Australian Government Report: Get Ready for Peak Oil

The report – Queensland’s Vulnerability to Rising Oil Prices – was tabled by the Minister for Sustainability, Climate Change and Innovation, Andrew McNamara, who authored the report as a backbencher before his appointment as a Minister last month.

“The focus of the report was the concept of peak oil – the point at which maximum world oil production is reached - which is predicted to lead to shortages and consequent significant price increases. More

WindBelt

Micro-wind power sucks. Cheap bearings eat up too much of the power provided by the wind, and expensive bearings are a dumb thing to put on a tiny turbine (you're better off just getting a bigger turbine).

Remember the Tacoma Narrows bridge that oscillated itself to destruction? A thin band of material in the wind will vibrate. Stick a magnet on the band and put some coils around it and you've got a Windbelt micro generator.

The article says that prototypes have generated up to 40mW in a 10mph wind. If you were getting that from a rechargeable battery at 1.2v it would be around 30mA. A typical AA NiMH battery has a capacity of 2500 mAh and so can provide 30mA for about 80 hours.

The belt length, tension and wind speed are related and control how much the band vibrates. It would be interesting to see if the belt length or tension could be mechanically controlled with a wind vane of some sort so that the belt could generate power in any breeze.

On the other hand, a typical squishy American can generate a maximum of about 50W from a hand crank generator. That's well over 1000 times the power of the micro wind generator. If you could crank such a beast for, say, 30 minutes per day (not necessarily all at once), you'd generate 25Wh per day. Incidentally, that's 1/24th what it takes to run a typical medium sized chest freezer. If the wind averaged 10mph for 10 hours per day a single micro wind generator of the size of the prototype would generate 0.4Wh. So you'd have to set up about 60 of them to get the same power output as a simple hand-crank generator.

Vegetarian is not the Most Efficient

A study completed by Cornell has found that while a vegetarian diet uses the least land, it is not the most efficient diet. A diet that includes a small amount of animal products can be feed more people per acre. This is because the land required to produce a vegetarian diet must all be rich, high-producing land, whereas pasture land can be lower quality. There is much more land suitable for pasture, and crop rotation includes time as pasture. Animals can make use of this land to produce products that humans can use, thus increasing the utilization of the land, feeding more people. Read more.

Alberta and Etc.

The Oil Drum recently posted one of the most unsettling series of articles I've seen in quite some time. It starts out with a bunch of articles about the Alberta Oil Sands. From the sound of it they are pushing the limits on production. The environmental damage is stunning, with flammable water and stories of fish that smell like gasoline and give off the delectable aroma of burning rubber when fried.

It moves on into ethanol and arctic and global warming. Evidently Greenland is turning into a good place for farming again, much as it was when Erik the Red found it in 985.

Betavoltaics

I ran across a very interesting post today about betavoltaics, a method of generating electrical power similar to photovoltaics but based on beta particles (electrons) rather than photons. Despite what the gormless author of the linked article says, this is nuclear power based on radioisotope that is a beta-emitter. Usually this is tritium (which decays to produce the beta radiation, it is not produced by it as author states).

One of the interesting things about these batteries is that with tritium's 12ish year half-life you can have a battery that produces power for decades without recharging. Non-recoverable tritium is produced naturally by the action of cosmic rays on the atmosphere but for industrial purposes it is produced in nuclear reactors. While production is common enough to be a factor in routine nuclear processes, only an estimated 225kg have been produced in the United States since 1955.

Tritium is pretty cool stuff and is used in such things as gun sights and glowing keychains ("Trasers" or "Glowrings"). Alas, the United States and Canada have recently decided that keychains are a frivolous use of nuclear technology and so the totally harmless and very cool keychains that I'd very much like to have are banned in the US. Items like the keychains and gun sights contain only a very very small quantity of tritium, but also have a fairly steep price tag (about 7 to 10 bucks).

The power output of tritium is pretty low, about 24 watts per kilogram. A couple of years ago the price of tritium in Canada was $30,000 per gram. If you wanted to power a 10W device for 8 hours each day for 10 years you'd need a battery that could produce 80 watt-hours per day after one half-life. A kilogram of tritium produces 576 watt-hours per day, so you'd need 138 grams to produce 80 watt-hours per day. Double that to get the quantity at the start of the half-life, 277g. After it was all done you'd be looking at $10 million for the battery.

To compare, a D cell battery is about 23 watt-hours (depending on how fast you drain it). You'd need about 4 batteries a day to produce 80 watt-hours, or about 14,600 for 10 years. At 2 bucks each that's $30,000.

If you used a rechargable NiMH D cell that is good for 200 cycles, costs $9 and is good for 18 watt-hours you'd need 91 of them at a cost of $821 for all 10 years. Add a solar panel to charge them; you'll need a 15W panel at a cost of $60, for a total of about $880 or $0.24 per day. The tritium battery would cost about 10,000 times as much, but you have the advantage that you could stay in a cave for 10 years! With the 91 rechargables you could only stay in the cave for about 2 weeks before needing to charge up again (which would take about 2 weeks unless you got a bigger solar panel).