Category Archive 'Energy'
24 May 2008

America and the World’s Energy

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Michael Novak puts B. Hussein Obama in his place.

Candidate Obama, like so many lefties, seems to believe anything bad about the United States, without even submitting it to critical thinking. He said on May 19, 2008, for example, that 3% of the world’s population (i.e., in his calculation, the United States) accounts for 25% of the greenhouse gases put into the atmosphere. In the 1970s, the lefties used to talk about 6% of the world’s population using 25% of the world’s energy. Even before Obama, they were blaming America first.

The left’s figures depend on what is meant by “energy.” Before the founding and development of the United States, “energy” meant the human back, beasts of burden, windmills, waterwheels, burning wood, coke, and coal, and the like. The United States is certainly not using 25% of the energy generated by those means today. I don’t think so, although it might be. The darn country is just so efficient.

But if we mean by “energy” only the modern sources of energy – electricity, the Franklin stove, the steam engine, the piston engine propelled by gasoline (and now by electric and/or hydrogen batteries), the processing of crude oil into gasoline, nuclear energy, the jet engine, the development of ethanol and other fuels derived from plants, and other devices – all of these except one were invented by the people of the United States, as their gift to the world. (The exception was the steam engine, invented by our cousins in Britain, and further developed here as well as there.)

In other words, the United States has invented nearly 100% of what the modern world means by “energy.” And it has helped the rest of the world to use 75%.

02 Feb 2008

SCIENCE Article Supports Abiogenic Oil

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WND summarizes:

A study published in Science Magazine today presents new evidence supporting the abiotic theory for the origin of oil, which asserts oil is a natural product the Earth generates constantly rather than a “fossil fuel” derived from decaying ancient forests and dead dinosaurs.

The lead scientist on the study – Giora Proskurowski of the School of Oceanography at the University of Washington in Seattle – says the hydrogen-rich fluids venting at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean in the Lost City Hydrothermal Field were produced by the abiotic synthesis of hydrocarbons in the mantle of the earth.

The abiotic theory of the origin of oil directly challenges the conventional scientific theory that hydrocarbons are organic in nature, created by the deterioration of biological material deposited millions of years ago in sedimentary rock and converted to hydrocarbons under intense heat and pressure. …

The abiotic theory argues, in contrast, that hydrocarbons are naturally produced on a continual basis throughout the solar system, including within the mantle of the earth. The advocates believe the oil seeps up through bedrock cracks to deposit in sedimentary rock. Traditional petro-geologists, they say, have confused the rock as the originator rather than the depository of the hydrocarbons. …

Lost City is a hypothermal field some 2,100 feet below sea level that sits along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge at the center of the Atlantic Ocean, noted for strange 90 to 200 foot white towers on the sea bottom.

In 2003 and again in 2005, Proskurowski and his team descended in a scientific submarine to collect liquid bubbling up from Lost City sea vents.

Proskurowski found hydrocarbons containing carbon-13 isotopes that appeared to be formed from the mantle of the Earth, rather than from biological material settled on the ocean floor.

Carbon 13 is the carbon isotope scientists associate with abiotic origin, compared to Carbon 12 that scientists typically associate with biological origin.

Proskurowski argued that the hydrocarbons found in the natural hydrothermal fluids coming out of the Lost City sea vents is attributable to abiotic production by Fischer-Tropsch, or FTT, reactions.

The Fischer-Tropsch equations were first developed by Nazi scientists who created methodologies for producing synthetic oil from coal.

“Our findings illustrate that the abiotic synthesis of hydrocarbons in nature may occur in the presence of ultramafic rocks, water and moderate amounts of heat,” Proskurowski wrote.

The study also confirmed a major argument of Cornell University physicist Thomas Gold, who argued in his book “The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels” that micro-organisms found in oil might have come from the mantle of the earth where, absent photosynthesis, the micro-organisms feed on hydrocarbons arising from the earth’s mantle in the dark depths of the ocean floors.

