by frog
I have been looking for some down to earth way to talk about the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) World Energy Outlook 2009 (WEO) since it was released.
The OECD International Energy Agency (IEA) is the taxpayer-funded energy advisor to the 28 most developed countries. The agency was created in 1974 by large oil consuming nations in response to an oil supply embargo which began in late 1973.
Many frogblog readers will have heard about the IEA whistleblowers, who claimed that there was serious political interference in playing down the bad numbers so as not to spook the markets.
Morgan Downey, author of Oil 101 and the Scarce Whales blog, has written an excellent, relatively non-technical post on the Oil Drum, which illustrates the fallacies in the WEO 2009 report. Here are some of the key statements, but I urge you to go over and have a read of the article:
One of the conclusions which can be drawn from deconstructing the 2009 WEO, the IEA’s forecast of energy supply and demand out 20 years to 2030, is that the IEA estimates that the average new vehicle sold in Japan in 2030 will have to attain on average 85 miles per gallon. Even small motorcycles cannot get close to that level of efficiency in everyday use today.
Oil supplied to the global market in 2009 is just over 84 million barrels per day (Mbpd). Although the IEA’s 105 Mbpd 2030 supply forecast is down significantly from previous WEOs, it will still require the discovery and development of at least four Saudi Arabian sized oil producing areas before 2030. This huge challenge is the IEA’s basic “reference scenario”.
The IEA WEO report forecasts oil prices rising to an average of US$100 by 2020 and US$115 by 2030 (in year-2008 dollars).
What to do? It cannot be stressed any more how the winners in the IEA reference scenario to 2030, which many outside the IEA see as too optimistic, will be those that get ahead in terms of efficiency. Reacting to oil prices is by definition too late. We have to create an economic incentive to become more efficient independent and ahead of oil prices.
So why has our government scrapped plans for vehicle fuel efficiency standards? Why are we building ever more motorways, when the IEA’s watered down scenario says that prices are only headed up?
This government is planning to fail, and fail big.
Published in Environment & Resource Management by frog on Sat, December 5th, 2009
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
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Because National only thinks three years ahead – they need to make sure they keep their big business backers happy, so they get lots of campaign money for the next election. Then they will get in, and get their $243,700 for being a cabinet minister or $393,000 for being the prime minister.
Nothing further in the future matters to National – they will just blame it on others when it happens anyway.
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what’s 85 mpg in metric?
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85 mpg = 2.77 l/100km. The NZ light fleet is averages about 9.75 l/100km, or 24 mpg. So, as an OECD country which the IEA is saying will not get any more oil in 2030 than it currently does in 2009, we need to almost quadruple our fuel economy in 20 years just to stand still. (There are some Japanese assumptions behind this comparison that may not wash, but consider it in orders of magnitude rather than hard numbers.)
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Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see.
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This is what Richard Heinberg refers to as the “magic elixir”. It’s so tempting to believe that almost everyone does.
Our government, like others, believes in magic enough to convince themselves that, at worst, it will be someone else’s problem and there is no need to worry about it at the moment.
The pity is that almost all party leaders actually started to understand that peak oil was imminent, two or three years ago. Now that the mother of all recessions has dampened demand, suddenly that understanding evaporated.
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Watch the movie: Who killed the electric car? Some of the alternatives that could provide that level of effiency (such as plug in hybrids and small “community transport” vehicles) are not only in development but available now…
We as country though do need to set high fuel effiency standards or even a zero emissions percentage target like California in 1990 to elict the change from the big auto companies they (and consumers) will not make for themselves…
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Spot on, sofistek.
Of course Jezza electricity is the answer: if we were all to go electric on the road, our fleet would require the equivalent of current hydro production to run. Now where’s the provision for that?
I feel a Tui ad coming on.
And gosh, don’t we need a tunnel in Auckland to go with all the new motorways? At $3+ a litre for petrol circa 2012… the place will be crawling with pedestrians. Aucklanders WALKING? Oh my.
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Yes Jezza, these technologies for electric cars, solar energy etc need to be developed …..what is taking so long?
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I’ve got several hundred vegetable plants out there, ‘solar panels’ deployed, collecting rays and converting them into energy for me and my family.
(No need for a car today – I’m walking (bare foot too!)
Bliss!
