Tag: energy policy

The Left Coast is Finding Out What Zero Carbon Means, the Hard Way.

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California, Oregon and Washington (also known as the Left Coast) are some of the most progressive parts of the United States.  And one particularly rabid part of their agenda is green energy.  They have been punishing the oil companies for anything and everything they could think of for more than the last twenty-five years.

And now they’ve succeeded in convincing the oil companies to get outta Dodge.  That right.  California used to be a large-scale extractor and refiner of petroleum.  But those days are over and now the state no longer produces enough oil to cover the gasoline and other petroleum energy products it needs.  And this is even worse for Oregon which has a very tenuous lifeline of gasoline that travels through a single pipeline.  Oregon has literally zero oil refining capacity.  Oregon’s woman governor sent a letter to Shell Oil begging them to return to the state.  She promised tax subsidies and protection from environmental harassment.  They said no thanks.  After losing money on all their ventures on the Left Coast they’ve permanently moved on to working with the more lucrative LNG projects elsewhere on the planet.

Now Washington state has a less dire situation but only by comparison.  These states convinced themselves that electric cars and solar panels were the imminent future of transportation and energy production.  But none of that turned out to be true.  Now they’ve realized late in the game that they’ve chased away they petroleum industry and left themselves without the fuel stocks they need just to keep their economies running.  Now isn’t that special!

So, what’s my point?  Well, basically I’m just gloating.  Schadenfreude is a large part of the pleasure for us on the Right, here in the era of Trump.  I extract enormous satisfaction from watching morons like Newsom and Oregon’s Governor Tina Kotek panic when they discover that fossil fuels still provide the power that keeps their fantasylands from collapsing back into the stone age.  And that they’ve effectively driven away the people who provide these extremely valuable resources.  Listening to them beg grown-ups to give them another chance just does my heart good.

If you watch that first video, you’ll hear that Oregon predicts that if there is a pipeline problem anytime soon $9-$12 a gallon gasoline will be very likely.  Now think about what that will do to the cost of living.  All I can say is it couldn’t happen a nicer bunch.

Alright, I guess that’s enough gloating for now.

The Green Energy “Transition”

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Here’s an excellent article that takes an objective approach to energy policy.  It looks at energy sources as an historical phenomenon.  One of my favorite quotes is, “We find a useful referee in this war of words with the recently released Eye on the Market 15th Annual Energy Paper by Michael Cembalest, J. P. Morgan’s chairman of market and investment strategy. As this 70-slide, deep-dive report pointedly notes, “after $9 trillion globally over the last decade spent on wind, solar, electric vehicles, energy storage, electrified heat and power grids, the renewable transition is still a linear one; the renewable share of final energy consumption is slowly advancing at 0.3%–0.6% per year [emphasis added].” One does not need a mathematics degree to understand that such anemic growth rates are not the hallmarks of an “unstoppable” juggernaut. Hence, Cembalest’s bottom line: “Growth in fossil fuel consumption is slowing but no clear sign of a peak on a global basis.” That is to say, no “energy transition” is in sight.”

I like a business analyst that has a rye sense of humor; “an unstoppable juggernaut.”  The Germans being the hyper-obedient victims of their past behavior have gone down the green road with both feet.  They shut down their nuclear power plants and without Russian gas their economy has been crushed.  They don’t have enough heating energy for their homes and they can’t run their heavy industries like auto manufacturing and chemical synthesis without fossil fuels.  I wonder if they were smart enough to leave the nuke plants intact just in case they came to their senses.  Nah, they’re too smart to have left themselves a emergency exit.  I’ll bet they knocked them down.

The gist of the essay is that there’s never a transition from one energy source to the next.  The old one keeps on at the same lever or even increases.  Eventually an even more productive successor just step changes itself into prominence.  Human muscle didn’t disappear when animals were domesticated.  Wind power didn’t eliminate oxen.  Neither did steam.  And steam still powers many applications even though fossil fuels became predominant.  And one day oil and gas will be overshadowed by nuclear or geothermal or whatever larger source is engineered.  We want more power not less.  That’s the lesson.