Affirming this point, Proskurowski concluded the article by noting, “Hydrocarbon production by FTT could be a common means for producing precursors of life-essential building blocks in ocean-floor environments or wherever warm ultramafic rocks are in contact with water.”

abstract

Earlier post on Abiotic Natural Gas containing useful link.

21 Oct 2006

Rational Perspective on Oil Prices and Supplies

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UPI 10/20:

A University of Washington economic geologist says there is lots of crude oil left for human use.

Eric Cheney (Y ’56, Y Ph.D. ’64) said Friday in a news release that changing economics, technological advances and efforts such as recycling and substitution make the world’s mineral resources virtually infinite.

For instance, oil deposits unreachable 40 years ago can be tapped using improved technology, and oil once too costly to extract from tar sands, organic matter or coal is now worth manufacturing. Though some resources might be costlier now, they still are needed.

“The most common question I get is, ‘When are we going to run out of oil?’ The correct response is, ‘Never,'” said Cheney. “It might be a heck of a lot more expensive than it is now, but there will always be some oil available at a price, perhaps $10 to $100 a gallon.”

Cheney also said that gasoline prices today, adjusted for inflation, are about what they were in the early part of the last century. Current prices seem inordinately high, he said, because crude oil was at an extremely low price, $10 a barrel, eight years ago and now fetches around $58 a barrel.

25 Apr 2006

Republican Lemmings Racing For the Cliff

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Today’s Wall Street Journal notes the disgraceful appropriation of the democrat party’s politics of envy by the current so-called Republican Congressional leadership. I don’t know exactly who was managing the candidate and leadership selection processes over the last several years, but it’s only too clear that the current Republican Congressional majority was built on a foundation of non-conservative opportunist politicos, who would make late unlamented Everett McKinley Dirksen and Charles A. Halleck (me-too Republican minority leaders of the early 1960s) seem like rock-ribbed examples of Conservative Republicanism. We’re facing an electoral disaster in November, and this Congressional leadership will deserve exactly what it gets.

Few things are less becoming in a political party than desperation, as Republicans are now demonstrating as they panic over rising oil and gas prices. If blaming private industry for Congress’s own energy mistakes is the best the GOP can do, no wonder its voters may sit out the November election.

Oil prices hit $75 a barrel last week, while gas has reached a national average of about $2.85 a gallon. The Republican response has been to put on Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi fright wigs and shout about corporate greed and market manipulation. House Speaker Denny Hastert and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist fired off a letter to President Bush yesterday demanding the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department investigate “price fixing” and “gouging.” Senator Arlen Specter wants to go further and impose stricter “antitrust” laws for oil companies, as well as a “windfall profits” tax. Mr. Hastert also delighted the class warriors in the press corps by lambasting recently retired Exxon CEO Lee Raymond’s pay “unconscionable.”

There’s been unconscionable behavior all right, most of it on Capitol Hill. A decent portion of the latest run-up in gas prices–and the entire cause of recent spot shortages–is the direct result of the energy bill Congress passed last summer. That self-serving legislation handed Congress’s friends in the ethanol lobby a mandate that forces drivers to use 7.5 billion gallons annually of that oxygenate by 2012.

20 Apr 2006

A Modest Proposal

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Anne Applebaum Y ’86 marvels at the vehemence of opposition to windmills, and concludes that there is no pleasing the Environmental left.

The problem plaguing new energy developments is no longer NIMBYism, the “Not-In-My-Back-Yard” movement. The problem now, as one wind-power executive puts it, is BANANAism: “Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.” The anti-wind brigade, fierce though it is, pales beside the opposition to liquid natural gas terminals, and would fade entirely beside the mass movement that will oppose a new nuclear power plant. Indeed, the founders of Cape Wind say they embarked on the project in part because public antipathy prevents most other utility investments in New England.