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Jimmy, electric cars are quite a bit more expensive than petrol ones to build and run, and will be so until someone subsidises their development and deployment, or oil prices skyrocket again.
Of course, once oil gets expensive, it’ll be impossible to bootstrap the electric replacements. Possibly a good thing, we should be building electric trams run off the grid, not a privately owned battery-powered fleet, and making sure new construction in housing suits public transport access. The motorways might even be easy enough to convert to ultra-light rail (or overhead-electric bus) as needed.
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@Galeandra, the provision exists already, cars recharge overnight when the power grid has latent capacity…
As an example Plug In America studies show 180 million electric cars could charge overnight in the US without the need for a single new power station, even though they use mainly coal burning plants the far greater efficency of an electric motor tahn a conventional one greatly offsets the extra emissions and air pollution from running the plants longer…
Electric cars however are not the sole answer, only Steven Joyce or Nick Smith believe that, the big problems I see is not so much the technology but rather the environmental issues of the chemicals in the batteries, the scarceness of the components of the batteries and the emissions during construction plus a few more… Hydrogen fuel cells are a pipe dream…
We also need massively increased electric public transportation and energy efficeincy to take the pressure off the grid enough for us to allow transportation emissions to drop towards zero…
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I’ve heard such opinions but, a couple of years ago, I read a well argued case for at least a third extra capacity being needed. Some of the argument involved maintenance, I think, as not all capacity can be run continuously for ever, which I think is what is at the base of claims that no new capacity is needed. Of course, even that assumes that every car owner will have the capability to charge overnight, will actually do so, and will never need to recharge during the day.
Yup, just like electric cars.
Public transport is part of a solution but I think we really need to start thinking of other living, societal and economic arrangements. No amount of fiddling with transport will move us towards sustainability, if all the change that is envisioned is a different way of getting from A to B.
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My understanding is that running an electric car on coal-generated electricity releases about the same CO2 as burning oil in the car. If the electricity is generated using gas then it’s about half as much CO2, and with mostly hydro, a bit of gas and occasional coal (the mix we have in NZ) THEN, and only then, do you see significant reductions in CO2 being released – about 20% as much emissions are produced.
I use an electric vehicle, so I’ve looked into this in a big way. I needed to be sure the extra money was worth it.
From a climate change perspective, electric cars make sense in countries with large amounts of nuclear or hydro, but in places like the USA, China, India or Australia, not really.
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Hey Rimu, as I understand it the reductions come from the greater efficency an electric motor can operate at compared to a combustion one from less coal fired pollution, I think CARB did a study before introducing the California zero emission standard…
@sofistek, hydrogen fuel cell technology is a pipe dream due to a number of almost insurmountable problems, electrics however are already available at realistic prices and can utilise existing infrastructure… We absolutely can have sustainable transport by “fiddling” with existing technology, trolley buses and electric rail can be a big part of the solution, hybrids, plug in hybrids and full electrics can play a part…
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Yes, I’m aware of that. However burning coal releases *so much* CO2 that the extra efficiency of the electric engine is needed just to be equal to an internal combustion engine.
If I recall correctly, the basis for my view is section 4 of WWF’s report called Plugged In. There are download links at the bottom right of that page.
This was also confirmed to me by a presentation I saw a couple of weeks ago by some engineers who are into electric vehicles.
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You misundertood me Jezza. Electric cars, on the scale of today’s ICE cars, and projecting out to future growth, is a pipedream. Hydrogen vehicles also exist today. True electric cars are not affordable by most people and will hit resource problems long before they reach a significant proportion of cars in use, in my opinion, even if the distance problem can be overcome.
When I was referring to sustainability, I wasn’t referring to just transport. It’s not possible to have just transport as sustainable if the rest of society isn’t. No amount of fiddling with transport options will move us to sustainability; we have to do a lot of other things also and I suspect those other living arrangements won’t have as much need for public transport as now.
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Thanks for the info guys, very interesting…
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Methane fuel cells or IC engines might work fine. Adding a single C to four H molecules gives you a substance that can be liquid at sane temperatures and pressures, stored without embrittling the container it is in, and is energy dense ENOUGH to fuel a vehicle without greatly modifying vehicle design.
I don’t even have to read the H2 link to know that this is a dead end. I used to deal with industrial gases and liquified gases and I know what sort of trouble is available down where H2 is liquified.
