Drill for Typewriters? Biobutanol's "weak" producer, Good News Writers, Hawaiian Sugar goes Energy
Stafford Williamson
September 15, 2008
Is "disruptive" a bad word or not?
In the high technology world, the word "disruptive" is used to describe some new technology innovation that upsets that "ecology" of that sector of business. Like the personal computer was disruptive of the electric typewriter business in the world of "business machines."
The crowd was chanting often at the Republican convention. Too often, I fear, the chants were simply intended to drown out the voices of dissenters who had made their way into the venue in order to have a public opportunity to express their opinions. On more than one occasion I saw "security" personnel escorting disruptive voices from the hall. So in this sense, "disruptive" was both cause and effect. There were several times when the main speaker had to pause because the chorus of chants was too loud. At least once, maybe twice, the crowd was chanting, "Drill, baby, drill!" at the top of their lungs.
Senator McCain has clearly indicated that he is aware that evolving our energy dependence away from purely petroleum based sources is a necessity. He has expressed an all-encompassing policy of supporting further development of wind, solar, biofuels and hydrogen (oops, maybe not so much on the hydrogen) but he is a strong advocate of additional nuclear power plants. I think I recall him mentioning a figure of 20 new nuclear power reactors to be built under his (would-be) administration, but I trust that a couple of dozen would suit him just fine as well.
Now this is not, or at least not specifically, an anti-McCain tirade. I am trying to look at energy policy with a somewhat dispassionate eye. The problem is that when the advocates of nuclear power (specifically power from "nuclear fusion") are like George Bush who even after 8 years in the White House still can't even pronounce the word; (and by the way,Sarah Palin kept saying "Noook-you-lar" in her interview with Charles Gibson of ABC News this past weekend, too) that makes me very nervous about whether they have any clue what they are talking about. Senator McCain has been supportive of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump site in Nevada, but is, according to the express wishes of his constituents, opposed to any of it passing through Arizona on the way to Nevada. So while on the one hand he appears to be saying that nuclear power is safe, clean and "green", on the other it is too dangerous to even have nuclear waste transported through his state.
Let's get back to that, "Drill, baby, drill!" chant though. It would seem that despite the Exxon Valdez oil tanker spill in Alaskan waters (which you might think would weigh heavier on Governor Sarah Palin more than most) that someone, somewhere has waved a magic wand that removes all environmental hazard from off-shore drilling. Now I grant that it may seem like off-shore drilling operations have had an admirable safety record in recent years, but that is, at least in part, the narrow focus of most American news organizations. A "minor" spill of a few thousand gallons of oil in the North Sea, or off the coast of Indonesia would be unlikely to make it into the headlines or even the "world roundup" section of most network television news broadcasts.
Politicians (and the media generally as well) keep saying that the American people are "smarter than that", but the practical matter of it is that anything even slightly complicated goes over the heads of most of the American public. Not enough oil. Drill for more. It sounds "logical" as long as you don't actually think about it as a real-world, practical problem.
Even if the preliminary seismic surveys are complete we start with needing drilling equipment. For off-shore purposes that also includes a drilling platform of some sort, all of which will have to be built because virtually every available piece of such equipment is already in use and/or committed for several years to come. Then there's the actually drilling, again, potentially years worth (if it was "low hanging fruit" compared to other sources, oil companies would have tapped it already). Meanwhile Senator Obama says, let the oil companies drill on the leases they already own, and if they don't start tapping the oil available there, they should lose the right to drill there. It does seem close to criminal to buy up oil drilling rights and then neglect to actually drill, thus keeping whatever oil there is off of the market, doesn't it?
Oh, yes, back to that disruptive behavior compared to disruptive technology subject. I saw Tom Friedman (his new book is Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--and How It Can Renew America , though you may know him better as the writer of the bestseller The World is Flat or for his weekly column) on the Charlie Rose on PBS show this week talking about the "Drill, Baby, Drill" being like people standing around at the dawn of the personal computer age shouting, "IBM Selectric, IBM Selectric" (of which I was very fond, BTW, I owned several though I gave up my last one about 10 years ago).
On the other hand, Tom Friedman also made the comment that it was like people marching around Xerox headquaters chanting, "Carbon paper, Carbon paper."
I was going to say that one should not rush to hire engineers from WSU in Pullman, Washington but perhaps one should avoid their journalists instead. At least some of their engineers have their hearts in the right place. A rather cheery article in their campus paper, The Daily Evergreen announces the start of a local biodiesel club that meets Mondays in Sloan Hall on campus. But the journalist seems to have confused attributes of ethanol with those of biodiesel.
