Advocacy

The UK Energy Research Centre is Britain's official research center for energy issues. They've got a series of interesting looking reports and I'm currently making my way through one on peak oil.

http://www.ukerc.ac.uk/support/Global%20Oil%20Depletion

There was a statement in the introduction that so clearly encapsulates the problem I want to post this for discussion. The report is on the above URL and is hot off the presses having been released on Oct 8, 2009.

First point is there's a distinction between "conventional oil" and "non-conventional oil". Conventional oil is the good stuff that got us all hooked on this potent liquid fuel. You pump it out of the ground and have to do little processing other than sending it through a refinery. It's conventional oil that's heading towards an near term peak in production capacity.

Non-conventional oil is stuff like where they dig up tar sands and process that to create a refinable liquid. Processing tar sands is expensive and energy intensive and has a low energy return on investment. However various reports I've read indicate the powers that be intend to use nuclear power to create the energy (heat, electricity, steam) required to process the tar sands.

The quote I wanted to share is this:

The oil industry must continually invest to replace the decline in production from existing fields. The average rate of decline from fields that are past their peak of production is at least 6.5%/year globally, while the corresponding rate of decline from all currently-producing fields is at least 4%/year. This implies that approximately 3 mb/d of new capacity must be added each year, simply to maintain production at current levels - equivalent to a new Saudi Arabia coming on stream every three years.

Decline rates are on an upward trend as more giant fields enter decline, as production shifts towards smaller, younger and offshore fields and as changing production methods lead to more rapid post-peak decline. As a result, more than two thirds of current crude oil production capacity may need to be replaced by 2030, simply to prevent production from falling. At best, this is likely to prove extremely challenging.

Oil reserves cannot be produced at arbitrarily high rates. There are physical, engineering and economic constraints upon both the rate of depletion of a field or region and the pattern of production over time. For example, the annual production from a region has rarely exceeded 5% of the remaining recoverable resources and most regions have reached their peak well before half of their recoverable resources have been produced. Supply forecasts that assume or imply significant departures from this historical experience are likely to require careful justification.

To keep up the current game of liquid fueled vehicles at the current amount of use ... that's what they're talking about. To keep up that game means adding from somewhere, either conventional or non-conventional or biofuels, 3 mb/day (or equivalent) of production capacity. That's an amount equal to Saudi Arabia's production.

What defines the oil peak is when production capacity begins to decline. Added investment may slow the decline but the decline is the decline.

In any case it's this sort of factoid that's a large part of why I'm interested in electric vehicles. They don't require liquid fuels and EV's give us all much more flexibility because there's so many ways to generate electrons.

It's Keith here, and I am looking for EV builders in the Orlando/Cocoa/Melbourne, FL and surrounding area for interviews of builders of EVs. All kinds of vehicle are welcome. If it flies, drives, or swims, please bring your vehicle to Melbourne Saturday September 26th, at 4 pm. We will be interviewing EV builders about their vehicles. We want to ask why you built your vehicle, how did you do it, what motivates you, and any backstory that you wish to tell. The interviews are for an up-and-coming TV show about electric vehicles and alternative energy.

Feel free to drive or trailer your electric vehicle to our set location so we can get video of you and your vehicle. For driving distance calculations, the shoot will take place about 1 mile from the I95-Eau Gallie exit. For those who can't make it that day, and have a quite unusual vehicle to show, we can setup a future interview at your location.

Off the grid non-mobile applications are also welcome (i.e. if you get your power from solar and sell it back to FP&L or if you run a biofuel generator 24/7 and/or use your own home-grown biofuel.)

Please forward this message to anyone who may be interested. Interviews will start at 4 pm on Saturday September 26th. Later that evening there will be a party with bands playing. For more information please contact Keith at keithl@cfl.rr.com. Thanks for your time, and I look forward to hearing from you.

Keith

Today I was at an amazing meeting - the San Francisco Bay Area governments (and some businesses) are working diligently to make changes to build up infrastructure and code changes so that the coming wave of electric vehicles will have an easy time of being used. Today's meeting was one in a series of meetings where they're going over the issues.

One issue is the automotive industry has (or will soon) agree on a standard charging plug: J1772. The idea is to have one charging connection for safety reasons, and to simplify the story for electric vehicle service equipment (EVSE) a.k.a. charging stations. In the past (the years of the electric vehicle mandate) there were 2 (?3?) different connectors for electric vehicles, and this was a big problem that they clearly don't want to repeat.

What it means is there will be a lot of charging stations out there with J1772 connectors on them, meant to be used by cars. However obviously electric scooters and motorcycles could also be using these charging stations. Bicycles using these charging stations might be a bit out of place, but scooters and motorcycles would fit right in.

I haven't heard of any scooter or motorcycle manufacturer discuss the J1772 connector. Further scooters and motorcycles have smaller battery packs and the normal 120 volt AC charging rate (approx 1 kilowatt) is perfectly fine, perhaps. Clearly full size EV's (e.g. the Nissan LEAF has a 26 kilowatt-hour battery pack) need higher power chargers in order to have a reasonable charging time.