So what we do here is snag the Carbon out of the CO2 in the air and the H2 out of the H20 in water, and this takes energy input out the wazzooo but it is stationary energy. The end product is portable and energy dense and useful for vehicles… and even the vehicle currently in your driveway could be altered to use it.
No batteries required.
respectfully
BJ
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What’s needed is are huge herds of pigs and cows kept in very small cages so we can capture the methane…
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Can they be poorly lit and rarely mucked out? Why do things by halves?
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The claim that Even small motorcycles cannot get close to that level of efficiency in everyday use today. seems to be a throw-away line with no basis in fact. While most motorcycles bigger than 600cc are only marginally more fuel efficient than a small diesel hatchback most bikes smaller than 600cc easily able to better 85mpg/2.77l/100km.
http://www.motorcyclefuelconsumption.com/
The pessimism shown in this thread is largely the result of comparing different types of engines within the current vehicle design philosophy. Not dissimilar to the dire predictions made before F1′s engine size redution in 1960. Smaller engines should have resulted in slower cars but the change from front engine to rear engine revolutionised the design philosophy and triggered a cascade of innovations in aerodynamics and weight reduction resulting in the smaller engined cars being faster than the larger engined cars of just a few years earlier.
What you’re all overlooking is that most of the major fuel economy advances of recent years have come not from improving individual components but from rethinking the relationship between components. That change of approach is a natural consequence of the use of engine management computers and the systems philosophy that has always gone hand-in-hand with computerisation of manual systems. Consequently it is now possible to implement stop/start systems, integrated alternator/starter motors and a variety of other fuel economy tactics that were only investigated in the 1970s but found to be impractical back then simply because the electomechanical systems available back then just weren’t up to doing the job safely and reliably. These types of systems are already available as options on manuy European models. They don’t require fancy batteries and rare materials or complete redesigns of the entire drivetrain so they can even be made available as retrofit kit. However, their greatest potential is to unleash a cascade of weight reductions simply by making it feasibile to replace the many heavy hydraulic systems with lighter, smaller electric systems and using compact lightweight linear motors instead of the old bulky copper coil rotating motors that we are all so used to seeing.
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bjchip: producing methane or other hydrocarbon (other than as incidental capture from a process that’s already producing it) is usually only about 25% efficient from any chosen power source, combine that with a 35% efficient ICE to burn it in and you’re down under 10% total.
Compare that to running power to the main centres from large generators, you get better than 50% efficiency at the axle even through battery storage in an electric car. Yes, the batteries are a problem, but many places still run overhead-wire electric buses and trams, and they can be 70% efficient or better (and easily over 100% considering the gains from regenerative breaking, counting power output at the axles vs base heat available in the burnt hydrocarbons at the plant). Making Methane can’t compete, even though it is vastly better than making Hydrogen.
To go without hydrocarbons at all, the world needs to build solar concentrator turbines in the hot, dry parts of the world, and HVDC the resulting electricity it to where it’s needed. These are, again, four to ten times as efficient as the algae farms that might make fuel in their place, using almost no water in comparison, far cheaper than distributed solar panels, and have no rare or expensive components. It’d take a comparable budget to the world’s arms manufacturers to make them in sufficient numbers over 5-10 years, but it’s possible in theory. Cover something like 5% of the world’s mid-latitude deserts. Think of it as the next Appolo mission.
And 85 MPG? High speed electric trains can /easily/ do that now on a per-person basis, burning the oil in a large power plant. A man on a bicycle gets similar mileage by eating plants and vegetable oil, IIRC, and can do a good 50 kph with an aerodynamic shell. A couple of micro-hybrid cars in development are hoping to do 100 mpg, and the world records for lie-down aero-shelled powered bicycles are around 3000 mpg (at about 30 kph), so they’re not even close to the real limits.
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Tussock
Static power collection and generation. I DID say this would take a lot of power. However, I would be surprised if the process could not mature to reach 20% efficiency. I don’t think 10% cuts it, while twenty makes it OK but not brilliant.
The gains are that we don’t have to build a half million new cars to use it. That’s pretty major. We can do conversions to natural gas for immediate CO2 emission gains, can do our own conversions, and use methane as/when available. We can wear things out rather than replacing them in bulk and use fairly conventional distribution mechanisms. I am NOT thinking long term about automobiles but about aircraft, airships and ships.