Still, energy projects don’t even have to be viable to spark opposition: Already, there are activists gearing up to fight the nascent biofuel industry, on the grounds that fields of switch grass or cornstalks needed to produce ethanol will replace rainforests and bucolic country landscapes. Soon the nonexistent “hydrogen economy” will doubtless be under attack as well. There’s a lot of earnest, even bipartisan talk nowadays about the need for clean, emissions-free energy. But are we really ready, politically, to build any new energy sources at all?

My solution:

They have so much energy for venting indignation and organizing and opposing. If we could only find a way to get our moonbat activists to run in treadmills like hamsters, they would probably be able to supply the electricity for at least a handful of states all by their demented little selves.

21 Dec 2005

ANWR Drilling Blocked by Senate

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The goofballs in the US Senate again blocked oil exploration in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. Tara Sweeney explains what oil exploration means to her people, the Inupiaq Inuit who live there.

Right now, it’s 30 below zero in Kaktovik, the only village within the entire 19.6 million acres of the federally recognized boundaries of ANWR. It is total 24-hour darkness, and the wind is howling. Beyond the little houses, there is flat frozen ocean and tundra for as far as the eye can see. Stretching 1000 miles from the Barents Sea near Siberia in the west, to the Canadian border in the east, the Arctic Coastal Plain is one of the harshest climates in the world. Only the strongest people survive.

The PURE LUXURY of running water, flush toilets, local schools, local health care clinics, police and fire stations, were unavailable prior to the discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay, America’s largest oil field, 90 miles to the west. Kaktovik was the last community on Alaska’s North Slope to get these wondrous things, courtesy of tax revenue from oil operations at Prudhoe Bay.

What would Americans in the Lower 48 States do if they were denied these basic necessities? They’d scream bloody murder!

Yet these are the basic amenities that radical environmentalists of the Sierra Club and Wilderness Society say the Inupiat Eskimo people should be denied.

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John Hinderaker of Power Line asks:

It’s a funny thing: when the Democrats are in the majority, the Democrats run Congress. When the Republicans are in the majority, the Democrats still run Congress. How does that work?

Maybe if we get lucky, the democrats will nail Bill Frist with that phony scandal they’ve been working on, and get rid of him for us.

29 Nov 2005

Natural Gas not a Fossil Fuel?

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WorldNetDaily reports that developments in deep-drilling for natural gas present serious challenges to those who still maintain “Fossil-Fuel” theories as to the origin of complex hydrocarbon fuels. The Oklahoma GHK Company has found Natural Gas in two wells drilled to depths greater than 30,000 feet (approximately 5.7 miles), too deep for the remains of dinosaurs to be found. A Japanese Company, Teikoku Oil, produces equipment specifically for use in Japan’s Nagaoka and Niigata fields which are producing natural gas from bedrock that is volcanic in origin.

(Some) might stretch to argue that even if no dinosaurs ever died in sedimentary rock that today lies 30,000 feet below the surface… those levels (may) contain some type of biological debris that has transformed into natural gas. That argument, a stretch at 30,000 feet down, is almost impossible to make for basement structure bedrock. Japan’s Nagaoka and Niigata fields produce natural gas from bedrock that is volcanic in nature. What dinosaur debris could possibly be trapped in volcanic rock found at deep-earth levels? Deep-earth natural gas strongly supports the theory that the origin of oil (also) is abiotic, not organic in nature.

The growing evidence of the possibility of an abiotic, geological origin of so-called “fossil fuels” would be a very serious blow to leftist critics of modern industrial civilization. Predictions of the impending exhaustion of allegedly limited supplies of precious natural resources are a staple of leftist critiques of Capitalism and the American way of life.

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Mr. David Nix, a classmate of mine at college, has thoughtfully passed along this link to an article on the American Association of Petroleum Geologists web site.

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California blogger Gahrie supplies some links to materials on the abiogenic theory.

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