http://www.sunspot.net/business/bal-bz.gas...iness-headlines

Natural gas supply is down 'serious' 35%
Shortfall: Alan Greenspan has warned that the nation's shortfall in natural gas poses "a very serious problem."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Associated Press
Originally published May 24, 2003



NEW YORK - Although natural gas is primarily a winter fuel, the industry is getting an unusually high level of attention as summer rolls around because supplies are tight and prices are soaring.
This is traditionally the period when demand tapers off and the industry is able to replenish inventories with cheap fuel. But this year, industry and government officials are worrying that supplies might still be inadequate by the time the next home-heating season begins.

At the very least, the fuel being injected into underground storage facilities these days is unseasonably expensive, a cost utilities are likely to pass along to homeowners, industry officials said.

An Energy Department report released this week said the nation had 990 billion cubic feet of natural gas in underground storage facilities as of May 16. That is 35 percent below the five-year range and the fundamental reason for concern.

As with most issues confronting the energy business, this one intersects with environmental policy. For years, natural gas executives have complained that their ability to meet the nation's demand is impaired by regulatory red tape and a lack of access to federal lands, especially in the Rockies. Under the circumstances, industry officials believe that argument will now carry more weight in Congress.

The rumblings about the root causes of the current shortfall - dwindling domestic production coupled with a cold winter in natural-gas consuming regions of the country - reached a wider audience this week when Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan raised them before Congress.

Greenspan described the difficulty the natural gas industry is having as a "very serious problem" that could have negative consequences for the rest of the U.S. economy, particularly the manufacturing sector, which relies on natural gas to generate power.

"Working gas in storage is presently at extremely low levels," Greenspan testified, "and the normal seasonal rebuilding of these inventories seems to be behind the schedule. ..."

The industry has pursued an intentionally cautious approach ever since the summer of 2001, when record-high prices prompted a flurry of drilling that resulted in a supply glut as the economy sputtered. As prices plummeted below $3 per 1,000 cubic feet, drilling activity dried up and chastened executives vowed to be more circumspect.

Sure enough, the surplus disappeared and supplies tightened. Other factors contributing to the rising price of natural gas have been increased exports to Mexico and a decline in Canadian production - the first time that has happened in nearly two decades.

Futures prices are now hovering above $6 per 1,000 cubic feet and natural gas drilling activity is on the rise again, but it takes from six to nine months for such activity to show up in storage levels.

There is plenty of time to reach the November inventory target of 3 trillion cubic feet, said William Trapman, a natural gas analyst at the Energy Information Administration, the Energy Department's statistical arm.

"The big question is, will it be a hot summer?" Trapman added. "If it is, air conditioners will run more heavily, increasing demand for electricity."

Moreover, outages and maintenance-related shutdowns at nuclear plants this spring have led some analysts to conclude that extra demand will be placed on gas-fired power plants this summer.

"The hopes of refilling storage to comfortable levels while meeting gas-fired generation demand this summer don't look promising," UBS Warburg's Ronald Barone said in a report this week.

A mild summer would help avert any shortage.

So, too, would a decline in the price of oil, now more than $29 per barrel, giving manufacturers with fuel-switching capabilities an economic incentive to use crude-derived fuels instead of natural gas.

"All indications are that this winter natural gas will certainly be more expensive than last winter," said Rhone Resch, vice president of energy markets at the Natural Gas Supply Association in Washington.

Resch said the shortfall gives the industry fresh ammunition to press its political agenda on Capitol Hill, including its desire for access to federal lands currently off-limits.



Copyright © 2003, The Baltimore Sun

Thankfully, temperatures so far this spring have been below normal across much of the country, especially big population centers in the midwest and northeast.

This story is just another reminder of how dependent the industrialized world is on fossil fuels. Instead of opening up more drilling as the article suggests might happen hopefully more people will see the need for conservation and developing new sources of energy.

There are a number of options that require a major socio-psychological shift that we are culturally blocking just as we have vested interests that see these as grand shifts of economic power and resist. Transportation is one example but there are many.