A more reliable source of journalistic excellence belongs to a married couple who write for the ABOUT.COM website. They wrote a recent article on Biobutanol in which they note the principle roadblock of Biobutanol overtaking Bioethanol is the relatively weak constitution of the clostridium bacteria that do the conversion for us. It appears that Christine and Scott Gable do good work in reporting on alternative fuels. You might want to keep an eye on them.
I read what I thought was disappointing news from Hawai'i this week. Gay and Robinson, who operate one of the largest sugar cane plantations in the state have announced that they will quit making sugar. The news, however, was not as sad as it sounds (though as fond as I am of sweets, it still seems a tragedy)because the reason they are getting out of the "sugar" business is that they will be concentrating on energy crops. Now that IS admittedly an instance in which the demand for fuel feedstock is reducing food output, but the food vs. fuel "controversy" is still a fictionalized version of the real world since the main upward pressures on food costs have nothing to do with the still tiny percentage that goes to fuels. Quite the contrary, the cost of petroleum fuels to grow whatever crops they are cultivating (and the scary rise in those prices recently) has been the main cause of food price inflation, combined with increased demand from China and India.
My friends at Biogold Fuels announced this week an exclusive engineering alliance with ICM. ICM is an engineering firm based in Colwich, KS whose founder has extensive experience in bioethanol plant engineering and operations. Biogold, however, plans to use municipal solid waste to produce biodiesel and has been struggling to come to some decision on just which technology was going to do the job for them. The news at Energy Business Review says: "Pursuant to the agreement, BioGold has entered into a professional services agreement and will enter into a design and build agreement with ICM to design and construct BioGold's waste-to-energy plant in Harvey County, Kansas." (Elsewhere in the article it says they have made a "long term development agreement" in a formalization of their recently announced "strategic alliance" to design and build municipal waste-to-energy plants.) Congratulations, Steve!
I apologize for having missed filing a column last week, just in case anyone actually was waiting for or expecting it. "Busy week," is my basic excuse, and I am sticking with it (at least until I get a better one).
Love and warm wishes,
Stafford "Doc" Williamson
http://energy.psyrk.us/
Visit the Energy Circus.
In the high technology world, the word "disruptive" is used to describe some new technology innovation that upsets that "ecology" of that sector of business. Like the personal computer was disruptive of the electric typewriter business in the world of "business machines."
The crowd was chanting often at the Republican convention. Too often, I fear, the chants were simply intended to drown out the voices of dissenters who had made their way into the venue in order to have a public opportunity to express their opinions. On more than one occasion I saw "security" personnel escorting disruptive voices from the hall. So in this sense, "disruptive" was both cause and effect. There were several times when the main speaker had to pause because the chorus of chants was too loud. At least once, maybe twice, the crowd was chanting, "Drill, baby, drill!" at the top of their lungs.
Senator McCain has clearly indicated that he is aware that evolving our energy dependence away from purely petroleum based sources is a necessity. He has expressed an all-encompassing policy of supporting further development of wind, solar, biofuels and hydrogen (oops, maybe not so much on the hydrogen) but he is a strong advocate of additional nuclear power plants. I think I recall him mentioning a figure of 20 new nuclear power reactors to be built under his (would-be) administration, but I trust that a couple of dozen would suit him just fine as well.
Now this is not, or at least not specifically, an anti-McCain tirade. I am trying to look at energy policy with a somewhat dispassionate eye. The problem is that when the advocates of nuclear power (specifically power from "nuclear fusion") are like George Bush who even after 8 years in the White House still can't even pronounce the word; (and by the way,Sarah Palin kept saying "Noook-you-lar" in her interview with Charles Gibson of ABC News this past weekend, too) that makes me very nervous about whether they have any clue what they are talking about. Senator McCain has been supportive of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump site in Nevada, but is, according to the express wishes of his constituents, opposed to any of it passing through Arizona on the way to Nevada. So while on the one hand he appears to be saying that nuclear power is safe, clean and "green", on the other it is too dangerous to even have nuclear waste transported through his state.
