Carbon sequestration - using cattle herds.

Recently, developments in carbon sequestration and storage have been at the forefront of debates related to energy systems. During the recovery of oil and gas, cavities in the earth's crust are formed. These cavities can be used to pump carbon dioxide back into the crust, eliminating the negative effects of carbon dioxide on the outside environment. Another recent development also shows promise as a significant addition to carbon sequestration. Often, cattle are sourced as the cause of greenhouse gasses. Bovines release quite a bit of methane when consuming grass and feed. However, it seems that there is a delicate balance between animals and grasslands - the details of which we are just starting to understand. This idea has the potential to feed much of the third world, stop the desertification of much of the world's grasslands, and sequester enough carbon to reverse atmospheric carbon trends, let alone offset the affects of the added amounts of grazing animals. 

Triple win. 

Disclaimer: this is not my field of expertise, and I don't know the feasibility of holistic land management. That being said, based on some research which I've done, I'm confident that the idea is plausible.

 

[from facebook] Go green but go green smart

Right before writing this article I was not a huge advocate for wind power. I knew that wind turbines have one problem: supply and demand. Electrical energy needs to be created at the very moment it is needed. wind power can only When you turn on your washing machine, your lights, your dishwasher - you need power right then and there. Wind power can only be generated when there is wind. Therefore, you no matter how many extra windmills you put up, you still won't have enough power during the right times.And Solar won't help (at least in the winter). Solar has a lot of capacity in the summer, but in the winter not so much. When do we need power you ask? well look below (this is for sounthern Canada, courtesy NRCAN):You can see that energy demand is the least in October and April, and currently the most in January with a growing peak in July. For an idea of how energy demand changes during the day:You can build your wind farms, but unless you build some way of storing the energy, you will still need conventional (hydro-electric, coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear) power plants. Ways of storing power are:- batteries- water damnsTo build batteries would be just silly. You want to save the environment, so you create toxic waste? Batteries also do not have that much capacity. Building damns limits the locations you can build wind turbines to:- places that have a high frequency of wind (and)- places that are hillyThis combination is a hard find.But one thing did not click in my mind. Europeans are not idiots. Why build so many wind turbines, when they know that wind energy will not be able to suffice their power requirements?The answer is high voltage DC power lines. Yes, DC, this is not a typo. A list of advantages can be found here. AC transmission is used because of historical reasons: When we were installing AC power lines, we didn't know about the advantages of HVDC, and we had just switched from (Lower-Voltage) DC power lines because of their inefficiency. HVDC lines are standard (in Europe) at 500KV. This means much larger insulators are required, and more ground clearance. (Many) thyristors would be needed to change over to HVDC, and adaptations to current lines. Regular transmission lines are 125KV AC in North America.What does this have to do with wind energy???Winds are strongest in the winter in Scandinavia. THey are strongest in the summer in the Sahara. Europe wants to interconnect the whole continent with HVDC power lines, install (a lot) of wind turbines, and supply clean energy to the whole continent year round. This would not have been possible with much less efficient AC power lines.They are investing $80Bn US into this infrastructure. This kind of investment makes sense for other reasons: peak oil:Once oil supplies have sufficiently run out, we will inevitably need to use renewable resources. Having an efficient energy distribution system like this will allow for adding more (green) power sources and not worrying about local / regional power users, since power can be transmitted efficiently over (ridiculous) distances.I wasn't for wind power. Now I am. BUT North America needs a more efficient, and more importantly, more interconnected power distribution system than it has for this to work.Go green but go green smart.

http://thefraserdomain.typepad.com/energy/2007/11/supergrid-to-su.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HVDC#Advantages_of_HVDC_over_AC_transmission

[from facebook] nuclear...

