From the Garden

I planted about a half dozen green bean plants this spring. They took up about 5 square feet and produced about a quart and a half of cooked beans. I had trouble with finding the beans for harvest and with beans spoiling while hanging in the dirt. Next season I will be planting pole beans. I'm told that these produce many more beans per plant, and the climbing vine is easier to manage.

The tomato plants are producing now, though most of the tomatoes are small, about 1.5 to 2 inches in diameter. I think this is due to the clay soil. I have made two batches of tomato bisque in one attempt to learn how to use them. I started with a recipe I found on the internet and have modified to suit my taste. It consists of about 8 medium sized and ripe tomatoes skinned, seeded and chopped. This is added to one large onion diced that has been sauteed in a splash of olive oil. I add two cups of water, two chicken bullion cubes (alternately, two cups of chicken stock) and a couple teaspoons of sugar. This is simmered for 20 minutes to reduce by about 1/4 and then blended in the blender until smooth (Target cares a hand-crank powered blender for $80). The mix is then strained to remove unblendable stuff and a portion of cream is added. The first batch was a bit tart or sharp, I think as the result of using tomatoes that were still a bit green. For the second batch I used only very red tomatoes and a little more sugar and I liked the result better, but I think it was a bit too smooth, more like soup. The tomato plants still have a lot more tomatoes to produce, so I'll get to make some more soup soon I'm sure.

All of the potato plants died off last month. Evidently this was the result of some sort of pest. They have started to come back now, and I can see that they have produced some potatoes in their mounds, so I may have something to harvest this fall after all. I didn't attempt any pest control on them this year, I wanted to try to establish a baseline level of performance so that I have something to compare against when I make an effort next year.

I need to do some more infrastructure work in the garden for next year. I'd like to work a good quantity of compost into the soil and install some tall posts with wire into which I can train the beans and tomatoes. I think that will make them much more manageable.

Bicycling to Work

I wanted to give the bicycle motor I installed a try so today I rode the bicycle to work. The motor performed well, it really flattens out the hills and makes intersections with cars pretty trivial. Usually crossing intersections with cars is fairly intimidating, but with the motor assisting, acceleration through intersections is quite brisk.

Without the motor assist the bike is heavy and sluggish. I'm not sure if there is a problem or if this is just how a fat mountain bike acts. I think because of this heavy bike with a good bit of drag the motor isn't performing as well as it could. I made it most of the way to the office on the fully charged battery pack, but had to power the last half mile or so myself. I left home around 7:45 and arrived at the office around 8:30. The ride is about 6 or 7 miles so I averaged about 8 miles an hour. I could ride a bit faster, but the trails turn through the trees a bit, and the biological component of the system is not yet up to supplying the extra power. I think that if I was going much faster I'd want to be out on the road. The park-like trails are beautiful, but at 15mph I feel as if I'm running a good chance of running down small dogs and the women and old folks walking them.

The charger is 85W and takes about 6 hours to fully charge the pack, so I would normally have time during the work day to top up the batteries. Today however I need to meet a contractor back at the house at 2, so I'll be driving the bike home in the van.

I still think I should try the kit on a light weight and efficient road bike. I think it would perform much better, both in speed and range. It also wouldn't be such a bear to ride with dead batteries :)

Improving biodiesel production efficiency

Researchers find a more efficient way to produce biodiesel by taking advantage of an enzyme produced by a fungus.

Wired Science - Wired Blogs

Scientists at the Indian Institute of Chemical Technology have found a much better way to make biodiesel. Their new method could lower the cost and increase the energy efficiency of fuel production.

Instead of mixing the ingredients and heating them for hours, the chemical engineers pass sunflower oil and methanol through a bed of pellets made from fungal spores. An enzyme produced by the fungus does the work -- making biodiesel with impressive efficiency.

