The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand

This is a guest post from Neil Howes. Neil is an Associate Professor at the University of Sydney. The post describes a response to the “Carbon Pollution Reduction Green Paper” (27 August 2008).

Executive Summary

We are proposing that the Government of Australia facilitates the replacement of 50% of Australia’s base-load coal fired electricity generation by financing the building of a high capacity National Electricity Grid (NEG) by 2020. This will interconnect high value renewable energy sites for wind, solar and geothermal energy to enhanced hydro electricity pumped storage capacity enabling these low CO2e energy sources to provide base-load power to major retail and industry consumers.

The objective of the plan is to :

(1) Link the East Coast and Tasmanian electricity grids (known as the NEM - National Electricity Market) to the Western Australian electricity grid via a 1500Km high voltage DC (HVDC) connection between Norseman, WA and Pt August SA,

(2) Build a new 1000 Km HVDC connection between Leigh Creek SA and Roma, QLD to link the SA and QLG regions within the NEM, in order to access solar and geothermal sites in WA, SA, VIC,NSW and QLD.

This would also require;

(3) A high voltage AC (HVAC) extension and upgrade of the WA grid north of Norseman, via Kalgoorlie, to the proposed Pilbara local grid to access stranded natural gas (NG) power in WA mining communities and solar thermal sites in the NW of WA

(4) A HVAC interconnection from Norseman to Esperance and Albany wind power sites with increased capacity HVAC connections along the SW coast of WA t4 Perth. This infrastructure project will assist the development of all renewable energy resources, starting with developing wind resources along the SW coast of WA, West Coast of Tasmania, and coastal and highland wind sites in SA, VIC, NSW and QLD with an installed capacity of 28GW by 2020.

I have given a lot of thought to the issue of opening up new areas for drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). My position has always been to leave that oil in place for a very rainy day. I wanted to see major conservation efforts in place before we considered tapping that oil. Opening those areas when oil was $20 a barrel would have meant that much of it would have been used frivolously.

Now that oil is over $100 - and in my opinion will be much higher in 5 or 10 years (T. Boone Pickens predicts $300/bbl in 10 years) - we will have tightened our belts a good deal by the time any of this oil could actually reach the market. Therefore, I think now is the time for Congressional hearings on opening up these areas. Let's have an open debate on the issue. However, if these areas are opened for drilling, I have a compromise that should be very attractive to those in opposition.

At least I hope it is my last one. I have made a few long-distance trips by car in my life. The first few were a lot of fun. I was seeing the country for the first time. But after crisscrossing Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma a few times, I would honestly rather have a root canal than have to do it again - especially when it means 25 hours on the road with three impatient kids in the car.

Things have changed quite a bit since my last trip, though. When I was in college, my first long distance road trip took me from College Station, Texas to Gaspé, Quebec (2,600 miles) and back. My most recent long-distance trip, in 2005, had taken me 1,150 miles from Northern Oklahoma to Montana (twice). This time, I drove from Montana to North Texas (1430 miles). For reference, New York to Los Angeles is about 2,800 miles. Here are my observations.

When we left Montana, I noticed that traffic was very light. That is unusual for Montana in the summer, because a lot of traffic passes through Billings on I-90 headed to Yellowstone National Park. The road is usually packed with RVs, but I was well into Wyoming before I saw the first RV. In fact, in the first 300 miles of driving, I saw only one RV on the road. This theme was consistent throughout the trip: Light traffic, and very few RVs. My wife commented that high gas prices had really done a number on the traffic. I told her that I thought an era had passed and that going forward we would start looking at personal mobility in a different manner.

The World Wind Energy Conference is just around the corner and happens to be in my home town. I was flipping through the conference program and noticed a familiar name pop up quite a lot: Paul Gipe. He's written a number of books on wind power and most recently has become involved in feed-in tariffs for wind power in North America. I spoke to him a while ago about how the industry has developed.

To listen to the show, you can either play it in the built in player, or download it directly via the link.

or download directly: Wind Power Conversation with Paul Gipe

Wind power is currently the fastest growing renewable energy source (in terms of capacity - solar has a faster percentage growth rate), and looks like remaining so into the next decade. While most attention is focussed on the mainstream approach of generating power using large wind turbines - both onshore and, as Jerome recently looked at, offshore - there are a wide range of alternatives being considered for harvesting energy from the winds. In this post I'll look at 2 approaches that have received some attention in the press recently - attaching kite sails to ships and airborne wind turbines.