This is an economic win for us. That we need to eventually alter the transport mix, transport paradigm and fuel profile for the country is a given. That we can make large changes if we WANT to do so, and take advantage of things we have, is going to be important as well, because in time (20-30 years) we are going to have a lot of households looking for replacements for their reticulated gas services.
Building this capability up, transitioning the vehicles off, bringing the households on… I am thinking long term and I am thinking of ways to finesse the shortages to come as well as preserving as much capital as possible.
Do we in the end, remove all the gas heat and stoves? That may be a better solution.. as the reticulated mains will always lose a little methane or natural gas into the atmosphere. All electric is likely best as the end-game target (except for the major international transit stuff), but how to make the transitions?
respectfully
BJ
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Any solar concentrator turbine will have a diurnal cycle that makes for problems in power storage. I like them… but they solve only about a third of the problem unless you can store the energy.
No one answer will work. Many answers together will work. The system is not too complicated to be imagined, but the human species has to grow up, rather than just grow. Our cities here in NZ have to have better mass transit and organization… not just a broader spread of 400 square meter sections with 200 square meter houses planted on them.
…and 85 MPG isn’t impossible at all.
respectfully
BJ
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Did you mean half a billion new cars there BJ..?
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No… I am just talking about NZ
BJ
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To go without hydrocarbons at all, the world can also power down and re-localise. That would be more likely to yield sustainable societies than trying to re-power business as usual. Unsustainable societies must end. Why is that so difficult to understand?
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Do we in the end, remove all the gas heat and stoves?
Heating, YES. Cooking, NO. The noble art of cooking requires gas.
On the other hand, bottled gas is fine.
Good discussion. Preserving capital is a key point.
What about ammonia as a transport fuel? Produced directly at wind farms. Just thinking about NZ specifics.
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Unsustainable societies must end. Why is that so difficult to understand?
Nobody on this thread has been arguing in favour of perpetuating unsustainable societies.
They understand that part of your argument perfectly well. What they find hard to understand is why you ignore the critical role of exergy efficiency in dragging the world from serfdom to freedom and want to return the bulk of the population to serfdom.
They are arguing for perpetuating civilised societies – ones in which medicines and hospitals are available to all and not just to the landed gentry, where education is available to all and not just to the landed gentry, where healthy food and fresh water are available to all and not just to the landed gentry. Powering down and relocalising will take us back to the level of civilisation that existed in pre agricultural revolution Europe. A world dependent on limited supplies of biofuels to feed it’s army of extremely inneficient engines, the world of serfdom and subsistence farming.
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Not consciously, perhaps. I don’t ignore the critical role of efficient use of resources, it is key to reducing our consumption of resources to sustainable levels. I certainly don’t want to return the population to serfdom and have no idea why you would think that.
To perpetuate what you call civilised societies, we need to ensure that our societies are sustainable. Collapsed societies will not give you what you want.
That you may not like what a sustainable society, in a world of sustainable societies, may look like is not particularly relevant to whether it is better to aim for a sustainable society, unless you look forward to a collapsed society. I don’t hold a fixed opinion about what sustainable societies might look like but it’s hard to see that anything closely resembling what we have now (but with a more efficient transport system) could be sustainable. If you’d like to argue that it is, then I’m all eyes. I would love it to be so.
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BJchip: storage is trivial, though I should remember to mentioned it every time I write about solar.
Take a large amount water, and pump it up to a dam in a high valley. Sea water will do if you’ve mountains near the ocean. Such storage is highly efficient and responsive, and low cost compared to the initial generation. You just need some sufficiently elevated valleys to damn (sic), and the HVDC lines to shift the Joules around.
New Zealand could almost get by with wind generation and dams, but most countries need solar base built in the nearest desert. And no, many answers together will *not* work, the world either sticks with fossil fuels, or it replaces them with a solar base of 100 million GW peak or so, backed up with a lot of high lakes: anything else eats up too large a proportion of the world’s land and water resources, and costs far too much to be reasonably constructable in the required time-frame.
Which is why the world won’t do anything but pretend to care. Why build such a project when we can run a few bullshit wars instead?
Oh, efficiency’s all well and good, but there’s not that much inefficiency where the world uses most of it’s energy, heavy industry. Personal houses and cars are inefficient, but they’re also a small chunk of the total. Most of our real carbon footprint lives overseas, with our industry.