I have a concern however that maybe the result will be scooters & motorcycles that do not have these connectors, a charging infrastructure that only uses these connectors, leaving the EV scooter and motorcycle owners out of luck because of the automobile focused planning commissions that aren't aware of EV scooters and motorcycles.

So I asked them about this. Their answer was along the lines that an EV scooter or motorcycle owner would have a positive advantage from having higher speed charging, and that it would be a great idea for them to get on board with the J1772 standard. Hmm, while that's a great point it wasn't exactly the answer I wanted to hear.

For the record - it is immensely frustrating to ride my electric motorcycle to Sunnyvale, park in the garage, there's EV parking there, but their equipment is incompatible with my charger because they don't have a simple 120v outlet to plug into. Only the AVCON and paddle style chargers.

James Howard Kunstler is a leading thinker in peak oil circles. Peak Oil is a theory (rather well proved) describing how in the not too distant future (or perhaps already) we will see a decline in fossil oil production. There are more reasons for adopting electric vehicles than greenhouse gas stuff.. it's also that fossil oil production is very highly likely to decline. The situation of increasing demand for oil and a decline in possible production is likely to not be pretty.

Anyway in the most recent episode of his podcast he goes into electric cars starting from a Nova episode about electric cars. I've embedded both below.

James Howard Kunstler is very negative on electric car possibilities.

I agree with him on some points - I think the existing car-centric infrastructure is just wrong, it's ugly, it degrades quality of life with things like noise pollution and interferes with walkability and walkable cities. Further I think the car centric infrastructure is more energy intensive than to have more compact cities with better mass transit. I'm obviously coming from this as an American but my visits to places with good mass transit (Brussels and Prague) showed me it's possible to easily get around a decent size city without having to own a car, and to boot I'd be walking around more often and be in better health.

He also goes on about how it'll be impossible to build enough wind and solar power to cover the electricity requirement of having all cars converted to electric. According to a Stanford Univ researcher who I saw speed recently, he's just wrong about that. There's been an incomplete understanding of the amount of power possibly available through wind and solar power, and more recent figures show the potential is vastly more than Kunstler seems to be admitting.

In any case this is very interesting...

KunstlerCast_74.mp3

I've written an article on examiner.com about the recently launched Mini-E program and a stink that Plugged In America is raising. BMW Mini E program has major problems, maybe

I don't know about the rest of y'all but I'm into electric vehicles because of two reasons: a) peak oil, 2) climate change. Oh and c) because it's such a blast riding electric.

Another thing which ties those together is the Transition Movement. I'm involved a little with the movement. There's a book which covers it very well: The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience (Transition Guides)

The main thing is to recognize the threats of peak oil & climate change. Peak Oil is a theory whose pattern has occurred in oil field after oil field around the world. Eventually an oil field gets to a point where it's harder and harder to pump out the oil, it gets more expensive, and eventually it becomes expensive enough to where the oil companies stop extracting from the field. The world passed it's oil peak a year or so ago and from here on out oil is only going to be more and more expensive. There may be short term ups and downs as supply hiccups happen, but the long term pattern is upward.

Climate change is more well known.. Our activities are building up green house gasses and we're gonna roast. That kinda thing.

Our society is completely dependent on oil, especially in the U.S. where the lack of wisdom of our forefathers left us without good mass transit systems and saddled with a highway system which is likely soon to be useless due to a lack of oil to drive the vehicles we use on those roads.

In the U.S. especially supplies of food and other necessities is done using just in time inventory systems shipped over long distance. Any hiccup in delivering these supplies will quickly turn into shortages in stores ..etc..

Those are the kind of threats that are likely and which the Transition movement is about addressing. But it's not a doom and gloom thing, it's about positively focusing on solutions and especially developing local resources so our local towns can survive.

The reason I'm going into this is I was just interviewed in one of the local newspapers about peak oil and the Transition movement. It's a pretty good article, does much better than I just did in explaining it.

http://www.metroactive.com/metro/06.24.09/cover-0925.html

I've put some further resources here: http://www.7gen.com/website-categories/transition-towns

The transition towns movement is centered here: http://transitiontowns.org/

Here is the internet version of an Article that came out recently in the Post and Courier.
It is a SC state Newspaper.

http://www.postandcourier.com/news/2009/jun/04/electricbikes84730/

They were very interested in the bikes. Good timing I guess.

Take care

Ed

I was reading the following article (via wwwatts) about a "philantropist" who got the 500th Tesla. The article also mentions Tesla's plans for more show-rooms in various cities.

http://planettesla.com/blogs/news/archive/2009/06/03/tesla-delivers-500th-roadster.aspx

The idea in my mind is the expensive business plan with dealerships around the world. Sounds like the issue being discussed in Suspension of Trading - What does it mean? .. just switch out the name Tesla for the name Vectrix and some of the same things are true, maybe. Maybe though Tesla's management is doing a better job. Such as getting Daimler to invest, that shows something maybe about the quality of the business.