There is an economically and technologically viable industrial plant that is starting to make synthetic heating oil out of urban waste and there is a need for synfuel conversion but more importantly more passive generalized energy collection/distribution and adequate mass transit. BUt decentralized power production and profit is a direct competitor with the monolithic producer interests now.

There is also in our society an ability to E-Commute through the web and reduce the need to actually leave home but there are social consequences that this includes. Recycling is measured by the wrong yardstick of cost. Many of our economic models are way out of whack for reality and are skewed to measure the vested interests of the status quo rather than more objective meters and models for a planned future.

There are windfarms going up and cities using waste vegetable oil to power busses but these are all tokens and experiments on the scale of real demand. Madison WI. for example has thousands of miles of protected bike lanes but these were an excuse to diminish rather than improve mass transit while they cut up the wetlands and built more and wider highways to encourage the urban sprawl into the richest farmland in America.

Too bad every aspect of progress seems to possess a double image, a doppleganger evil spirit accompaning every promise of technology.

There are no easy answers but there are many many small ones that begin with each individual's choices.

I got the heads-up on this problem from reading alternative, progressive & environmentalist news sources on the Web. None of the free-market sites I'm aware of even gave a hint that this was coming. If anything, free-market ideologues tend to argue sophistically that fossil fuels are potentially "infinite" because the human mind is "the ultimate resource," and can presumably pull energy out of the air the way John Galt did with his perpetual-motion invention in Atlas Shrugged.

The prospect of the power grid failing -- permanently! -- from a crash in the fossil fuels supply doesn't seem so far-fetched now. This poses just as potentially catastrophic a danger to would-be immortals as a global super-plague, a nuclear war or a doomsday asteroid or comet. But for some reason nobody with any political or business authority seems to be thinking that far ahead, unless you count the Bush Administration's efforts to turn the Persian Gulf countries into additional states of the Union.

This post has been edited by advancedatheist: May 24 2003, 05:04 PM

I still think it is a little far fetched, but it is another incentive to get power generation for my house and get off the grid. Solar cells & fuel cells are what I am looking at. Having both would add redundancy and both are relatively clean.

http://asia.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?...storyID=3438196

Oil Companies Show Fiscal Discipline
Sat September 13, 2003 08:53 AM ET
By C. Bryson Hull
HOUSTON (Reuters) - Exploration and production companies could once be counted on to spend like drunken sailors when oil and gas prices were high, but in the current boom, they are holding onto their wallets like never before.

Two key factors have led to the fiscal discipline in the E&P sector, say executives and industry experts: the memory of how free boom-time spending led to a sector collapse in 2001 and the growing shortage of high-yield prospects.

This is great news AA! If oil and gas are getting scarce the free market will force people into different energy sources than oil. Oil is an old an somewhat dirty source of energy. It would've been replaced already if it wasn't so darn cheap.

If industrial civilization isn't falling into a systematic energy crisis, the news stories this year read "as if" we are.

Consider:

The U.S. government acknowledges that North America is experiencing a serious shortage of natural gas, with no short-term solution.

The U.S. military invaded an allegedly oil-rich country, but its contractors can't seem to get the oil production back up to its reported potential. (It wouldn't surprise me if we hear in a few months that Iraq didn't have nearly as much oil as we were led to believe.)

New Zealand, Japan, several European countries, Canada and the U.S. have experienced massive power failures not caused by natural disasters or other specific disruptions. Italy has just joined the list.

Reuters reports that American oil companies are reluctant to spend money on new exploration and drilling, despite high prices for oil and gas, because of "the growing shortage of high-yield prospects"

Phoenix, Arizona, experienced a gasoline shortage for several weeks this summer because a pipeline broke.

The international airport in Sydney, Australia, has recently experienced a shortage of aviation fuel because of problems with the local refinery (which could pose a problem for a cryonicist who deanimates in Australia and needs to get flown in a refrigerated state to his cryonics organization in the U.S.).

And just the other day, OPEC announced a cutback in production.

You know, a few more data points like these will make the prospect of a Final Blackout seem not at all far-fetched.

