Un Petit Pois

'Alarming' Use Of Energy In Modern Manufacturing Methods

“Modern manufacturing methods are spectacularly inefficient in their use of energy and materials, according to a detailed MIT analysis of the energy use of 20 major manufacturing processes.

Overall, new manufacturing systems are anywhere from 1,000 to one million times bigger consumers of energy, per pound of output, than more traditional industries. In short, pound for pound, making microchips uses up orders of magnitude more energy than making manhole covers.

Professor Timothy Gutowski, of MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, notes that manufacturers have traditionally been more concerned about factors like price, quality, or cycle time, and not as concerned over how much energy their manufacturing processes use. This latter issue will become more important, however, as the new industries scale up — especially if energy prices rise again or if a carbon tax is adopted, he says.

Solar panels are a good example. Their production, which uses some of the same manufacturing processes as microchips but on a large scale, is escalating dramatically. The inherent inefficiency of current solar panel manufacturing methods could drastically reduce the technology’s lifecycle energy balance — that is, the ratio of the energy the panel would produce over its useful lifetime to the energy required to manufacture it.”

March 31, 2009, 9:50am

Bad News: Scientists Make Cheap Gas From Coal

“Scientists have devised a new way to transform coal into gas for your car using far less energy than the current process. The advance makes scaling up the environmentally unfriendly fuel more economical than greener alternatives.

If oil prices rise again, adoption of the new coal-to-liquid technology, reported this week in Science,  could undercut adoption of electric vehicles or next-generation biofuels. And that’s bad news for the fight against climate change.

The new process could cut the energy cost of producing the fuel by 20 percent just by rejiggering the intermediate chemical steps, said co-author Ben Glasser of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. But coal-derived fuel could produce as much as twice as much CO2 as traditional petroleum fuels and at best will emit at least as much of the greenhouse gas.

“The bottom line is that there’s one fatal flaw in their proposed process from a climate protection standpoint,” Pushker Karecha of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies wrote in an e-mail to Wired.com. “It would allow liquid fuel CO2 emissions to continue increasing indefinitely.”“

March 27, 2009, 1:24am

A brief history of wind power | Wind of change | The Economist

March 26, 2009, 2:47am

The Economist - "Wind of Change"

Case history of wind power in The Economist’s Technology Quarterly, Dec. 4th 2008.

March 26, 2009, 2:45am

50% of Denmark’s electricity is created using a decentralised system, and 40% of the Netherlands’. In Finland, 98% of Helsinki is heated by community heat networks. (source)

March 24, 2009, 12:55am

Suncor, Petro-Canada announce merger

• Suncor Energy will acquire Petro-Canada in a deal worth $15 billion,
• Combined worth of $43 billion
• Petro-Canada equity holders will receive 1.28 shares for each Petro-Canada share, giving investors a 25% premium
• The merger would cut $1.3 billion in annual costs through reduction in capital spending and job cuts
• Oil sands operations: Suncor at 228,000 barrels/day, Petro-Canada at 59,900
• Conventional oil: Suncor at 3,100 barrels/day, Petro-Canada at 240,800
• Under the Petro-Canada Public Participation Act, no shareholder or company can legally hold more than 20% of Petro-Canada’s shares.

March 23, 2009, 10:46pm

Obama and Energy Chief Push Innovation

“In a two-pronged push, President Obama and Steven Chu, the secretary of energy and Nobel laureate in physics, spent the middle of the day Monday laying out the administration’s plans to link economic renewal with an energy revolution.

Mr. Obama met with energy-technology entrepreneurs and researchers near the White House at an event called “Investing in Our Clean Energy Future.” One highlight is $400 million set aside under the economic-recovery bill for an advanced research agency for energy, Arpa-E, modeled along the lines of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.”

March 23, 2009, 10:35pm

OPEC to Keep Production Steady

“OPEC is facing its toughest environment since oil prices collapsed in the late 1990s. Oil demand is falling in both industrialized nations, like the United States, and developing countries like China, which had been the main engine of growth for the past decade.

As a result, oil prices have dropped nearly 70 percent since their summer peak.

Since September, OPEC has agreed to trim its output by a total of 4.2 million barrels a day. According to outside estimates, the cartel has achieved about 80 percent of these reductions, a remarkably high outcome at a time of crisis.

So far, these cuts have been successful in stemming the drop in prices and stabilizing the market. After peaking at $147 a barrel in July, oil now trades at $47 a barrel.

Producers are torn by contradictory forces. On one hand, the sharp drop in oil demand during the global financial crisis suggests the need for members of the cartel to keep slashing their output to prevent a price collapse.

Algeria, as well as Venezuela, favors more cuts, but the most powerful member, Saudi Arabia, is wary of putting more strains on customers whose economies are deep in recession.”

March 23, 2009, 10:21pm

“Last year America ramped up wind-power capacity to 25 gigawatts (GW), overtaking the previous leader, Germany, according to new data from the Global Wind Energy Council. America added 8.4GW of installed power in 2008, more than any other country. China is also investing heavily in wind power, nearly doubling its capacity for the fourth year running. Global capacity grew by 29% last year, the highest annual increase for six years.”

March 21, 2009, 10:57pm

The fact that they collect royalties from the energy sector plays an obvious key role in their position in relation to energy policy and structuring. Plus, on a sustainability level, these royalties are nothing to the integrated corporations, but more extraction will be a huge environmental cost to the province.

Interesting article: “Alberta holds fast on royalty regime”.

btw, Suncor Energy Inc. (SU). Down 79 cents, or 3.16 per cent, at $24.20 on a volume of 8,463,599 shares. 52-week high was $74.28… speculated to be vulnerable to international takeover bids.

October 16, 2008, 9:59pm