Matt Simmons discussing the GAO report on CNBC

Matt Simmons was on CNBC's Financial Sense Newshour with Jim Puplaua to discuss the General Accounting Office's report on oil depletion and depletion in general. This is interesting because, besides simply being a good interview with some interesting oil facts, it shows how peak oil is filtering higher up into the mainstream media. Financial markets have been following it for at least a couple of years now, because it obviously has large implications for investors, and this is more finance news, but on a national and widely watched news show. Good stuff.

JIM:
In February of this year the General Accounting Office released a
report on crude oil. Uncertainty about the future oil supply makes
it important to develop a strategy for addressing a peak and a
decline in oil production. Joining me on the program this week is
Matt Simmons, he’s Chairman of Simmons Intl.
Matt,
when I saw this report I thought: finally, somebody in Washington
is taking this issue seriously. I found that at least encouraging.


MATT
SIMMONS:
Yeah, I did too. I knew that the report was going to be released
in a press conference last Thursday. Congressman Udall, and
Congressman Bartlett, I think are two really remarkably great
Americans. Bartlett’s basically an 18-year veteran Republican
from Frederick, Maryland, and a PhD in science. And Tom Udall is a
Democratic Congressman from Albuquerque. He’s the son of Stewart
Udall, probably the last great Secretary of the Interior. So these
are two very special people. They happen to also be the
co-chairmen of the Peak Oil Caucus. And I felt it was like
basically finally the first real official cannon going off saying
we really screwed up.

[...]

MATT:
You mentioned Cantarell. I spent a week ago
yesterday, pretty well all day at his request, visiting with the
new Director General of Pemex, and Mexico thought they had 50
million barrels of oil 7 years ago – they now think they have
13. And what they now know because it’s happening in front of
their eyes is that the world’s second largest producing oil
field, Cantarell – that has accounted for 6 out of every 10
barrels of oil that Mexico’s produced for the last 40 years –
finally went into a tertiary recovery program. They went from 40
producing wells to 440 producing wells. The 40 producing wells
from 81 to 96 produced a million barrels a day without a hiccup.
They now have 440 producing wells and they nitrogen injected the
gas cap which was like stepping on a tube of toothpaste, and it
ramped the production all the way up to 2.2 million barrels a day.
And all of a sudden it’s in decline, and it’s declined by 20%
the first year. They are hoping that the decline rate slows down
to 14% - but it’s just a hope. And my commentary was if you look
at the production profiles of all sorts of publicly available data
on giant producing fields that have now done sort of the most
aggressive sweep of their oil, it doesn’t slow down until
you’re down to about the last 10%. Then it slows way down when
you manage the tail.JIM:
Yet the remarkable thing, as you’re describing what’s
happening with the second largest oil field, there are similar
problems with the world’s largest oil field.


MATT:
There are similar problems with the world’s third largest; there
are similar problems with the world’s fourth largest. You can go
down the top twenty producing oil fields and there might be one or
two that are still in their ascendancy – but the rest are all in
irreversible decline. That’s what makes it so hard for me to
fathom why some people can so casually say that peak oil is an
event that won’t happen for decades, and then we’ll have an
undulating plateau for decades. And I say, “give me a break,
where are they coming from?” They have access to the same data I
do.JIM:
Is it just something that is optimistic because I mean if you take
a look at – and this gets back to the reserves data – and you
look at, okay, we have the tar sands, and maybe we have shale oil,
we have deepwater oil, and the assumptions out there that we have
all this stuff, maybe not in the conventional form, and we’ll
just substitute that stuff.
MATT:
Yeah, that’s exactly what they are doing. And Dan Yergin at CERA,
along with Exxon, have probably become the two loudest voices that
we have no problems. He basically loves to go back and remind
people over the last one hundred years we’ve had several times
when we were basically worried that it seemed like we had run out
of things to find – he always said “run out of oil” but
it’s never been that, it’s run out of things to find – and
then, bingo, we find a new oil basin. Well, he’s actually
correct, as we started from no idea what was there to now we’ve
basically swept the world. What he is basically assuming is if you
do that for one hundred years you can do it for another hundred
years. And it’s a terrific economist sort of thesis – but you
can also go back and say that Cantarell in 1975, 76 was the last
oil field that we’ve ever found that basically produced over a
million barrels a day; and the North Sea fields were the last
fields that we ever found that produced over 500,000 barrels a
day. And now we basically have Thunder Horse may be coming on in
2009, as opposed to 2005, that may be it will produce 250,000
barrels a day – that’s the biggest deepwater field we’ll
ever do. And so the average new field today – you know, giant
field – produces about 40- or 50,000 barrels a day for a couple
of years and then goes into rapid decline. That’s just real
numbers.

