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Gene Ellis

What If We Never Run Out of Oil? - Charles C. Mann - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...5

shared by Gene Ellis on 01 May 13 - No Cached
  • Walking around town, my friend and I had noticed that almost every home had a pile of coal outside, soft dark chunks that people shoveled into stoves for cooking and heating. Thousands upon thousands of coal fires were loading the air with tiny dots of soot. Scientists have taken to calling these dots “black carbon,” and have steadily ratcheted up their assessments of its harm. In March, for instance, a research team led by a Mumbai environmental group estimated that black carbon and other particulate matter from India’s coal-fired power plants cause about 100,000 deaths a year.
  • A 31-scientist team from nine nations released a comprehensive, four-year assessment in January arguing that planetary black-carbon output is the second-biggest driver of anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change; the little black specks I found on my glasses and clothes have roughly two-thirds the impact of carbon dioxide.
  • The rule of thumb is that if a well leaks more than about 3 percent” of its methane production into the air, “natural gas actually becomes dirtier than coal, from a climate-change perspective,
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  • Worse still, the aging natural-gas infrastructure is riddled with holes and seeps; early this year, a survey of gas mains along Boston’s 785 miles of road, the first-ever such examination, found 3,356 leaks.
  • What we can’t do, or at least not readily, is overcome the laws of economics.
  • As an example, typical solar cells today have an EROEI of about 10—better than tar sands but worse than most oil and gas.
  • One recent estimate put the EROEI of Spain’s extensive solar-power network at less than 3.
  • When renewables supply 20 to 30 percent of all electricity, many utility-energy engineers predict, the system will no longer be able to balance supply and demand. Brownouts will ripple across the landscape
  • To ask utilities to take in large amounts of solar power
  • is like asking a shipping firm to replace its huge, professionally staffed container ships with squadrons of canoes paddled by random adolescents.
  • But even if such techniques work in the way researchers hope, the infrastructure transformation ahead is daunting in scale and scope. It’s like setting up a second Industrial Revolution, only all over the world and in one-third the time.
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