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Three for the Future: Water, Food, Energy
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HOUSTON — This is not your father's energy crisis. Not by a long shot. Properly put, it may not even be a crisis but a race to avoid a crisis. Delegates gathered here for a conference on energy, organized by the World Energy Council and its American and Canadian chapters, heard about an energy world that has been transformed from the time of the gasoline lines of the 1970s to one that is squeezing abundant supplies of petroleum products from the earth, and an electric sector that is looking at an intoxicating array of new possibilities. Item: In the past three years, gas from previously unavailable tight shale formations, especially the Marcellus field, stretching from New York through Pennsylvania and down into West Virginia, has changed profoundly the outlook for U.S. energy supply. Plentiful gas has ended many schemes to import liquified natural gas and caused utilities to turn from an expected surge in nuclear power to a passion for gas. The race to avoid crisis rests on the belief that world population and its peaceful expansion rests on three interrelated pillars: water, food and energy. Normally planners look at these separately, but Cristoph Frei and Karl Rose of the WEC and Barry Worthington of the United States Energy Association share a common view that all three of these cardinal needs have to be taken together, and their impact on each other considered. Rose is preparing a study on the water needs of the energy sector going forward. He says these are enormous with an impact not always included in projections of water demand. Oil and gas in tight formations, oil sands and electric utility cooling towers are part of the future and strain the water equation; as do the obvious needs for water for agriculture, the largest user and, of course, potable water. Energy can solve or exacerbate the water problem, according to the energy savants. Item: Alstom, the Paris-based global engineering company is planning to build the mother of all wind turbines: a 6.5-megawatt offshore behemoth – the equivalent of an A380 Airbus, spinning atop a huge pole. Today's large wind turbines are in the 1.5-megawatt range. A new nuclear power plant comes in at 1,600 megawatts. Item: While nuclear is in retreat in Germany, Italy and Belgium, it is going ahead in Britain, central Europe, China and India. Jacques Besnainou of nuclear supplier Areva North America, insists that nuclear is still the cheapest form of electricity and the gateway to a whole new world of medicine. France reprocesses (or, as he says, recycles) its own nuclear spent fuel and that of other countries. Recycling is profitable for France as well as Areva. He wishes the United States had continued with recycling. Driving the rush for more energy is not only the world's voracious current consumption (approaching 90 million barrels a day of oil alone), but also the rising prosperity in Latin America and Asia. China and India, in particular, are sucking up oil and gas and furiously building electric power stations. An aspiring population demands water, quality food and energy. Item: Canada is exuberant about its oil sands and Alberta's ability to handle the environmental impact. Joe Oliver, Canada's minister of natural resources, estimates air pollution at 0.1 percent of the world's green house gas emissions. The resource is calculated to be equivalent to two-thirds of the reserves of conventional oil in Saudi Arabia. New sources of oil and gas have lifted, at least in North America, the gloom that has hung around energy production for decades. Even those who are facing market share loss to natural gas, coal and nuclear, sense there will be demand aplenty for both, as the energy for survival race heats up. Item: Even as the big three – water, food and energy – were being debated in Houston, the United Nations calculated the 7 billionth baby joined the world population. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate - no responses
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The Shocking Truth about Future Electric Supply
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TORONTO — “Nobody knows de trouble I see,” goes the Negro spiritual. It could have been playing as background music in Toronto, where the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) held its annual convention this week. Things are not terrible for the U.S. electric utility industry at the moment. But the industry’s future is more uncertain than it has ever been.
The challenge facing the industry is that we are using more electricity than ever before, with our bigger homes that have more appliances and gadgets. To meet future demand, according to Jeffry Sterba, chief executive officer of Albuquerque-based PNM Resources, the industry will need to spend $800 billion. Not only is it unclear whether it can raise this amount of money, in a time of constrained credit, but it is also unclear what expenditures public policy will sanction. Consider:
l The future of coal, which accounts for more than half of U.S. electricity production, is uncertain. It is the largest contributor to greenhouse gases, and the future promise of “clean coal” is yet to be realized on a large scale at an affordable price.