It seems that people are very quick to join the anti-nuclear cause. Using their extra large washing mashines, dryers, and fridges. Electric can openers and electric hair cutters. electric this and electric that.For most of them, their cause is like saying that whe shouldn't eat any beef, dairy, or any other meat/ fish because of dyoxin levels, finally getting their way so that nobody eats any of the any of the aforementioned foodstuffs, then wondering why the earth's population starves (http://alpineresearchcenter.com/?p=14, http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=10167). We need to eat meat for the simple reason that most of us will die if we don't. We DON'T need another nuclear power plant - but I am sincerly inconvinced that anyone is willing to change their way of living enough to dent the increasing energy demand - and the government won't pass legislation to curb these outrageous Canadian energy demands (we produce more waste and use more energy per capita than any other nation in the world, save the United Arab Emrates).Yes - there are other energy sources - wind (which is NOT as expensive as pro-nuclearists proclaim), low head damns (which have limits on the energy demands that they can curb), wavel (which in most cases can be combined with offshore wind-farms - most use the wells turbine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_turbine), and tidal (using damns). The only thing is - the numbers don't add up. Unless we stop our wastefull lifestyles, there's NO way of not using nuclear. So let's just embrace the fact. Yes, things like ITER (magnetic confinement fusion, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER) are trying in other ways to curb this - but still being AT LEAST 50 years from a commercial reactor - this reactor will produce radioactive waste, but with smaller half lives (reuse of material in ~100yrs) - or other good ideas like the Polywell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell) - good ideas, but physically impossible (http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/1721.1/11412/1/33227017.pdf). My last hope - up until my coop at the National Research Council of Canada - layed in Research. We shurely could think of a solution in time to curb all these problems? Not quite. I'm currently working on a way of reducing GHG emmisions in the processing of Bitumen for oil production in the Alberta oil sands - and the process is SLOW. These things do take YEARS, and researchers work hard and aren't paid for it. So why not just embrace the fact that we will slowly poison the earth to death, and embrace nuclear power?

[after facebook]

The above I wrote pre Fukushima, and I still think nuclear is a good base load source of power after Fukushima.

Simplify.

Cutting out facebok, throwing out old clothes, getting rid of books. Throwing away old class notes. Cutting down to the bare bones. I'll still keep my skis (both downhill and x-country), bike, camping equipment, and many other things. I feel like a tree in the early spring. Time for pruning, so that there is better, more directed growth in the coming year.

Oily reports

World oil reserves: 1,392 billion barrels*
World yearly oil production: 32.5 billion barrels (2011)

Years of reserves left at current production levels: 42.8

*Not included: Venezuela oils sands mentioned in previous post

Years of reserves left with Venezuela oil sands: 58.6

And here's a chart of oil consumption by region:

You can see that most places are fairly steady, with Eurasia taking decent dive and Asia taking a nice climb. Overall consumption is increasing. Oil reserves are also increasing, but at a slower pace.

Oil sands in Venezuela

It seems that the worlds largest oil sands are not in Canada, after all.

Athabasca oil sands recoverable oil: 170 billion barrels (Canada 2006 est.)
Orinoco oil sands recoverable oil: 513 billion barrels (US 2009 est.)

Oil sands are a quick fix to the problem we have with consuming so much energy. They decimate the place around them, making it a toxic waste land. I do see some value in extracting oil from these sands, but we need to invest all the profits from these oil sands into renewable technologies.

Algae...

A US company, Solazyme, recently signed a contract for 20 million gallons of oil to be used in insulating transformers. That's the equivalent of about 2 000 barrels of oil / day, or 2% of Canada's oil sands production.

2% is not a lot by any standard.

However, this is algae we're talking about. Algae companies are now signing commercial contracts for oil. Depending on the variables used, algal based crude oil can be produced today at around $90 / barrel, with Solazyme setting targets of $60-80 / barrel.

With that, all I have to say is "bloom algae, bloom!"

Runnin'

A while ago now, I ran the Peterborough 1/2 marathon, the above is a "sample picture" I didn't buy the print. I ran it in record time (for myself) with little training the two weeks before.

The night before, I was on the fence for going or not. Then, a friend and my older sister text'd me and asked if I'm going, so that pushed me over. I went. I drove down, signed up, and looked at the track. It wasn't the same one as two years ago. Two years ago, it was flat. This one had some decent climbs. Urgh.

I started near the front of the pack. I was "aiming" to finish in 1hr 35 min... which is around 30 min per 7km, so this is how I was keeping track on my watch. I finished the 1st 7km in 28min, and decided that I could slow a little. Then I hit a wall at around 8-9km, which persisted until after the 1/2 way point, at around 11km.