Stamp Out the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard Once and for All!

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The latest EPA scam to prevent energy production employs a favorite old ploy.  Namely, create a full species out of a small slightly differentiated population of some animal (in this case lizards) and then claim this new species is endangered because there are so few of them.  And the difference between the two populations can be almost non-existent.  A different number of scales on their chins or a slightly smaller overall average length or whatever.  Now the truth of this is that every species with a large enough range develops slight regional variation.  And things like color will vary in order to blend with local conditions.  Even over short time spans moths have been known to genetically select for darker or lighter color based upon the advantage in blending into backgrounds that had more or less coal dust in different parts of London in the 20th century.

So here comes the dunes sagebrush lizard (Sceloporus arenicolus) a small drab creature that is part of a family that includes 114 so-called species that extend from New York State to California and from the Canadian border to Panama.  And even more pathetic, until very recently (1972) the arenicolus was considered just a subspecies of the sagebrush lizard (Sceloporus graciosus) which is in no way endangered.  Now government funded biologists live to produce new species in order to have a reason to apply for a government fund to study this new endangered species.  And as you’ll read in this article, the dunes sagebrush lizard is disappearing because oil and gas are being extracted from its home range.

My thought is, “Too damn bad!”

Let’s suppose that what they say is true.  Oil and gas extraction is bad for the very important lizard and if extraction is expanded then the very important lizard will go extinct.  Dead, gone, buried, finished.  Well, guess what.  In twenty years, the sagebrush lizards on the other side of the dune will begin moving into that territory left vacant by the demise of the dunes sagebrush lizards that were just too delicate to make it.  And in a hundred years they will adapt to the exact climate in that dune environment and guess what?  They will look and actually be indistinguishable from the extinct dunes sagebrush lizard cousins they replaced.  Hooray for evolution!

So, my advice to President Trump is to have his EPA not only delete the dunes sagebrush lizard from the endangered species list but also reclassify it as a subspecies of the sagebrush lizard and forget about it forever.  And while they’re at it do a review of all the other endangered species to see how many of them are subspecies with tiny ranges that have been elevated to full species rank just so that their range can be excluded from useful human activities like building houses and fishing in lakes and drilling for oil.

In the same way that Democrats use the USAID as a piggy bank to fund their wish list of stupid causes, the National Science Foundation is a source for endless grant money for things like inventing endangered species and spending whole careers walking around studying these unimportant populations of common species for no meaningful reason.  Being the champion and greatest living authority on the dunes sagebrush lizard should be a badge of shame.  And at the very least should be a pursuit unfunded by the United States federal government (in my opinion).

Guest Contributor – Chemist – 24JAN2025 – Nuclear Power

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“Now the real problem is managing the wastes and breeding more fuel.”
Interesting choice of words.
If only there were a way of capturing all those extra neutrons and making fuel grade Uranium from more common ore. We could call it a “Breeder reactor”.
Nah. It will probably be decades until we could do that.
Like negative 7 decades.

There is no scientific reason not to use nuclear power. As you pointed out, the French have been doing it for 70 years. (They sell power to Germany.)
And if the French can do it….
The roadblocks are 90% political and 10% engineering.
Nuclear waste can be dealt with if we give American engineers a chance to attack the problem. But with no new activity going on, we can’t solve the problems.

Spending billions on a waste storage project in Nevada and then letting a corrupt politician kill the project was clearly the wrong way to go.
BTW, Nevada, I’d like that money back.

The Next Big Thing

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According to Elon Musk the big project is man going to Mars.  According to Donald Trump it’s Big AI.  So, which do I think is the next Manhattan Project?  Well, neither of those.

