EclecticLip

Newsweek ran a story awhile back on how “big oil’s gone green for real”.  (Though the correct phrase would be “big oil’s gone greenwashing for real”.)

A sample looks-good-at-first-glance sentence is the following:

In fact, while companies like BP and Shell are cutting back on commercial projects in wind and solar, Big Oil is taking a closer look at how they might be used to increase efficiency internally, or to free up increasingly profitable fossil fuels, like natural gas, for commercial sale.

If going green means cutting back on alternative energy programs, George W Bush should’ve won the Nobel Peace Prize.    Increasing efficiency is something any good business does, so that’s not a real mark of improvement.  And the stated reason for pursuing natural gas is money-green, not sustainability-green.
As it turns out, this is a case of advertiser-funded media gone awry.  From ClimateProgress:

Newsweek since 2007 has sold advertising packages to the oil industry’s biggest influence group that included the right to co-host forums on energy issues, including two where members of Congress sat side-by-side on panels with the association’s president.

American Petroleum Institute ranks among advertisers that have reached a spending threshold that allows them to attach their name to a Newsweek event and have their top executive as a panel speaker…

…journalism and ethics experts decried the arrangement.

“You’re selling access,” said Edward Wasserman, Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. “Newsweek is using its reputation as a great news organization to convene these officeholders to talk about public policy. Then it’s renting out a space at the table for one of its customers who would not be at the table if not for giving money to Newsweek”…

To mark this occasion, and in light of the current goings-on at Copenhagen, I put together a “Big Oil Hierarchy of Denial”, along the lines of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and the Five Stages of Grief.  Sort of a guidebook to the different stages that Exxon & co have gone through, over the years.  Enjoy!

Note: the list is to be read from the bottom up. 

For the third year in eight, European nuclear reactors are having to shut down in summer, on account of the heat.  To understate things mildly, this does not bode well for nuclear as a major power source, in a warming world!  One-third of France’s nuclear capacity is currently offline, to avoid discharging excessively warm water into nearby rivers (water contains less dissolved oxygen as it gets warmer; pumping enough hot water into a river kills marine life).

France has 19 reactors, so if visualized as a litter of identical nineteen-uplets, this is equivalent to knocking six of them offline during peak periods when everyone’s turning up the “climatiseur”.  (Another three are run full-time to enrich the uranium fuel — sadly I can’t recall my source, but it was a generally reliable contributor to The Oil Drum — so electricity for civic purposes has dropped from sixteen to ten reactors’ worth.)

Back home, Ontario’s Bruce Power reactors are sited next to Lake Huron (a much larger body of water) so shouldn’t ever suffer this kind of problem.  For lake- or ocean-side reactors, the primary hurdle to nuclear power is cost — a hurdle with which the fuel cell industry is all too familiar. 

The estimated cost of nuclear power (as calculated by companies submitting bids to build reactors in various countries) is in the 20 cents/kWh range over the reactor lifetime.  Consequently, nuclear is more expensive than pretty much everything but solar photovoltaics — and the latter are getting cheaper as production scales up.  (Each time worldwide installations double, solar gets about 20% cheaper.  And installations are doubling every 2-3 years.)

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The EPIA’s recent estimate that solar PV installations grew 129% from 2007 to 2008 is excellent news.

While growth is likely to be stunted in 2009 (due in part to the collapse of the Spanish economy, last year’s biggest market) this is the kind of trend that should warm greens’ hearts, and not the planet.  One factor which works to solar’s advantage is the recent collapse in polysilicon prices back to “normal” levels — which will improve silicon-photovoltaics’ cost-competitiveness, even as some companies’ profit margins will be squeezed.

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While wind energy is cost-competitive with fossil fuels, the rule of thumb is that it can’t be used for more than about 20% of the grid, due to its intermittent nature.  Basically, to accomodate large amounts of wind, you need to be able to turn other sources of power on or off instantaneously — to account for situations where the wind dies down or comes up suddenly.  That means hydro (which accounts for about 20% of worldwide power generation; quelle coincidence!).

While solar is also intermittent, a big advantage it carries over wind is that it only provides energy during peak usage hours (from morning to evening).  Which generally makes it easier to tie into the grid.  While wind energy production will continue to overshadow (heh) solar electricity for a few years — generation capacity is currently about 120 GW to 5 GW — solar’s ease of grid tie-in should help it surpass wind perhaps a decade from now.

For now, the next milestone for solar will be to outpace nuclear; in 2007 new nuclear generation capacity was about 2 GW.  Solar installations in 2008 were about 3 GW peak, which normalizes to about 1 GW (since solar doesn’t provide energy at night, and provides a lower-than-peak amount of power in the morning and evening).

Late last year, one of the executives asked me to help write a paper on the future of energy.

McKinsey & Company have now published it. 

Other authors in the series include:

• Nobel Laureate and US Energy Secretary Steven Chu (“Time to fix the wiring”)
• Intel co-founder Andy Grove (“An electric plan for energy resilience”)
• peak oil titan Colin Campbell (“The end of the oil age”)

Cooler still, as this unPhotoshopped screengrab shows, we’ve got the top spot in the Energy section!!  (For now.)

Even cooler still, McKinsey had originally intended to circulate the essay collection at the World Economic Forum at Davos.  (Ultimately they published a subset, and ours didn’t make the cut.)  So I came within an editor’s whim of being able to put “…his work has been circulated at the World Economic Forum at Davos…” on my resume!

A long-form version of the essay will be made publicly available soon; I’ll link to that in due course.

Meanwhile, I think I’ll take a few more days off blogging to bask in the quietly ecstatic glow. 

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(click to enlarge)

This is the most encouraging news I’ve seen coming out of Alberta in a good long while. Sadly, the Globe and Mail still has a ridiculous paywall policy for anything more than a week old.  So, in case this is being read after end-Feb, the news is this: the tar sands lobby has splintered!

Like Joe Biden in a Vice-Presidential debate, I’ll repeat that one more time: the tar sands lobby has splintered!  Good to see the dirty-oil campaign has won some success.

This is a classic divide-and-conquer victory: fracturing your opponents and getting them to outflank each other, instead of you.  Wonderful stuff.

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Basically, newer tar sands players using maybe-not-quite-as-lethally-destructive steam-assisted gravity-drainage extraction (SAGD) are trying to separate themselves from traditional tar sands miners.

The process is even more energy intensive than traditional tar sands mining, but it should be possible to extract the bitumen without denuding the boreal forest above.  The process should use less fresh water, and eliminates the need for visible-from-space tailings ponds.

While the only “clean” tar sands are the ones left in the ground, I think SAGD could be marginally less environmentally destructive, on the whole.  Whether a lifecycle analysis confirms this or shows otherwise, it is absolutely refreshing to see the tar sands lobby splintering. 

This New York Times article summarizes why I believe peak oil’s imminence doesn’t mean the end of first-world living-standards as we know it.

It turns out, the US is ridiculously unproductive when it comes to GDP-per-unit-CO2: at 93rd (of 137) it ranks below even Thailand and Mexico!  [corrected from 167 as per comment below]
Ah, but there’s more to that than meets the eye…

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