Everyone was passing me. It didn't feel too well, but I knew that I didn't pace myself well at the beginning, so I had some time. I felt fine until around 17-18km, when my feet just started getting really heavy. Surprisingly though, it was my feet that felt like giving out, not my breath. I trudged on, and finished in 1hr 37min 19 sec. Not bad, but I know that with some training I can do better.

I'd like to one day qualify and run the Boston marathon. I'd need a time of 3hr 10min for the full marathon, which is.., well... attainable...

Bio building blocks

It seems I'm studying the wrong thing.
Well, kinda.

My interests lie in energy and trying to shift to green energy. I'm finding more and more that the solution for green energy is much more green than I thought. Biology and bio-mimicry.

I've been looking for a solution to our energy problems for a while. After listening to a talk by Prof. Peter Berg on resource scarcity, I began to believe that this is the beginning of the end of modern civilization. We'd need nothing short of another energy revolution to get past this. Well, I say modern man has one more revolution left to go through.

The Biological Revolution.

I'll offer a few interesting examples first:

The simplest example I have is greenhouses connected to power plants. Power plants normally don't have a use for heat at 80C. They simply reject it to the environment in their giant ubiquitous cooling towers. There are a few options that some places incorporate: district heating, or greenhouses.

Pond biofuels is hooking up with St. Mary's Cement to take their exhaust gasses and produce fuel for their kiln in the calcination process. There are cost savings here and CO2 reductions.

You'd think this was huge. Except...

Calera developed another process where they use CO2 as a building block for making cement. WTF. Normally making cement creates more CO2 than coal power plants do. Now, you're using CO2 as a building block for cement? Albeit this doesn't use calcification; it uses bio-mimicry from... coral reefs.

Shimon Steinberg suggests throwing away all pesticides and insecticides. His solution? Natural "good bugs." You simply have places where you promote natural good bugs to reproduce much faster than in nature, and you don't need any pesticide. I'm not sure if you realize how many birds he just shot down with one stone.

Now, I don't want to bash my own research, but we are all allowed to be ignorant before we know better. The copper chlorine cycle for hydrogen production sounds pretty awesome: making a nuclear power plant more robust and making hydrogen at the same time. Except: it turns out that bio-reactors for making hydrogen are, well, just more efficient.

The last example is of New York City's inner harbour. Kate Orff suggests using oysters as a natural filter for water in the harbour. This will translate into huge savings for water filtering, and sewage treatment (both energy and efficiency wise).

I am not disputing Peter Berg when He says that (in not so few words) making ethanol from corn is stupid. Algae is so much more efficient at this. The numbers are just for measure; the exact ones depend on who's patents you are using, of course.

I was asked by a non-engineering friend why the government is subsidizing rooftop solar photovoltaic (PV) installations. Wouldn't a new technology come around in a few years rendering this one pointless? Well here's my answer. No and Yes. No, I don't think we can go that much further with PV. right now commercial pannels are 15-22% efficient at turning solar energy into electricity. The world record right now stands at 42.3%, using mirrors and nanotechnology, and changing the name to "concentrated solar panels." Another company is literally stacking three different solar cells on top of each other. This way, they capture the whole solar electromagnetic spectrum. If both technologies could be used in tandem, I see the state of the art being at 65%, at a higher cost than today's panels. Commercialization of such a beastie would take a few years yet.

The reason why I liked the question was because it was open-ended. The only task we are given is to make our rooftops work for us in the most efficient manner possible. I'm not sure of the answer right now, partially due to my ignorance in biology.

I think Michale Pawlyn said it best. We have to turn to nature for our inspiration. We only have resource scarcity if we continue to define resources in the same way. We are now only entering the biological frontier. Let's see where it will take us.

Ducks

I am always concerned about heeding advice. I do it quite often, because I know others have experiences I don't, but ultimately your decisions should be your own. I feel if I heed too much advice I won't be my own person.


I saw an amazing sight the other day when I went to get some groceries. Ducks. Quack.

I was crossing a little creek on a footbridge. This creek is right in the middle of the city, without many trees on either side. It's cold outside, and the creek was freezing over so that only an area about the size of a picnic table was open to the water below. There were about 20 ducks swimming in this little area. Each second, one duck would jump out, and another would jump in, and there was much duck-bumping going on.

It was the cutest sight I've seen in quite a while.

[The image is not one that I took; at my creek there were many more ducks]