In addition to energy shortages we are also seeing a year when weather is beginning to demonstrate the clear and dangerous characteristics of accelerated global warming and the impact to economy and food supply is starting to have repercussions as well as a year that is finding new disease outbreaks and at least showing that we are beginning to take that avenue seriously.


Ironically as food should always be considered a part of energy related issues for both reasons of physics and production it should also be noted that fish stocks are not just dramatically lower than at any time since the pre Devonian Age but the fish are smaller and this represents a reduction in the tonnage of yield as well.



Never forget that food is literally our biological "fuel" and continuing to beat Malthus depends on secure and continuous, massive supplies of fuels for an industry that is very dependent on large quantities of energy and technology as well as well as climate, area, transportation, and labor to maintain increasing productivity to meet increasing demand. Fuel disruptions also directly effect food production as well as cost and availability of the end product.

Those who think that Malthus's ideas are dead speak prematurely for what we have is an ever increasing level of struggle. The crisis not only looms but as populations grow and become more urban the threat hangs even greater over our heads like a sword of Damocles because a single sufficiently catastrophic event, or combined series of events could tip the balance precipitously over to massive short or even long term inability to provide food to billions of people.

Severe and longer term disruptions of energy supplies combined with political and economic crises are one scenario but a single impact of a sizable asteroid even in the ocean, would not only create hardship and devastation for major segments of the directly impacted populations but would drastically alter global climate and inhibit shipping and the ability to redistribute existing stocks sufficiently fast to offset the social crises and famines that would occur over large parts of the world for many months to years that follow.

Oh and weather is a factor for energy distribution too as anybody that is still without electricity in the Ohio River valley and the Virginia's or Carolina's should begin to understand. Severe weather can damage a distribution grid and the resources to safely put it back together takes time. And as we are learning in Iraq petroleum distribution pipelines are vulnerable too and these "grids" are being impacted by the "social climate".

Richard C. Duncan in his "Olduvai Theory" graphs empirical data about the world's per capita energy consumption. (I'm trying to find data from reliable sources so I can test his theory.) Duncan claims that the graph peaked in the late 1970's (!), and has been declining ever since. He predicts that we're on a "slide" and near a "cliff" in energy availabilty which will be signaled by recurring massive, and eventually permanent, blackouts by 2012 or so:

THE PEAK OF WORLD OIL PRODUCTION AND THE ROAD TO THE OLDUVAI GORGE
http://www.dieoff.com/page224.htm

I find it striking that pervasive power problems the world over have begun this year.

New Zealand experienced an electricity crisis earlier this year because of a drought and the depletion of its main natural gas field.

Japan experienced an electricity crisis over the summer because it had to take a number of nuclear power plants offline for safety reasons.

France's nuclear power plants during its recent heatwave had trouble cooling because of restrictions on the temperature of the exhaust water they can emit. If the French had adopted the American habit of running air conditioning in the summer, they would have experienced an extraordinary blackout.

The northeastern U.S. and southeastern Canada had experienced an unprecedented blackout back in August, from causes as yet undetermined.

England experienced a similar blackout about a week later.

And just a few hours ago, Italy experienced a blackout affecting even more people than the North American one, again for reasons not immediately obvious.

Those are just in developed countries. China is investing an enormous amount of resources into building up its generating capacity, but even then it can't keep up with the demand caused by its rapid industrialization. So I wouldn't be surprised if China joins the ranks of blacked out industrial countries some time in the next few months.

Italy's grid went down today as a matter of coincidence.
Italy slowly comes back to light
BBC

I lived in California for almost a year, right in the central valley, and spent most of my time outdoors. I was not bitten by one mosquito (none that I am consciously aware of anyway). In fact I remarked to most of my friends that the one good thing about California is that there are virtually no bugs (due to the arid climate). Here in the midwest I get bitten several hundred times each year.

Also, I cannot believe that "experts" still claim that WNV arrived in 1999 and spread to 34 states within 2 summers. They still cling to outlandish theories that circular migrating birds and mosquitoes that "over-winter" in city drain pipes led to this rapid spread.