[...]

JIM:
As I went through the GAO report, another problem is that – as
they address – a lot of these government agencies they spoke
with in putting this report together, their efforts were not
specifically designed to address peak oil. In fact, the Department
Of Energy said there is no formal strategy for coordinating and
prioritizing Federal efforts dealing with peak. And right now, the
hot topic in Washington is global warming. It’s like putting the
cart before the horse.


MATT:
It’s amazing how this one report from the United Nation’s
study group, and Al Gore’s movie, finally just put the icing on
the cake that, “oh my gosh, let’s all acknowledge global
warming’s here.” And I say that climate change is probably a
very important issue. I do not pooh-pooh that at all. I think we
need far better data to understand the implications of whether
it’s CO2, or methane for instance. There’s a lot of data in
that same report that methane is three times more lethal –
it’s just that we don’t know how to capture it, and so it’s
easier to pick on CO2. But peak oil is far more real. The data is
far more compelling, and the impact on our lives in the next three
years is utterly awful if we ignore it and it happens.

[...]

MATT:
The reality – it would be nice to think otherwise – but the
reality of the Middle East oil is that there were 35 giant fields
that were discovered, and they were all discovered in a very
narrow area. If you sit in the EXPEC center of Saudi Aramco in
Dhahran and watch this really well put together 3D movie, the
movie starts out with a depiction of the earth cracking and the
creation of the Rift Valley and the Red Sea; and what they show is
that basically effectively scraped the whole Arabian Peninsula of
several thousand feet of what was once rich swampland over until
it hit the Zagreb [phon.] mountains – and that’s why
these 35 fields are lined up perfectly North to South like they
are tankers on a radar screen coming out of the Straits of Hormuz.
That’s all the oil that basically got created in the Middle East
because of that one event.
What
I found out to my unbelievable amazement as I went back and read
some SPE papers about Cantarell before going to Mexico last week,
was that in the mid-90s they discovered the most amazing fact that
they basically through magnetic surveys the largest meteorite
crater that’s ever been discovered was this meteorite they
believed hit earth 45 to 60 million years ago and created a
ten-by-ten mile crater – that’s the Bay of Campeche. Within
that crater floor is every giant oil field of Mexico.
So
two acts of God created two of the most prolific basins the world
has ever known. And yet for a half a century we sort of assumed
oil was kind of dispersed around the world equally, and if we just
had two million rigs at work we’d basically be producing 200
million barrels a day. No one ever quite said that, but that was
sort of the implication of the architecture that we created for
the world we now have. [19:57]


JIM:
Another issue I find absolutely fascinating in this whole debate,
and I’ve interviewed authors who think peak oil is a myth, some
think it is far out in the distance, but when I take a look at it
and you boil it down, you’ve got about 75% of the world’s oil
lies within OPEC, and another 10% in Russia – their reserves are
unaudited, so how do we know what they have are real? They
increased by 300 billion in the 80s with no major discovery. Then
many OPEC countries, their reserves remained constant.


MATT:
Well, they produced another 350 billion barrels of oil.


JIM:
Yeah. And you know, the government report even acknowledged this.
They said, “wait a minute, Kuwait has not changed its reserves
in the last two decades, and yet we know that they produced 8
billion barrels of oil.” The fact that nobody questions this is
just remarkable.