The second hope for coal, carbon capture and sequestration is a hot topic in electric utility circles. But David Ratcliffe, chief executive officer of Southern Company, confesses that it has been oversold, and it will be many years—if ever—before the technical and legal issues of diverting carbon dioxide and storing it by the millions of tons underground. The uncertainty has already caused 60 new coal-fired power plants to be canceled, according to speakers at the EEI convention.
l Nuclear power, a longtime favorite of utility executives, still faces public antipathy, and the cost of building the plants has gone up as the American engineering base has declined. The large steel forgings that are required for the construction of nuclear power plants can no longer be made in the United States. They must be imported from Japan at great expense.
Also the U.S. nuclear industry, thriving in the 1960s, has been sold off. Where once there were four U.S. companies that offered nuclear power plants, now General Electric is the only one, and it is in partnership with Japan’s Hitachi. The once mighty Westinghouse Electric is owned by Japan’s Toshiba. And the other vendor is France’s Areva. Only Ratcliffe’s Southern Company is sure that it is going to build two nuclear units. Other companies, including Baltimore-based Constellation Energy, have expressed interest in about 14 new plants—only about half of these are likely to be built.
The Nuclear Energy Institute reckons the nation needs a whopping 65 new nuclear plants to meet new demand and to allow for the retirement some of the more than 100 operating reactors.
l Wind is a bright spot. Wind power has proved more effective for most utilities than they thought, and they are now scrambling to find ways to store wind power as compressed air. But while the West and the North have good wind conditions, the Southeast suffers stagnant air at the time it most needs electricity: the summer. It is an energy option that is not open to every utility and because of its dispersed nature, it is not as manageable as a large coal-fired or nuclear plant.
l Then there is natural gas, which is the most desirable fossil fuel. In the past 25 years, the use of natural gas to turn utility turbines has grown exponentially, from 0 to 30 percent of generation. The trouble is that there is not that much indigenous natural gas around, and there are demands on it for home heating, cooking and fertilizer manufacturing, which are seen as higher uses than making electricity.
This has led to a boom in the import of liquefied natural gas from Asia and the Middle East. But James Rodgers, chief executive officer of Duke Energy, which is a large gas seller as well as a major electric utility, says that this is a dangerous route. By the time the gas gets here, after it has been liquefied and transported in an oil-burning tanker, Rodgers says it is only 20 percent less polluting than coal. Worse, he says this will harness U.S. electric rates to the global cost of oil and gas. That way he sees ruin.
Like their compatriots in the oil industry, utility executives talk a lot about technology coming to the rescue. But so far, there has been nothing that suggests a revolution akin to the one that transformed telephony is in sight. The only really happy thing here in Toronto is the realization that the plug-in hybrid car is coming, and that it will boost utilities’ revenues by recharging overnight when there is a surplus of electricity.
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The lost art of debate — and other wordy topics
January 30th, 2012
Guests: Aram Bakshian, author and critic; Atul Singh, Fair Observer
Obama’s strengths and weaknesses; the Internet
January 23rd, 2012
Guests: Tim Farley, Sirius XM Radio; Adam Clayton Powell III, University of Southern California; Wayne Madsen, Wayne Madsen Report
A discussion of Shirley’s book, “December 1941: 31 Days That Saved America and Changed the World”
January 16th, 2012
Guest Craig Shirley, author
World events as the U.S. elections get fully underway
January 9th, 2012
Guests Arnaud de Borchgrave, Center for Strategic and International Studies; Andrei Sitov, Itar-Tass; Al Leeds, The Washington Post
The Joys of Transportation
January 2nd, 2012
Guests Bill Gouse, Transportation Consultant – Originally Broadcast October 16, 2011