Given that WNV shows no sypmtoms in 80% of the cases and the rest of the time it mimics the cold or flu, it is quite likely it has been here a long time (decades), and the so called "rapid spread" across the country was just an epdipemic of testing.

And you aren't even an "expert" epidemiologist Mind. How dare we question these illustrious minds, Mind. [lol]

But actually when was the last time you found experts agreeing easily? )

In the case of mosquito populations in California I suspect they are actually more common in metropolitan areas (a more dangerous situation for pandemics) due to how the insect has adapted to the advantages of humans creating stagnate standing water sources than they are in many more arid environments. But almost all mosquito populations appear tame in comparison to some areas around Wisconsin in summer, though inland Florida is worse I think.

Again this is an aspect that has solutions. I am just reporting it as they are writing it but aside from whether we are going to agree on the rate of the spread I think it is important to acknowledge it is spreading.

As a serious climatologist I also suggest you consider this perspective in relation to not only global warming but whether we are accelerating that process as a species too. Or do you also want to go on record saying global warming is a myth and madness?

We can argue about consequences of global warming separately after we first get past the question of existence. The same idea relates to West Nile Virus and other encephalitis infections as well as now malaria that are appearing in America for the first time in decades.

We may discuss why we have, and what to do about this problem but it is only meaningful to raise these issues if we first agree that we have a problem.

http://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/europe/1...global.warming/

World oil and gas 'running out'
By CNN's Graham Jones
Thursday, October 2, 2003 Posted: 1245 GMT ( 8:45 PM HKT)

LONDON, England -- Global warming will never bring a "doomsday scenario" a team of scientists says -- because oil and gas are running out much faster than thought.

The world's oil reserves are up to 80 percent less than predicted, a team from Sweden's University of Uppsala says. Production levels will peak in about 10 years' time, they say.

"Non-fossil fuels must come in much stronger than it had been hoped," Professor Kjell Alekett told CNN.

Oil production levels will hit their maximum soon after 2010 with gas supplies peaking not long afterwards, the Swedish geologists say.

At that point prices for petrol and other fuels will reach disastrous levels. Earlier studies have predicted oil supplies will not start falling until 2050.

Alekett said that his team had examined data on oil and gas reserves from all over the world and we were "facing a very critical situation globally."

"The thing we are surprised of is that people in general are not aware of the decline in supplies and the extent to which it will affect production.

"The decline of oil and gas will affect the world population more than climate change."

According to the Uppsala team, nightmare predictions of melting ice caps and searing temperatures will never come to pass because the reserves of oil and gas just are not big enough to create that much carbon dioxide (CO2).

Alekett said that as well as there being inflated estimates, some countries in the Middle East had exaggerated the amount of reserves they had.

Coal-burning could easily make up the shortfall. But burning coal would be even worse for the planet, as it would create even more CO2, he said.

Predictions of global meltdown by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sparked the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, an agreement obliging signatory nations to cut CO2 emissions.

The IPCC examined a range of future scenarios, from profligate burning of fossil-fuels to a fast transition towards greener energy sources.

The Uppsala team say the amount of oil and gas left is the equivalent of around 3,500 billion barrels of oil -- the IPCC say between 5,000 and 18,000 billion barrels.

Alekett said his team had now established what they called the "Uppsala Protocol" to initiate discussion on how the problems of declining reserves could be tackled -- protecting the world economy but also addressing the problem of climate change.

The conclusions of the Uppsala team were revealed in the magazine New Scientist Thursday, and Nebojsa Nakicenovic, of the University of Vienna who headed the IPCC team said it was standing by its figures.

He said they had factored in a much broader and internationally accepted range of oil and gas estimates then the "conservative" Swedes.

A conference in Russia this week heard a warning that global warming kills about 160,000 people through its effects every year. The numbers dying from "side-effects" of climate change, such as malaria and malnutrition, could almost double by 2020, the climate change conference in Moscow was told.

