by the end of the year.

Executive director Matthew Wright says the opportunity is there for Australia to invest in new, climate-friendly transport infrastructure and avoid spending on high-priced oil imports, which Beyond Zero estimates could exceed $50 billion a year by 2015. ''That's what I call a great big tax,'' says Wright.

The thrust of the plan is to electrify the country's road and rail transport systems as much as possible with a renewable-powered grid, and the use of liquid biofuels to replace oil for range-extending and some off-road and agricultural uses. Thousands of kilometres of new light and heavy rail would be laid across major cities. Auto manufacturers would retool to make electric cars locally.

Very fast trains would link the capital cities, excluding Darwin, and the major regional centres.

It's the infrastructure we're going to need. Unfortunately it's not the infrastructure we're building, which is heavily skewed towards roads and against rail.

And if it all sounds expensive consider that we are still subsidising oil at a rate of billions of dollars a year, whether through diesel fuel tax rebates or a fringe benefits tax regime that encourages private company car use. As peak oil bites, that's crazy.

How close is peak oil ?

Giles Parkinson at The Climate Spectator has an article wondering when the peak oil of oil production will be reached - How close is peak oil ?.

It seems politicians everywhere are suddenly waking up to the implications of peak oil. When will it arrive? Has it already passed? What does it mean for prices? And what do those prices mean for economic growth, and geopolitical risk? Most are finding that whatever action they are thinking of taking now, they should have been doing decades ago.

This week, US President Barack Obama has been pressuring Congressional leaders to remove $US40 billion of subsidies to the oil industry as he begins to rebuild the foundations of his clean energy policy that aims to rid the country of its dependence on foreign oil.

This has been a stated goal of every US President since Nixon, yet – as Ted Turner and T. Boone Pickens pointed out last week – the power and the influence of Big Oil has meant nothing has happened. Now, surprisingly, Obama appears to be gaining some sort of support from the Republicans.

Actually, it shouldn't surprise at all. As Pickens said last week, peak oil may have already passed. “Oil’s a finite resource and it’s running out,” he told a National Press Club luncheon in Washington. “In the fourth quarter of this year, demand is projected to be 90 million barrels a day and I don’t think the world can produce 90 million. If they can’t, the only way you can kill demand is with price.” He expects that price to soar to $US400 a barrel within a decade.

Not many people will argue against it. The world’s biggest oil producer, Saudi Arabia, may quibble about the numbers, but the kingdom’s rulers are realistic enough to start planning massive investments in nuclear and renewable energy technologies that will wean their domestic energy requirements off a reliance on oil, and free up more reserves to sell into a depleted and price-inflated market in the future.

And the change in that market could be quite dramatic. The International Energy Agency, formed as a response to the oil crisis of the early 1970s, barely recognised the existence of peak oil until last November, when it declared it may already have passed – at least in terms of conventional supplies - in 2006!

This reappraisal, it says, was the result of the most detailed survey ever carried out of 800 oil fields, which concluded that the decline rate in existing fields is very, very deep. So sharp, says IEA chief economist Fatih Birol, that the world would need to develop four new Saudi Arabia’s over the next 25 years just to maintain current production levels. And there is considerable about whether deep lying and unconventional sources such as tar sands can provide that much oil.

“It is a huge, huge challenge that we continue to underline,” he told ABC Radio’s Science program last week. “And on top of that, this would mean that the world's reliance in terms of oil supply would be on a very few number of countries in the Middle East. So you have both the financial aspect, you have the geological aspect, and you have the geopolitical aspect of the growing reliance on oil. I am afraid that there will be more and more intersection between oil and geopolitics. This is the first worry. The second worry is the sudden increase in the oil prices. This is not good news for anybody."

On the same program, Jeremy Leggett, the author of "Half Gone," a book about peak oil, and head of a UK-based industry group that is trying to get its mind around the implications of peak oil, has an even more dispiriting message.

“We think that this problem is actually as bad, if not worse, than the credit crunch. It's going to come down on a world economy that is oil dependent, nay, oil addicted, as a great surprise when oil supply begins to descend, maybe even collapse. This is a huge whistle that we are trying to blow.

“There are so many problems with conventional oil and unconventional oil that on the massive balance of probabilities, by 2015 at the latest in the view of the industry task force, there will be a descent of global oil production. That will cause a crunch, it will cause the price to go through the roof, it will cause price volatility and all the downsides that come with a fabulously expensive and, in some cases, simply unavailable oil.”

Are our politicians worried? Yes. Prepared? No. Obama clearly sees the implications, but without Republican support cannot act. China is betting heavily on electric vehicles as part of it’s solution. Australia, which exports a heap of coal and gas, but imports most of its transport fuels, faces a similar challenge.

The Australian Conservation Foundation issued a report this week noting that state and federal governments are spending at least four times more on building roads and bridges than on public transport infrastructure. Its study found that while $11.3 billion was spent on road construction around the country in 2008-9, $5 billion was given away as subsidies by the Federal government through the Fuel Tax Credits program and another $1 billion was spent through the Fringe Benefits Tax to encourage the private use of company cars. Just $3.3 billion was spent on rail construction in 2008-9. The Greens have used this study to call for a national strategy that helps the country break its reliance on oil.

The only obvious winners are electric and hybrid car makers and EV network operators. Their business is almost entirely an arbitrage play on rising oil prices. Given the current forecasts – the IEA predicted itself that sales of conventional gasoline cars will be negligible by 2050 – it’s looking something like a sure bet.

How to make durable ocean-power equipment: Dive! Dive! Dive!

Dintz has a post on Australian wave power company Aquagen, who were recently featured at the Federal Government's Innovation Showcase - How to make durable ocean-power equipment: Dive! Dive! Dive!.

Oceans are a tough place for any technology, but Australia's AquaGen has plans to generate power beneath the waves even in the middle of the Perfect Storm.

The company's SurgeDrive equipment can be set up in "wave farms," a matrix of bobbing power-generating buoys connected to a very stripped-down version of an oil-drilling platform. The lines tying the buoys to the platforms also transport the generated electricity.

The buoys generate power while sitting on the energy-rich ocean surface and riding the waves, using the waves' energy to turn a turbine. In stormy conditions the buoys are simply pulled below the surface, where the more muted wave action will allow them to continue generating power without being damaged.

Since the buoys disassemble into smaller generating units, repairs are easy. Simply remove the broken SurgeDrive from its wave farm matrix to fix on land, while the rest of the farms continues generating power.

Cross posted from Peak Energy.

Catalyst: The Oil Crunch

The ABC’s Catalyst program has a special edition on energy and peak oil this week - Catalyst: The Oil Crunch.

In just a century, we’ve become entirely dependent on cheap oil. We rely on oil for just about everything, from the food we eat, to our transport systems and even our economic stability. So what would happen if we ran out? There’s a growing fear amongst petroleum experts that it’s happening much sooner than previously thought – that we are hitting Peak Oil now. So how soon will demand outstrip supply, and will we be able to avoid the global economy collapsing when it does? How prepared are we for the Oil Crunch?

The Oil Crunch

Could global oil demand soon outstrip supply? Dr Jonica Newby follows up on 'Real Oil Crisis' from 2005 and discovers the 'Oil Crunch' is imminent.

Kenyan Hot Rocks

Kenya is harnessing geothermal resources to provide clean renewable base load energy which, as a bonus, is transforming the lives lof ocals.

Oil From Algae

Oil alternatives, particularly environmentally friendly sources, are in hot demand. Could algae help meet our needs?

Sustainable Houses

A 1950's weatherboard home transformed to be energy efficient and a modern home with unique technology to monitor energy consumption.