MATT:
I find it so utterly naïve for people to just say, “you’re
stupid, just look at the 265 billion barrels that Saudi Arabia
has.” And I say, yes, I know because of the research I did that
the senior executives at Aramco under oath told the same GAO
entity that there were basically 110 billion barrels in 1979 (of
proven reserves under SEC standards) and basically since then
they’ve produced down to where that same number would be
probably today 18 to 20 billion left. And yet they say they have
265 billion, and they have another 200 billion sitting in reserves
if we ever need it. And people say, “thank you, I didn’t
realize that.”

FSO Transcription - "The GAO Report on Peak Oil" by Matthew Simmons 04/07/2007

Awareness continues to rise

SFGate.com recently published a good article about oil. Here are a few excerpts:

When Hurricane Katrina struck two years ago, Americans learned just how ill-equipped the government is to respond effectively to natural disasters. But if you think the government's response to Katrina was inept, brace yourself for peak oil.

Global oil production will hit its peak in the next few years, at which point oil prices will skyrocket and voracious consumers like the United States, China and Europe will quickly drain every last barrel they can afford to buy. Our per-capita oil consumption is double that of most European nations and more than triple Mexico's, and shows no sign of slowing. As supplies dwindle, an economic disaster on a par with Katrina will start to unfold.

Global oil demand is at 84 million barrels a day and rising, and there are at most a trillion barrels' worth still in the ground, most of which is very difficult and expensive to recover. Do the math, and you'll see that the end of oil is, at most, 30 years away.

In February, the U.S.
Government Accountability Office dropped a quiet little bombshell: a
report on peak oil concluding that there is an urgent need for a swift,
coordinated government strategy to assess and develop alternative
energy technologies to avert "severe economic damage." The agency concluded: "(T)he United States, as the largest consumer
of oil and one of the nations most heavily dependent on oil for
transportation, may be especially vulnerable among the industrialized
nations of the world." Stark though its conclusion is, the GAO may in
fact be understating the gravity of the situation.

The report followed on the heels
of a 2005 peak oil risk management report commissioned by the
Department of Energy, which warned of the "extremely damaging" and
"chaotic" impacts that will ensue if "intensive," "aggressive" and
"expensive" mitigation measures are not put in place at least 10 years
ahead of time. Both reports landed with a dull thud and have been
dutifully ignored. In other words, there is no Plan B.

The United States has reacted to
the threat of peak oil and gas with all the alacrity of its response to
climate change. It is ignoring the looming crisis for as long as it
can, just waiting for that sledgehammer to land its first blow.
Eventually, when a recession hits, tax revenue will plummet, and the
government will have nowhere near the money it needs to build an
alternative energy and transportation infrastructure. Every year that
goes by without an intensive mobilization to build an oil-independent
economy diminishes our odds of surviving the end of oil.

At this point, you might be
asking yourself: When oil becomes scarce, how will I get food? That's a
very good question. Here are a few more: Will my garbage get picked up?
How will my water district purify and deliver water and treat sewage
without petrochemicals? What if I need an ambulance? What if my home is
one of the 7.7 million that rely on oil for heating? Which of my
medications are made out of petrochemicals? How will I get to work?
Will I even have a job anymore?(More)

Bicycle Motor

Last week I ordered and installed a 500W bicycle motor on my mountain bike. Yesterday I picked up the last of the three batteries required to operate it and gave it a test run. The total price was $360, including the batteries at $25 each.

It runs pretty well, at full throttle with me pedaling in high gear (52x17) It runs a bit over 20mph. This is too fast for the off-road tires on the mountain bike, at least on the low quality rim that came with the motor. It is obvious that for extended road use I would need to switch out the knobby tires for road tires.

The rim that came with the bike motor is a bit crappy. The joint where it is welded is offset by about 0.010" which doesn't sound like a lot, but it has a pronounced effect on the braking system. The front brakes are jumpy and rough and generally inspire fear.