"We estimate that climate change may already be causing in the region of 160,000 deaths... a year," Andrew Haines of the UK's London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine said. (Full story)

Most deaths would be in developing nations in Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia, says Haines. These regions would be worst hit by the spread of malnutrition, diarrhea and malaria as a result of warmer temperatures, droughts and floods.

Laz, my beef with the WNV spread (read scare) is that it has been blown out of proportion. Municipalities are spending millions of dollars spraying toxic chemicals on people over a virus that has been here much longer 4 years. For the threat level WNV represents to the U.S. population we are spending an obnoxious amount of money. There are much greater threats. I know you know this.

I would also argue that the spread of old diseases is more the result of the mobility of the world population than climate change. The only way climate change would factor in is that "warm weather" mosquitos can live 100 miles further north than before. It has no effect on the spread of these diseases in 95% of the U.S.

Many immigrant neighborhoods in the U.S. now resemble the lesser developed parts of the world from where the immigrants came. It is no suprise to me that the diseases have followed.

Also, the climate changes over time. I can't argue about that.

Supercomputer climate model whips up a storm

The above link is an article about improved resolution in global climate models. The models that have run in the past were coarse with many atmospheric factors removed for number crunching reasons. Soon there will be new results with a greater degree of confidence. I posted this in the Climate Change/Global Warming forum also.

From "THE PEAK OF WORLD OIL PRODUCTION AND THE ROAD TO THE OLDUVAI GORGE," by Richard C. Duncan (refer to Duncan's graphs):

http://www.dieoff.com/page224.htm

The "cliff" is the final interval in the Olduvai schema. It begins with the 7th event in 2012 (Note 7) when an epidemic of permanent blackouts spreads worldwide, i.e. first there are waves of brownouts and temporary blackouts, then finally the electric power networks themselves expire. The 8th event in 2030 (Note 8) marks the fall of world energy production (use) per capita to the 1930 level (Figure 4). This is the lagging 30% point when Industrial Civilization has become history. The average rate of decline of ê is 5.44 %/year from 2012 to 2030.

Now, this year alone previously unprecedented blackouts have affected well over 100 million people in developed countries. The power situation in the U.K. appears especially dire, as reported by the Wednesday, 15 October 2003 issue of Scottsman.com:

http://www.news.scotsman.com/uk.cfm?id=1139692003

'Save power or beware blackouts' say experts


FAMILIES have been warned to save electricity to stem the prospect of a winter of blackouts.

A series of power cuts could plunge the country into darkness, spelling chaos on the roads, forcing businesses to close and increasing the number of fires as people turn to candles for light.

The warning comes in the wake of a report by energy watchdog Ofgem which revealed the UK is facing the tightest electricity squeeze for almost a decade.

It means the country will be vulnerable to power shortages in "extreme circumstances" such as a severe winter.

Energy experts have predicted there is a one in five chance the nation’s system may be unable to cope.

And they say consumers should try to be as "energy efficient as possible".

Measures which could help include turning down heating and hot water, avoiding leaving electrical appliances on standby, turning off lights after leaving a room, buying low voltage bulbs and stopping heat escaping through floorboards by filling gaps with newspaper.

The industry crisis was forced into the spotlight after the blackout that hit America and Canada in the middle of August. Fifty million customers there were affected by the power cut.

And in London two weeks later, a fifth of the city was blacked out after technical problems at a substation.

A clever balance is needed. We need enough available energy to power our economies. On the other hand, we need an energy demand to fuel experiments into new sources of power.

Sadly, the world prefers to use the "pound of cure" instead of the "ounce of prevention". It seems very tough to promote R&D into alternate energy. Also, reducing your own demands seems futile when compared to the ignorance of your neighbors.

No one seems to appreciate suggestions to reduce their energy/water/landfill consumption. Most everyone seems to prefer to whine when costs go up.

I like the study of ecology. But, boy, it's depressing.