Mars will have to wait until there is a compelling reason to send men there.  Sure, send some really advanced drones and bring home some Mars rocks (or Martians if you can find them).  Heck, send a lander to Titan or Ganymede.  I’m all for that.  Even capture an asteroid made of gold and platinum and break off chunks and throw them into the desert or the ocean.  All good clean fun.  But that’s not the Manhattan Project.

And neither is AI.  That’s just more of the same.  That’s management reducing the payroll to a minimum.  Sure, it’s a stunning tool that will enhance the ability of all kinds of projects.  And it will make a lot of us redundant too.  So, I don’t look at it as some big breakthrough for humanity.  At least not as advertised at the moment.  Maybe when we get the AI implants, I’ll change my mind.

No, the Manhattan Project for the 2030s is the changeover of the American power grid to nuclear plants.  We have a window of opportunity while the current fossil fuel reserves are still relatively robust to begin systematically designing and optimizing fission plants to make them as close to foolproof as humanly possible.  We have about fifty years to achieve this before we run out of fuel and based on how the French have been using them for about seventy years without a catastrophe I’m confident that within thirty years more than fifty percent of the American power capacity could be converted to fission plants.  And after that it would be a short time until the only other plants would be hydroelectric and some exotics like solar panels in the desert.

Now the real problem is managing the wastes and breeding more fuel.  A lot more work needs to be done on optimizing the life cycle of the radioactive materials in both the fuels and the wastes.  Long term storage and recycling materials for reuse are still underdeveloped areas of study.  Just dumping depleted fuel rods in an underground mine under a mountain in the Nevada desert is a pretty crude plan for the materials produced by the reactor.  Often the byproducts of the reactor can be reclaimed and even transmuted into useful fissionable material.

But we are still in the infancy of nuclear technology.  Combustion is almost as old as hominid life on the planet.  Neanderthal possessed fire.  Now we have to make the leap to domesticating the neutron.  What’s needed is a push in the right direction.  A pilot project sponsored by the federal government to design a plant that can be tested under the most disastrous set of circumstances imaginable and proven safe.  This will provide the American public with the confidence that their bogeymen from the Three-Mile Island and Chernobyl events are long dead and buried.

Right now, it wouldn’t have to be some trillion-dollar boondoggle.  Use reasonable resources to build the test case.  Tap into the existing designs and the recent innovations that are going on in China and India and then let the big brains at the big engineering firms show what they can do.  Who knows, maybe Elon Musk could be convinced to put his Mars mission on hold to bring forward the future of human energy production.  Surely, he would consider that a worthy project.  And it would make his dopey electric cars a lot cheaper to charge.

Hello, Hello.  Is There Anybody Out There?

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We got five or six inches of really wet heavy snow last night so of course the power goes out and also the cable, internet and phone lines.  The generator faithfully kicked in so Camera Girl and the dogs were warm and cozy while the male contingent was tasked with clearing the snow.  Of course, the snow blower is suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome so the snow had to be cleared the old-fashioned way.

To add insult to injury the electrical failure is less than five hundred feet from my driveway and so there are the trucks and electrical crew and even some fire fighters standing around looking puzzled.  I thought about going and talking to them but reconsidered.  I’m guessing some of my neighbors already have and I figure the more times you bother those guys the slower they’ll fix it.

It’s about eighteen hours in and I’m sort of resigned to a world without connectivity.  The only phone is an old flip phone that we keep around for emergencies.  I charged it up and Camera Girl called the kids to let them know we’re alive.  I called work and said I was declaring a snow day.  When the driveway was clear I went to a wi-fi location and checked to make sure OCF was up today and that has been the extent of our electronic communications for the day.

No news sites, no X, no nothing.  All things considered, it’s not so bad.  I guess if the utility reliability continues to decay out here in the hinterlands of Dunwich, I’ll have to ask Elon Musk to provide us with our own dedicated Starlink satellite, a small nuclear power plant and maybe a spaceport.  Dunwich is located at the nexus of the Terran/Great Old Ones dimensional rift so a small dedicated interdimensional port makes a lot of sense.  If he’s not too busy with his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) role-playing game maybe he could get working on that.