The thing I'm taking from the Vectrix story is an expensive business plan with building a global sales and service organization, and the company failing.

It's not a given that an expensive business plan means failure. It simply requires enough ramp up of business to support the business plan. If Vectrix were getting enough income to pay for the business then we wouldn't be having that discussion about suspension of trading. But they didn't and therefore we are.

With an expensive business plan it requires more income to pay for the business .. obviously.

http://www.thestar.com/article/643141 ... Sheesh. In the early history of cars, in England there was a law requiring cars going on roads to be limited to 20 miles/hr and to be proceeded by someone waving a flag warning all passersby about the approaching car. That of course made adoption of cars hard in England until the law was repealed.

There have been many of these "electric cars are dangerous because they're silent" articles.. and I'm wondering out loud whether it's a disinformation campaign by entrenched interests (a.k.a. oil companies) to slander the electric car, position them as dangerous, to keep them off the road.

I think it's the responsibility of the driver to operate their vehicle safely. If they happen to run over a deaf person who didn't hear them, then it's the responsibility of the driver for having done so. Cars are heavy objects that carry a lot of inertia when moving and it's a huge responsibility to operate heavy machinery in a safe manner. Unfortunately it seems many people shirk their responsibility to be safe behind the wheel. In this case they're positioning blind people as the victim of marauding silent electric vehicles, when there are other ways to present the same story.

Over on electric_vehicles_for_sale someone mentioned a documentary, Taken For A Ride, which is just as alarming and well researched as Who Killed the Electric Car. But TFaR is not so well known as WKtEC. I just watched the movie and ohmygosh.

Unfortunately the documentary seems to not be available through any normal purchasing means like going to a DVD store and buying a DVD. You can buy it through the Taken for a Ride home page, and you can watch it online. I've embedded the video below.

Taken for a Ride is an amazing documentary by Jim Kleina and Martha Olson that documents the efforts to derail mass transit in America. Ever wonder why the U.S. has the worst mass transportation system in the industrialized world? Using historical footage and investigative research, this film tells how GM fought to push freeways into the inner cities of America, and push public transportation out. For more information about this film, check out http://www.newday.com. This video was funded by the Independent Television Service. Support the work of this film by (a) using public transportation, (b) telling your elected representatives to dedicate more funding towards public transportation, and (c) purchase this video for your own collection.

There is a study guide on the website that makes for a good synopsis of the contents: http://www.newday.com/guides/takenforarideSG.html

The basic story is before WWII the U.S. and most other industrialized nations had excellent mass transit systems using electrically powered intra-city rail systems. Street Cars were the name then, today the phrase is "light rail". The street cars ran frequently and were very convenient. For example people glowingly talk about the LA Street Car systems (the Red Cars) and for example the sub-plot of Who Killed Roger Rabbit was the death of that very street car system to be replaced by highways.

The movie goes pretty deep into the history of General Motors and how they were behind the destruction of electric rail systems all across the U.S. Another resource for that same story is the book: Internal Combustion: How Corporations and Governments Addicted the World to Oil and Derailed the Alternatives. GM didn't kill the electric street car directly they worked through front companies that bought up the electric street car systems, and destroyed them.

A part of the story is the different choices made in the U.S. and other countries after WWII. In the U.S. the choice was made to destroy the street car system, and that led to huge costs all over the country in building the interstate highway system, in building intra-city highway systems, in destroying existing neighborhoods or farmland replacing it all with eyesore highways. One focus is the former Mayor Alioto of San Francisco who apparently fought against a demand from then-Gov. Reagan to build a freeway through the Embarcadero in San Francisco. Different stages of that fight are shown including some interestingly powerful testimony by him before Congress. To this day that freeway section was not done and anybody driving through San Francisco has to go onto city streets. It's inconvenient if you are trying to go elsewhere but hey he made a good point that San Francisco is a great city to stop in and enjoy. The same could be said for cities all across the country, but in the name of progress you've got city bypass highways that let people drive past city after city and in most cases city cores are dead because nobody goes there. Another attribute of San Francisco is they still have electric streetcars but most of them are in the shape of a city bus with rubber tires and power lines overhead which run with the rest of the traffic, rather than a street car with steel wheels on steel tracks in its own lane of traffic.

In Europe and Japan a different decision was made, to rebuild the street car systems and ensure their cities had multimodal traffic systems that preserved peoples ability to walk around. I've only seen a bit of this on trips to Brussels and in Prague but in both of those cities I was happily able to jump onto the street car systems (and subways) and zip around town with little trouble and able to get anywhere I wanted to go. Try that in most U.S. cities and you run into huge problems.

There are two books about the car industry which both use the phrase "Taken for a Ride" in the title but they don't seem to be associated with the movie.