Good things humans are rational and we have a relatively free market. Malthus did not include human ingenuity in his projections of mass starvation. Neither did Ehrlich. How many of us here think people are going to just keep on using more and more electricity until the world stops going? The blackout of 2003 caused quite a stir and people are working on solutions. They don't just sit by and say "oh well, I guess the world will end now...nothing I can do" When gas prices rise people buy smaller cars and drive less. If the supply of electricity runs short, the price will go up, and people will conserve - or get to work developing new sources of electricity and power. And... the great thing is...the people who develop new sources of electricity will get rich.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/200...u-bm9102603.php

Public release date: 26-Oct-2003

Contact: Lee Siegel
leesiegel@ucomm.utah.edu
801-581-8993
University of Utah

Bad Mileage: 98 tons of plants per gallon
Study shows vast amounts of 'buried sunshine' needed to fuel society
Oct. 27, 2003 – A staggering 98 tons of prehistoric, buried plant material – that's 196,000 pounds – is required to produce each gallon of gasoline we burn in our cars, SUVs, trucks and other vehicles, according to a study conducted at the University of Utah.
"Can you imagine loading 40 acres worth of wheat – stalks, roots and all – into the tank of your car or SUV every 20 miles?" asks ecologist Jeff Dukes, whose study will be published in the November issue of the journal Climatic Change.

But that's how much ancient plant matter had to be buried millions of years ago and converted by pressure, heat and time into oil to produce one gallon of gas, Dukes concluded.

Dukes also calculated that the amount of fossil fuel burned in a single year – 1997 was used in the study – totals 97 million billion pounds of carbon, which is equivalent to more than 400 times "all the plant matter that grows in the world in a year," including vast amounts of microscopic plant life in the oceans.

"Every day, people are using the fossil fuel equivalent of all the plant matter that grows on land and in the oceans over the course of a whole year," he adds.

In another calcultation, Dukes determined that "the amount of plants that went into the fossil fuels we burned since the Industrial Revolution began [in 1751] is equal to all the plants grown on Earth over 13,300 years."

Explaining why he conducted the study, Dukes wrote: "Fossil fuel consumption is widely recognized as unsustainable. However, there has been no attempt to calculate the amount of energy that was required to generate fossil fuels, (one way to quantify the 'unsustainability' of societal energy use)."

The study is titled "Burning Buried Sunshine: Human Consumption of Ancient Solar Energy." In it, Dukes conducted numerous calculations to determine how much plant matter buried millions of years ago was required to produce the oil, natural gas and coal consumed by modern society, which obtains 83 percent of its energy needs from fossil fuels.

"Fossil fuels developed from ancient deposits of organic material, and thus can be thought of as a vast store of solar energy" that was converted into plant matter by photosynthesis, he explains. "Using published biological, geochemical and industrial data, I estimated the amount of photosynthetically fixed and stored [by ancient plants] carbon that was required to form the coal, oil and gas that we are burning today."

Dukes conducted the study while working as a postdoctoral fellow in biology at the University of Utah. He now works for the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Global Ecology on the campus of Stanford University in California.

How the calculations were done

To determine how much ancient plant matter it took to eventually produce modern fossil fuels, Dukes calculated how much of the carbon in the original vegetation was lost during each stage of the multiple-step processes that create oil, gas and coal.

He looked at the proportion of fossil fuel reserves derived from different ancient environments: coal that formed when ancient plants rotted in peat swamps; oil from tiny floating plants called phytoplankton that were deposited on ancient seafloors, river deltas and lakebeds; and natural gas from those and other prehistoric environments. Then he examined the efficiency at which prehistoric plants were converted by heat, pressure and time into peat or other carbon-rich sediments.

Next, Dukes analyzed the efficiency with which carbon-rich sediments were converted to coal, oil and natural gas. Then he studied the efficiency of extracting such deposits. During each of the above steps, he based his calculations on previously published studies.

The calculations showed that roughly one-eleventh of the carbon in the plants deposited in peat bogs ends up as coal, and that only one-10,750th of the carbon in plants deposited on ancient seafloors, deltas and lakebeds ends up as oil and natural gas.

Dukes then used these "recovery factors" to estimate how much ancient plant matter was needed to produce a given amount of fossil fuel. Dukes considers his calculations good estimates based on available data, but says that because fossil fuels were formed under a wide range of environmental conditions, each estimate is subject to a wide range of uncertainty.