Well, whatever the New England states have done to the power grid it doesn’t bode well for the future.  I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that a generator with a cut-in switch that can handle the full electrical load of a home is now standard equipment around here.  You can be without power for a week in the winter at any time.  So natural gas or a large propane tank is what you need.  Getting enough gasoline might not be a safe bet if everyone is without power and out searching for fuel.

Well, anyway, while I sit here isolated from Al Gore’s world wide web and information superhighway, I think about how the Democrats want to cut away the last links of reliable energy we still have.  The blue states are going full speed ahead to criminalize the internal combustion engine and anything else that uses fossil fuels.  I guess that Trump’s term will be a decision point for some parts of the country.  Without his support, all of the promised charging stations and other green energy rigamarole won’t be there to allow for the fossil-fuel-free-wonderland they envisioned.  It may turn out that their deadlines are not be feasible.  And if they insist on them, there may be some serious blowback from the voters.  It might become quite interesting for Gavin Newsom.  Instead of the bullet-train future he promised he might be leaving on a different rail, one that includes tar and feathers.

Sunnyside Saturday

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It’s Saturday and that’s the happiest day of the work week (in my opinion).  And so today can’t be doom and gloom day.  No end of the world stuff or triumphant deep state conspiracy theories for me today.

I was just watching a YouTube video about why commercial nuclear fusion is fifty years away and always will be (ha ha).  And of course there were no surprises there.  The sheer magnitude of the temperatures, pressures, magnetic flux and energy consumption needed to make this process work is beyond daunting.  It’s technical lunacy.  When you look at where nuclear fusion does exist (a star), what you realize is that this is an environment where gravity can compete against the electromagnetic force head-to-head.  That is not going to happen in our labs and factories.  So, we have to pay for magnetic containment and we pay by the gigawatt-hour.  It’s not a good trade-off.

When I try to imagine what practical controlled nuclear fusion would look like I conjure up a tiny gun shooting tritium nuclei, one at a time, into a target of heavy water and boiling the heavy water to make steam.  It’s my version of the “Back to the Future,” Mr. Fusion engine that runs Doc Brown’s time machine at the end of the movie.  The breakthrough is that I’m able (by magic) to keep the energy expenditure for the tritium gun down to the level of what I can extract from a USB cable on my MP3 player.  Of course, where I get the radioactive tritium from and how I keep myself from being irradiated while riding in my fusion powered car are at this point undetermined.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  Given a thousand years I think we’ll make real progress on commercial nuclear fusion or find out it’s not feasible.  And I think research on it is a very good idea, if for no other reason than that it will spawn innumerable amazing technological byproducts that may be even more beneficial than the primary problem.  But I think we should all put aside any dreams of living in a world powered by nuclear fusion (unless some wise guy figures out that cold fusion is an actual thing).

But all of this is just the intro to my main thought.  And that is what would life on Earth be like if energy really were essentially free.  Now I don’t mean free, free.  The infrastructure for breeder reactors and handling their waste products will be an incredibly complicated and expensive industry that will employ a good chunk of the technically minded part of the population.  And maintaining a power grid and the other allied industries that will grow up around very cheap electricity (e.g., syn-fuel) has always been a big piece of modern life.

But imagine if you can what kinds of problems would be solvable if essentially limitless power were available.  For instance, what if desalination of sea water could be accomplished at a scale to be able to farm the Sahara Desert?  Think of the engineering projects that become feasible if power is no longer a problem.

And all chemical synthesis is available if the power to provide the potential to run the reaction in your direction is provided.  We could even start making cars out of metal again.  I’ve always dreamed of having a car that was immune to road salt corrosion.  Hastelloy C, Tantalum, or boring old titanium?