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Oh, and of course, sufficient transcontinental HVDC lines mean you need less storage, because it’s always daylight somewhere, but such a scale of cooperation would be politically difficult, even compared to giving up pointless wars for a few years.
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You just need some sufficiently elevated valleys to damn (sic), and the HVDC lines to shift the Joules around.
I think you trivialize a rather difficult problem. Find such storage in West Australia for instance? Getting salt water into the aquifer is a big no-no and you would, if you pumped salt water.
You would need substantial storage lakes, and FRESH water in them. to accomplish the storage you want.
Storage is where most small-scale local power schemes lose their attraction as well. Storing power is always a problem. Always. It is a cost of doing business and as nice as the stored-hydro schemes are, the sites where one can actually USE it are scarce. Even here in NZ with lots of mountains and valleys and water.
…and here in NZ we will NOT be builting transcontinental high-voltage DC power lines, and it is NOT always daytime “somewhere” in NZ.
Which is why “many answers together” are required. Wind supplements solar, backs it up in the winter when the wind howls but the sky is dreary, and works at night.
Which is why we need means of storing power that are more diverse than hydro lakes where no rivers run. I’d suggest licensing some of the flywheel tech and building it here as well. We have resources and we don’t need the radical redesigns that other countries will HAVE to have, but the notion of doing this all via Solar is not viable. Solar is an important part of the answer. The answer however, has many parts.
respectfully
BJ
(busy these days)
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There is already a solution to the solar power at night problem – it is solar thermal power generation. The sun is used to heat a heat storage medium (such as molten salt) during the day and this heat is then used to generate the electricity when needed, either immediately or at night. Because there is no additional conversion process introduced, it is relatively efficient and uses existing technologies.
Great for Australia, not so good in the land of the long white cloud.
Flywheel storage is good for short bursts of high power. It isn’t so good for longer periods such as overnight. Vanadium redox flow batteries are better for lower power, higher energy storage requirements but still don’t store enough for large scale solutions – good for Stewart Island and the Chathams though.
Trevor.
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tussock: very interesting posts, thanks.
I realise that there are many solutions to what is coming, and many of them look promising. But I don’t think we’re acting fast enough to implement them on the massive scale that is required. Once cheap energy becomes more difficult to get, it will be correspondingly difficult to implement solutions, amongst the associated chaos of food supply problems and economic crashes.
Unfortunately, until the energy becomes expensive everyone just continues on as if they can’t see the future, with blind faith in the system that worked great when energy was cheap.
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Frog – the article you quote has it’s own falacies – like the false statement about 85mpg
“Even small motorcycles cannot get close to that level of efficiency in everyday use today.”
Try 144mpg – (with heaps above 85mpg) – see
http://hubpages.com/hub/MPG-Guide-The-Fuel-Economy-Of-250-Top-Selling-Scooters
We curently have hybrids capeable of getting over 80mpg and many deisels not far behind getting just on 70mpg.
Or what about a deisel that gets 285mpg? see
http://gas2.org/2008/03/12/the-worlds-most-fuel-efficient-car-285-mpg-not-a-hybrid/
Or a Hummer that gets 60mpg see
http://gas2.org/2007/12/14/car-hackers-hummer-gets-60-mpg/
Or a big old heavy 1959 car that got 376mpg, see
http://gas2.org/2008/02/29/37659-mpg-car-found-in-museum-it-was-built-in-1959/
Have a look at the links for this page for a 300mpg hybrid, 120mpg from a prius etc.
As for new motorways – electric cars and trucks and buses are going to have to drive somewhere. nless you want a highly expensive rail system that will never be efficient in a low population density country like NZ.
As for fuel efficiency standards – they would likely have the opposite effect of what is wanted, just like the safety changes did.
Only newer cars are imported, and instead of upgrading, more people are forced to keep their old cars.
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Your assumption is that society can pretty much go on as normal, just by changing to electric vehicles. That’s a pretty big assumption to make in the face of climate change, degraded topsoil, resource depletion, biodiversity decline, etc. When a society is living unsustainably, no amount of technological innovation can hope to allow that society to continue living unsustainably. Spending money and resources on roading that will not be needed in future is, at best, a poor allocation of those resources.
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