Plants in your tank?

Dukes calculated ancient plant matter needed for a gallon of gasoline in metric units:


One gallon of oil weighs 3.26 kilograms. A gallon of oil produces up to 0.67 gallons of gasoline. So 3.26 kilograms for a gallon of oil divided by 0.67 gallons means that at least 4.87 kilograms of oil are needed to make a gallon of gasoline.

Oil is 85 percent carbon, so 0.85 times 4.87 kilograms equals 4.14 kilograms of carbon in the oil used to make a gallon of gasoline.

Since only about one-10,750th of the original carbon in ancient plant material actually ends up as oil, multiply 4.14 kilograms by 10,750 to get roughly 44,500 kilograms of carbon in ancient plant matter to make a gallon of gas.

About half of plant matter is carbon, so double the 44,500 kilograms to get 89,000 kilograms – or 89 metric tons – of ancient plant matter to make a gallon of gas. In U.S. units, that is equal to a bit more than 196,000 pounds or 98 tons.
Dukes made similar calculations for oil, natural gas and coal to determine that it took 44 million billion kilograms (97 million billion pounds) of carbon in ancient plant matter to produce all the fossil fuel used in 1997. That includes 29 million billion kilograms of prehistoric plants to produce a year's worth of oil (including gasoline), almost 15 million billion kilograms of buried plant matter to make all the natural gas used in 1997, and 27,000 billion kilograms of dead plants to produce all the coal used in the same year.

"It took an incredible amount of plant matter to generate the fossil fuels we are using today," says Dukes. "The new contribution of this research is to enable us to picture just how inefficient and unsustainable fossil fuels are – inefficient in terms of the conversion of the original solar energy to fossil fuels. Fortunately, it is much more efficient to use modern energy sources like wind and solar. As the reasons keep piling up to switch away from fossil fuels, it is important that we develop these modern power sources as quickly as possible."

What about modern plant biomass?

Unlike the inefficiency of converting ancient plants to oil, natural gas and coal, modern plant "biomass" can provide energy more efficiently, either by burning it or converting into fuels like ethanol. So Dukes analyzed how much modern plant matter it would take to replace society's current consumption of fossil fuels.

He began with a United Nations estimate that the total energy content of all coal, oil and natural gas used worldwide in 1997 equaled 315,271 million billion joules (a unit of energy). He divided that by the typical value of heat produced when wood is burned: 20,000 joules per gram of dry wood. The result is that fossil fuel consumption in 1997 equaled the energy in 15.8 trillion kilograms of wood. Dukes multiplied that by 45 percent – the proportion of carbon in plant material – to calculate that fossil fuel consumption in 1997 equaled the energy in 7.1 trillion kilograms of carbon in plant matter.

Studies have estimated that all land plants today contain 56.4 trillion kilograms of carbon, but only 56 percent of that is above ground and could be harvested. So excluding roots, land plants thus contain 56 percent times 56.4, or 31.6 trillion kilograms of carbon.

Dukes then divided the 1997 fossil fuel use equivalent of 7.1 trillion kilograms of carbon in plant matter by 31.6 trillion kilograms now available in plants. He found we would need to harvest 22 percent of all land plants just to equal the fossil fuel energy used in 1997 – about a 50 percent increase over the amount of plants now removed or paved over each year.

"Relying totally on biomass for our power – using crop residues and quick-growing forests as fuel sources – would force us to dedicate a huge part of the landscape to growing these fuels," Dukes says. "It would have major environmental consequences. We would have to choose between our rain forests and our vehicles and appliances. Biomass burning can be part of the solution if we use agricultural wastes, but other technologies have to be a major part of the solution as well – things like wind and solar power."


###
University of Utah Public Relations
201 S Presidents Circle, Room 308
Salt Lake City, Utah 84112-9017
(801) 581-6773 fax: 585-3350
www.utah.edu/unews

From, "Bush Is Wasting His Energy and Ours on Old Ideas":

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/po...ics-white_house

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