 | The National Energy Essay Competition | TOD: Australia/New Zealand | The Bullroarer - Friday 18th July 2008 |  |
67 comments on How Technology Increases Oil Production
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I bet you're thinking of A Solar Grand Plan: Scientific American. PV with storage in NG fields nationwide. Don't think many tech breakthroughs would be called for but gawd! what a monstrous amount of buildup. It's been hashed over here, do a search. And there have been a few other Grand Solar Plans proposed here, like Staniford's.
Innovation and scalability are the two things people just don't understand. What we need are short-and-sweet illustrations of the size of these hurdles. People can't grok page after page of reasoned documented arguments, they need something that they can take home, that can't be forgotten readily, like 1000 barrels a second or a cubic mile of oil.
If you check the comments on the Solar Grand Plan, you will see that it was pretty thoroughly disembowelled.
Turns out they wanted to use compressed air as the storage medium, and the process they suggested would use natural gas.
That would involve more NG than is likely to be available, apart from it's global warming implications.
Solar has a big contribution to make in providing peaking power, but even at the latitude of the Mohave winter incidence is only around 25% or so of that in the summer, so that you would need a massive overbuild to provide base-load.
That passes over the fact that you would also need to have dry cooling, which is expensive as it is a water-stressed area, and ignores the fact that even providing enough storage for overnight power is not easy or cheap.
Solar thermal is also dependent on really clear skies, far more than, say, amorphous silicon, so that back up power is also needed for up to a week, even for the Mohave, as I was informed by someone in the industry.
As for schemes to power the whole country this way, let alone run Europe from transmission lines from the Sahara, they are pure science-fiction.
PV power locally produced is a far better bet, although very expensive for the moment.