Lord Ron Oxburgh, former non-executive chairman, Shell UK; chairman, House of Lords select committee on science and technology; honorary professor, Cambridge University

The morning began with a Keynote address by Lord Oxburgh former non-executive chairman of Shell, who spoke on “Out of Oil, into Hot Water.” He began by noting the economic difficulties that are coming as demand continues to exceed supply. We are not, after all, making oil any more. (Ed comment – well let’s not forget biofuels – and it turned out he did not). Because these problems will arise around the time of peaking they will likely be precursors to it, and these economic consequences will come sooner than expected.

The problems, however, are not that we are running out of oil, rather it is that we are running out of cheap oil. When oil fields are abandoned there may be 60% of the original oil (OOIP) that is left in the rock. At present this is just too expensive to extract, but it leaves us with a problem since most transportation requires a liquid fuel. To work effectively the vehicle must have a small, relatively light engine, together with a storage reservoir full of fuel, that must in turn, be as light, yet energy dense, as possible. The Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) has filled that need for the past century or so. The fuels that power it are among the most energy dense of those commonly available. That alone, however, is not the problem.

The energy gap left by declining fossil Solar fuels may be filled by alternative sources of energy. In short, the Earth has ample supplies of energy to sustain human population and economic growth. Discuss....

This post is intended to provide a structured background to energy matters for new readers and hopefully to provide a provocative debate with seasoned Oil Drum veterans. A listing of over 50 links to Oil Drum articles from the past year is provided which combined provide a comprehensive overview of the issues surrounding peak oil and energy decline. If you are new to the site or have been lurking and want to ask a question then all you have to do is sign up and post your query. The Oil Drum is here to educate--and we are here to help.

Income trust imbroglio

On April 9, The Globe and Mail reported that Flaherty's tax changes, which were supposed to have brought Ottawa more revenue, are having the opposite effect. Not only is revenue lost instead of gained, Canada is losing ownership of its resources in the process, and investment in the energy sector is decreasing. "It would only take slightly more than 15 per cent of the trust sector to be bought out by foreign private equity, and non-Canadian firms, before Ottawa was losing annual tax revenue equivalent to what it said eluded its grasp before the trust tax."

In other words, Ottawa could lose $5- to $6-billion annually. The article quotes Sandy McIntyre of Sentry Select Capital Corporation: "If so-called tax fairness was intended to accelerate the sale of Canadian companies to foreign entities, then it is a success. If it was intended to increase Canadian tax revenues, it is a failure."

Canadian rebirth for wind power

Inside an unremarkable office building on the outskirts of Vancouver, a small team of engineers and marketers is building a technology that will tame the wind.

It is a high-tech battery that looks like a pair of hot-water tanks linked by a twisting network of plastic piping. Each tank is filled with vanadium, an element named after a Norse fertility goddess that could give birth to new possibilities in alternative energy by making wind turbines nearly as reliable as coal-fired electric plants.

First designed by NASA and developed by Vancouver-based VRB Power Systems Inc., the vanadium battery took a major step toward commercial success yesterday after the Irish government released a study showing it could substantially boost profitability at wind farms when the Emerald Isle is looking to inject some of its famous green into its power supply.

Arctic Gas projects put on ice

New cost estimates that pushed up the price of the Mackenzie gas pipeline to $16.2- billion make Canada's Arctic natural gas among the most expensive on the continent, top explorers in the area said yesterday.

Executives at Devon Canada Corp. and Apache Canada Ltd. said they're putting exploration plans on ice until the project becomes a reality.

"When I see the welders show up and start welding pipe, that's when exploration will ramp up again," said Chris Seasons, president of Devon Canada, a subsidiary of Oklahoma City-based Devon Energy Corp., which spent more than $300-million looking for natural gas in the North this decade. "Certainly the delay to 2014, assuming the project goes ahead, is not helpful, and while we haven't seen any tolls on the mainline, just looking at the costs, it's going to make it amongst the most expensive gas in North America," he said.