I'll ride the bicycle to work a few times as it is before I buy new tires. I think that they will be necessary for the sake of efficiency and speed, but I'd rather buy a good road bike for about $70 and move the motor to it for commuting. The mountain bike is great for off-road use, but the frame configuration and tires make it feel like I'm driving a Hummer around town. It just isn't suitable for that purpose.

Infinate Growth, Finite Planet

Climate change: From 'know how' to 'do now' | Gristmill: The environmental news blog | Grist

This guest essay comes from Herman E. Daly, an ecological economist and professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park. He's one of the experts featured in Leonardo DiCaprio's new eco-documentary The 11th Hour, which opens in L.A. and New York on Aug. 17 and in other spots around North America on Aug. 24.

The recent increase in attention to climate change is very welcome. Most of the attention seems to be given to complex climate models and their predictions, however. It is useful to back up a bit and remember an observation by physicist John Wheeler: "We make the world by the questions we ask." What are the questions asked by the climate models, and what kind of world are they making? What other questions might we ask that would make other worlds?

The climate models ask: Will CO2 emissions lead to atmospheric concentrations of 500 parts per million? And will that raise temperatures by 2 or 3 degrees Celsius, or more, by a certain date? And what will be the likely physical consequences in climate and geography, and in what sequence, and according to what probability distributions? And what will be the damages inflicted by such changes, as well as the costs of abating them? And what are the ratios of the present values of the damage costs compared to abatement expenditures at various discount rates, and which discount rate should we use, and how much new information we will learn in the meantime?

What kind of world is created by such questions? Surely a world of such enormous uncertainty and complexity as to paralyze policy. Scientists will disagree on the answers to every one of these empirical questions.

Could we ask a different question that creates a different world? Why not ask, can we systematically continue to emit increasing amounts of CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere without eventually provoking unacceptable climate changes? Scientists will overwhelmingly agree that the answer is no. The basic science, first principles, and directions of causality are very clear. Focusing on them creates a world of relative certainty, at least as to basic thrust and direction of policy. Only the rates and sequences, timing, trajectories, and valuations are uncertain and subject to debate.

As long as we focus on measuring inherently uncertain empirical consequences, rather than on the certain first principles that cause them, we will overwhelm the consensus to "do something now" with the second order uncertainties of "first knowing the exact consequences of what we might someday do."

To put it another way, if you bail out of an airplane, you need a crude parachute more than an accurate altimeter. And if you also happen to take an altimeter with you, at least don't become so bemused in tracking your descent that you forget to pull the ripcord on your parachute.

The next question we should ask is, what is it that is causing us to systematically emit ever more CO2 into the atmosphere? It is the same thing that causes us to emit more and more of all kinds of waste into the biosphere: namely, our irrational commitment to exponential growth forever on a finite planet. Again we ask the wrong question. For example, can my firm emit more CO2 without causing any identifiable harm to any specified person? Yes, no doubt it can. Can all firms do this without causing much harm to many people with a high degree of probability? No, certainly not. Also, instead of asking, when will we be rich enough to afford the cost of protecting the environment? we might instead ask, does growth in GDP at the current margin and scale in the U.S. really make us richer? Might it not be increasing environmental and social costs faster than it increases production benefits, thereby making us poorer? It is clear that we need an aggregate limit on CO2 emissions to avoid this "uneconomic growth." It is easy to preach the traditional dogma of economic growth. It is something else to demonstrate that growth in GDP has not in fact become uneconomic. Economists have so far run away from this challenge.