Let's get back to that, "Drill, baby, drill!" chant though. It would seem that despite the Exxon Valdez oil tanker spill in Alaskan waters (which you might think would weigh heavier on Governor Sarah Palin more than most) that someone, somewhere has waved a magic wand that removes all environmental hazard from off-shore drilling. Now I grant that it may seem like off-shore drilling operations have had an admirable safety record in recent years, but that is, at least in part, the narrow focus of most American news organizations. A "minor" spill of a few thousand gallons of oil in the North Sea, or off the coast of Indonesia would be unlikely to make it into the headlines or even the "world roundup" section of most network television news broadcasts.
Politicians (and the media generally as well) keep saying that the American people are "smarter than that", but the practical matter of it is that anything even slightly complicated goes over the heads of most of the American public. Not enough oil. Drill for more. It sounds "logical" as long as you don't actually think about it as a real-world, practical problem.
Even if the preliminary seismic surveys are complete we start with needing drilling equipment. For off-shore purposes that also includes a drilling platform of some sort, all of which will have to be built because virtually every available piece of such equipment is already in use and/or committed for several years to come. Then there's the actually drilling, again, potentially years worth (if it was "low hanging fruit" compared to other sources, oil companies would have tapped it already). Meanwhile Senator Obama says, let the oil companies drill on the leases they already own, and if they don't start tapping the oil available there, they should lose the right to drill there. It does seem close to criminal to buy up oil drilling rights and then neglect to actually drill, thus keeping whatever oil there is off of the market, doesn't it?
Oh, yes, back to that disruptive behavior compared to disruptive technology subject. I saw Tom Friedman (his new book is Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--and How It Can Renew America , though you may know him better as the writer of the bestseller The World is Flat or for his weekly column) on the Charlie Rose on PBS show this week talking about the "Drill, Baby, Drill" being like people standing around at the dawn of the personal computer age shouting, "IBM Selectric, IBM Selectric" (of which I was very fond, BTW, I owned several though I gave up my last one about 10 years ago).
On the other hand, Tom Friedman also made the comment that it was like people marching around Xerox headquaters chanting, "Carbon paper, Carbon paper."
I was going to say that one should not rush to hire engineers from WSU in Pullman, Washington but perhaps one should avoid their journalists instead. At least some of their engineers have their hearts in the right place. A rather cheery article in their campus paper, The Daily Evergreen announces the start of a local biodiesel club that meets Mondays in Sloan Hall on campus. But the journalist seems to have confused attributes of ethanol with those of biodiesel.
A more reliable source of journalistic excellence belongs to a married couple who write for the ABOUT.COM website. They wrote a recent article on Biobutanol in which they note the principle roadblock of Biobutanol overtaking Bioethanol is the relatively weak constitution of the clostridium bacteria that do the conversion for us. It appears that Christine and Scott Gable do good work in reporting on alternative fuels. You might want to keep an eye on them.
I read what I thought was disappointing news from Hawai'i this week. Gay and Robinson, who operate one of the largest sugar cane plantations in the state have announced that they will quit making sugar. The news, however, was not as sad as it sounds (though as fond as I am of sweets, it still seems a tragedy)because the reason they are getting out of the "sugar" business is that they will be concentrating on energy crops. Now that IS admittedly an instance in which the demand for fuel feedstock is reducing food output, but the food vs. fuel "controversy" is still a fictionalized version of the real world since the main upward pressures on food costs have nothing to do with the still tiny percentage that goes to fuels. Quite the contrary, the cost of petroleum fuels to grow whatever crops they are cultivating (and the scary rise in those prices recently) has been the main cause of food price inflation, combined with increased demand from China and India.
My friends at Biogold Fuels announced this week an exclusive engineering alliance with ICM. ICM is an engineering firm based in Colwich, KS whose founder has extensive experience in bioethanol plant engineering and operations. Biogold, however, plans to use municipal solid waste to produce biodiesel and has been struggling to come to some decision on just which technology was going to do the job for them. The news at Energy Business Review says: "Pursuant to the agreement, BioGold has entered into a professional services agreement and will enter into a design and build agreement with ICM to design and construct BioGold's waste-to-energy plant in Harvey County, Kansas." (Elsewhere in the article it says they have made a "long term development agreement" in a formalization of their recently announced "strategic alliance" to design and build municipal waste-to-energy plants.) Congratulations, Steve!
I apologize for having missed filing a column last week, just in case anyone actually was waiting for or expecting it. "Busy week," is my basic excuse, and I am sticking with it (at least until I get a better one).
Love and warm wishes,
Stafford "Doc" Williamson
http://energy.psyrk.us/
Visit the Energy Circus.
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