But the best part of all is imagining that my electric bill for my home heating and cooling and lighting is zippity doo dah all the way up to some pretty impressive electrical usage.  Hell, even I would give up my oil heat and use resistance heating just for the sake of getting rid of that damn furnace that’s always breaking down.  And I want them to throw in free fuel for my car up to let’s say a couple of thousand miles worth a week.  Ah, what a wonderful world it could be without technophobes.

Alright, all optimism for the week officially used up.

Who Will Own the Future?

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The earliest civilization that archeologists have identified is Sumer.  Located in the southern portion of the Tigris-Euphrates basin the Sumerians invented irrigation agriculture, domesticated several of the familiar farm animals and formed the first empire.  Their technological advances allowed them to grow their population until it probably included a million people.  Pretty good for six or seven thousand years ago.

So why aren’t we all speaking Sumerian and praying to Enki and Enkidu (Enki see, Enki do)?

Well as it turns out, using the Tigris and Euphrates as an irrigation source for hundreds of years eventually raises the salinity of the soil to the point where agricultural yield falls way off.  That’s right.  The technology that made their civilization possible was eventually unsustainable.

Sustainability is a buzzword that Gaia worshippers love to bandy about.  And typically, they’re talking about fossil fuels as being “unsustainable.”  But more and more the sustainability of things like wind and solar energy systems have begun to be questioned.

As an example, down in Texas a hail storm destroyed a significant part of a 4,000 acre solar panel array.  And local people are worried about the damaged equipment leaking harmful chemicals into the groundwater.  And this is far from the first occasion when hail has destroyed these arrays.  And wind turbines have been having their own problems.  Maintenance has been found to be more expensive and frequent than estimated.  And the impact on bird life has been shocking for the wildlife lovers among the green energy crowd.  Dead eagles and other raptors are a common sight around these installations.

But the main complaint about these supposedly sustainable technologies is that they have significant environmental costs compared to the limited power production they represent.  In other words, replacing the current power generation capacity with these sustainable technologies would create enormous ecological impact from the production of the equipment and from the sheer size of the area needed to contain this capacity.  Imagine a landscape covered for miles and miles with wind turbines.  And the whole area littered with bird carcasses.

The current green energy technologies remind me of the compact florescent bulbs that the Obama administration tried to push on us.  It was a technology that had more problems than the technology it was supposed to replace.  Basically, it was a pretend solution to a situation that was being presented as a critical problem but was actually a manufactured crisis.

Now here’s the thing.  Problems with technology occur.  One problem that we have anticipated for a long time is what to do when fossil fuels run out.  Now whether that’s a hundred years in the future or a thousand years there will most probably will be a point where we’ll run out of recoverable coal, oil and gas.  And long before that time comes mankind should have a plan to replace this energy source with something else.

But the answer can’t be going back to living in caves as the green energy people want you to believe.  And if this country and the rest of Western Civilization decide that following the lead of the Greens is the answer then someone else will find the better way and move forward without us.

Will it be the Chinese, the Russians, the Indians?  It’s very hard to know who.  But it will happen.  And if we allow ourselves to be bullied by the likes of Greta Thunberg and John Kerry then we’re going to doom our children to living like stone age people and eventually be displaced by more rational societies.

I’m hopeful that the great experiment with green energy that California has pioneered will soon bear fruit and cause some horrific catastrophe.  Maybe a huge number of electric cars will get stuck in a traffic jam out in the desert and thousands of stranded motorists will die of heat stroke.  Something like that could allow rational people to realize how stupid the Greens truly are and return people to a sane way of thinking about energy and its place in our lives.

Well, Enki see Enkidu.

Guest Contributor – ArthurinCali – 15JUN2023 – Energy Haves and Have-NotsXYZ

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A side story on California’s stupidity on renewable energy:

Last fall the state energy commissioner, or whatever the “very important state official” who is in position to announce proclamations from on high to us peasants had dire news. The problem? Energy consumption between the hours of 4pm-10pm needed to be drastically reduced due to the whole sun going down effect. No sunlight, no solar charging-easy concept. The call was put out with advice on appropriate temperature settings for A/C, and the avoidance of activities that might strain the electric grid across the state.