Is it hard to come up with a reasonable policy? Not really -- a stiff severance tax on carbon, levied at the well head, mine mouth, or port of entry, would go a long way by both reducing carbon use and giving an incentive for developing alternative carbon-free technologies. Yes, but how do we know what is the optimal tax rate, and wouldn't it be regressive, etc.? Once again, we make the world by the questions we ask. We need to raise public revenue somehow, so why not tax carbon extraction heavily and compensate by taxing income lightly? More generally, tax the resource throughput (that to which value is added) and stop taxing value added. Tax bads (depletion and pollution), not goods (income). Does anyone imagine that we tax income at the optimal rate? Better first to tax the right thing and later worry about the "optimal" rate of taxation, compensation for regressivity, etc. People don't like to see the value added by their own efforts taxed away, even though we accept it as necessary up to a point. But most people don't mind seeing resource rents, value that no one added, taxed away. And the most important public good served by the carbon tax would be climate stability, brought about by the consequent reduction in use of carbon fuels and the incentive to invent less carbon-intensive energy sources. And much of the revenue from the carbon severance tax could be rebated to the public by abolishing other taxes, especially regressive ones.

Setting policy in accord with first principles allows us to act now without getting mired in endless delays caused by the uncertainties of complex empirical measurements and predictions. Of course, the uncertainties do not disappear. We will experience them as surprising consequences, both agreeable and disagreeable, necessitating mid-course correction to the policies enacted on the basis of first principles. But at least we will have begun moving in the right direction.

To continue business as usual, while debating the predictions of complex models in a world made even more uncertain by the way we model it, is to fail to pull the ripcord. The predicted consequences of this last failure, unfortunately, are very certain.

Empires Fall

FT.com / World - Learn from the fall of Rome, US warned

Learn from the fall of Rome, US warned

By Jeremy Grant in Washington

Published: August 14 2007 00:06 | Last updated: August 14 2007 00:06

The US government is on a ‘burning platform’ of unsustainable policies and practices with fiscal deficits, chronic healthcare underfunding, immigration and overseas military commitments threatening a crisis if action is not taken soon, the country’s top government inspector has warned.

David Walker, comptroller general of the US, issued the unusually downbeat assessment of his country’s future in a report that lays out what he called “chilling long-term simulations”.

These include “dramatic” tax rises, slashed government services and the large-scale dumping by foreign governments of holdings of US debt.

Drawing parallels with the end of the Roman empire, Mr Walker warned there were “striking similarities” between America’s current situation and the factors that brought down Rome, including “declining moral values and political civility at home, an over-confident and over-extended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government”.

“Sound familiar?” Mr Walker said. “In my view, it’s time to learn from history and take steps to ensure the American Republic is the first to stand the test of time.”

Mr Walker’s views carry weight because he is a non-partisan figure in charge of the Government Accountability Office, often described as the investigative arm of the US Congress.

While most of its studies are commissioned by legislators, about 10 per cent – such as the one containing his latest warnings – are initiated by the comptroller general himself.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Walker said he had mentioned some of the issues before but now wanted to “turn up the volume”. Some of them were too sensitive for others in government to “have their name associated with”.

“I’m trying to sound an alarm and issue a wake-up call,” he said. “As comptroller general I’ve got an ability to look longer-range and take on issues that others may be hesitant, and in many cases may not be in a position, to take on.

“One of the concerns is obviously we are a great country but we face major sustainability challenges that we are not taking seriously enough,” said Mr Walker, who was appointed during the Clinton administration to the post, which carries a 15-year term.

The fiscal imbalance meant the US was “on a path toward an explosion of debt”.

“With the looming retirement of baby boomers, spiralling healthcare costs, plummeting savings rates and increasing reliance on foreign lenders, we face unprecedented fiscal risks,” said Mr Walker, a former senior executive at PwC auditing firm.

Current US policy on education, energy, the environment, immigration and Iraq also was on an “unsustainable path”.

“Our very prosperity is placing greater demands on our physical infrastructure. Billions of dollars will be needed to modernise everything from highways and airports to water and sewage systems. The recent bridge collapse in Minneapolis was a sobering wake-up call.”

Mr Walker said he would offer to brief the would-be presidential candidates next spring.

“They need to make fiscal responsibility and inter-generational equity one of their top priorities. If they do, I think we have a chance to turn this around but if they don’t, I think the risk of a serious crisis rises considerably”.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007