Imagine the surprise that night to see So-Fi Stadium in Los Angeles fully lit up in anticipation for the NFL game being played. The irony was not missed on what the state considered their priorities to be during this alleged crisis. And yes, it was put out with an attitude that this could result in blackouts (brownouts?) across the state.

Those unfamiliar with Los Angeles weather should know that it is quite mild for most of the year. If this was such a desperate situation surely a football game should not have been that important to warrant the amount of wasted energy to light up a small village. The game could have been rescheduled to be during the daylight hours. But no. Priorities you see.

If This Goes On … Then What? – Part 3

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So, after the rainbow crusade the next most important article of the woke faith is the climate change crusade.  And the real-world consequence that this delusion engenders is the energy crisis that we are currently suffering under.

Starting in Europe but now picking up steam here in America, the Left is attempting to criminalize the use of hydrocarbon fuels.  And especially they’re trying to take them away from private citizens.  So even though the bulk of electrical generation is powered by natural gas in this country, the federal government and states like California are legislating against the use of gasoline powered cars and other equipment like lawn mowers and at the same time, against the use of natural gas for cooking and eventually home heating.

And indicating to the oil companies that they are going to be phased out has had the predictable effect of curtailing their efforts to keep the price of gas and oil stable.  Instead, this plan has unleashed the OPEC cartel’s efforts to maximize their profits in the short term and ignore Washington’s pleas to help it along with making the transition quiet so that it becomes a fait accompli.  And even though the adoption of electric vehicles is already becoming a nightmare for the power grid in California, the feds have doubled down on making this all happen by 2030.

First a word on the technical aspects of this plan.  As a chemical engineer I can say categorically this is a stupid and wrong-headed plan.  Charging electric cars from a grid that is basically powered using fossil fuels is incredibly wasteful.  Over a third of the energy that even reaches the grid is wasted as heat during transmission.  That’s not even taking into consideration the difference in efficiency between the internal combustion engine versus the combination of the turbine electric generators and the battery charging and discharging efficiency.  It’s absurd.  And they call it “green.”

So how does this end up?  Well, you know the drill.  Let me throw out some scenarios and I’ll make my guess and then you follow up on the poll.  Here goes.

The worst-case scenario is that this whole thing is accomplished.  The people of the United States act like good little sheep and just acquiesce in this whole stupid plan.  And in order to compensate for all the inefficiencies and fallacies in the plan we all end up losing a whole lot of freedom and affluence.  With much more expensive electricity and with the supply insufficient to allow everyone to recharge their cars every day, trains and busses will become the mandated form of transportation for ordinary people.  So, forget about auto trips and vacations.  Probably car ownership will become too expensive for anybody not in the upper middle class.  Even home heating will become a real problem.  Expect that people will walk around their homes in coats and hats in the winter and insulation will become a matter of life and death.  And enjoy living in the desert southwest without air-conditioning.  And the cost of food will also increase drastically and the variety of foods will go away.  No more fresh fruits in the winter except for the very well off.  The peasants will make do with whatever can last from the fall.  No more meat.  Unless you consider crickets meat.

The middle scenario is a much slower rollout and the realization that nuclear power plants can be sold to the climate zealots as “green energy.”  Having a reliable and economical high density power source could ameliorate some of the sins that battery cars create and leaves open the scenario where hydrogen fuel for cars is affordable.  And likewise, affordable energy could prevent the other problems like expensive food and home heating

The best-case scenario would be the American people revolting against the stupidity of the green agenda and voting for a combination of fossil fuels in the here and now and research into long term energy solutions like nuclear and other more exotic sources like geothermal.

For once I’m not guessing that the middle scenario will occur.  I think the American people are sheep that will be led to the slaughter.  I’m guessing we’ll get the whole green agenda and we’ll be eating bugs and taking the train in the future.  The ultimate humiliation for a once free people.

Leave your guess below.