Saturday, April 13, 2002
3:21 PM LINK
The Newspaper That Couldn't Shoot Straight
The link above points to "Turmoil in Venezuela Causes Jitters at Citgo Home" by Bob Haring in today's business section of the New York Times. It is supposedly about how Citgo is particularly affected by the turmoil in Venezuela. The reason is that PDV, Venezuela's state oil company, actually owns Citgo outright. Southland (7-11) sold their last shares to them in 1990.
As a result, most of Citgo's oil comes from Venezuela, and the shakiness of the situation there has people in Tulsa, where the company is headquartered, particularly edgy about being able to bring oil to market.
How much oil? Well, uh..., according to the Times' graphic, Citgo purchases over 500 million barrels a day, over 300 million of which come from Venezuela.
500 million barrels a day? Hmm...Funny. The U.S. only uses 20 million barrels in a given day. I have a feeling they meant 500 million barrels a year. But who knows? I suppose I could go look it up, but I'm not interested enough. That's their job.
Also, in the thick of the article, we hear that Venezuela ships about "one million gallons" of crude oil to U.S. each day, about half of it destined for Citgo refineries.
Let me say this flat out: units of gallons of crude oil have no place in any informative article. They are used (like acres instead of square miles) simply to puff up a number to make it more grandiose. To make any intelligent summary using this information, it is immediately necessary to convert the figure to barrels, in this case yielding about 25,000 barrels a day. Hmm seems sort of low for Venezuela. I don't trust that number.
Which brings me to my point: I have come to conclusion that any use of the units of gallons of crude oil (as opposed to gasoline) in any article about the oil industry in the press is a dead give away that the author doesn't know shite from shineola about the real dynamics of the oil business. You can pretty take the article as so much blather based on culling PR statements and the company's web site without any reflection about the meaning of the numbers.
O.K. I'm not asking for Brookings Institute-style commentary from Times reporters, but any more, I am thinking they have little grasp of the significance of the figures they throw around.
Obviously the graphic I mentioned was incorrect. I wonder if we'll see a correction about it. I'm betting on no.
One last point: the article mentioned that Citgo's two East Coast refineries are its asphalt plants at Paulsboro, New Jersey and Savannah, Georgia. This illustrates what I mentioned in my last post, that Venezuelan crude has a high specific gravity, and is more useful for heavier petroleum products. It's more expensive to recover gasoline from a typical Venezuelan barrel than most other oil producing nations. It is well suited for asphalt, however, which comprises the heaviest hydrocarbon molecules in crude oil.
1:21 PM LINK
Gas Guzzling in America
I'm posting this link because it made on Fark today, under the title "Take the mystery out of gas prices." It reminds of something someone said on the news lately, that many Americans judge the economic health of the country mostly on the current price of gasoline. I think nothing speaks to the truth-blindness of our society and energy more than this. Personally, I never notice the price of gas at the pump. It's of no concern to me. I know it's going to take between twenty and thirty dollars to fill up. I have a lot more important things to worry about than the exact amount.
I think there is this unspoken assumption among our citizenry that the government runs the oil business. That is, the government somehow controls the price, like the Federal Reserve, and that the fluctuations are a temperature of the government's ability to manage world affairs, instead of being simply a short-term indicator of a constantly-fluctuating free market. Fluctuations in price are natural. The spike due to the Chavez crisis in Venezuela had nothing to do with the economic health of the country. Yet it probably bummed out millions of people, making them wonder if the world was indeed going to hell.
Thus the price of gasoline is to "Main Street" what the Dow Jones/Nasdaq are to Wall Street: rather meaningless figures by themselves which are taken as reflective of something much more than they are (by the way, I hate the use of the phrase "Main Street" to mean "small town America," since Main Street no longer exists in most towns except as a relic.
An interesting fact from the link above: the daily gasoline consumption by the U.S. is around 360 million gallons a day, which (using an estimate of 100 million households), gives about 3.6 gallons per day per household. The 360 million gallons is not an direct measured figure, but is an estimate obtained by taking 43% of the daily crude oil consumption of 19.5 million barrels, since 43% is supposedly the fraction that winds up as gasoline.
2:12 AM LINK
The Venezuelan Coup
I liked this writeup by Steven Den Beste about Venezuela. The coup there came and went and I barely noticed. I didn't write about it because I don't really care about the short term picture and fluctuations in the current price of crude. Whether or not Venezuela is currently pumping out crude oil is not of any concern to me. Oil is free market commodity, and no matter what happens with the politics in Venezuela, its oil will find a way to market. What I care about is how much oil is really there.
Den Beste's article was good because it focused on the long-term, to wit:
"Indeed, they may well increase output in order to get more money, which does not bode well for Arab plans to use the "oil weapon". Venezuela has no stake whatever in Middle Eastern politics except due to its membership in OPEC, and it certainly has no reason to cut oil shipments to work towards an Arab political goal."
Indeed, Venezuela is the poster child for the capitivity of OPEC nations to their oil economy. Indeed this
OEIS report from March 2001 is enlightening:
"The last government of the ancien régime under pressure from the national oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDV), came close to abandoning OPEC, and PDV's publicly heralded policy to maximize volumes disregarding OPEC quotas and price objectives was a major cause of the 1998 oil price crisis."
In that vein, it's worth mentioning a few facts about Venezuela. First off, as far as imports to the U.S. are concerned, it is part of the "Big Four" nations which each contribute about 15% of the U.S. oil imports, the other three being Canada, Mexico, and Saudi Arabia (position is constantly shifting, but each hovers around 15%).
Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the western hemisphere, about 76 billion barrels of proven reserves (10-year U.S. supply; 3 x proven reserves of the U.S.; 1/4 proven reserves of Saudi Arabia).
There was an article a couple months ago in the New York Times about Venezuelan oil (I've lost the link). One of the facts I learned is that Venezuelan oil tends to be heavier than, say, Mexican oil. In the oil business, "light" oil is good (as measured by specific gravity). It is easier to pull up out of the ground, easier to transport, and easier to refine into the lighter hydrocarbon fractions such as the ones in gasoline. The fact that Venezuelan crude is heavier means its inherently more expensive recover and to refine than the crude in other countries. The cost of recovering oil is a factor that is almost never mentioned in the press, where oil seems to "just happen."
Following the shallow sea model of oil field locations, it is not surprising that the biggest Venezuelan oil fields are found in or around Lake Maracaibo, which contrary to the name, is actually a lagoon of the Carribbean Sea, somewhat like a miniature version of the Persian Gult. It's actually the kind of place you'd expect to be rich with crude oil.
Map of the Venezuelan Oil and Gas Fields.
Friday, April 12, 2002
5:40 PM LINK
Uranium Markets
More Uranium fact gathering...Uranium is sold on the world market as uranium oxide concentrate (U3-O8). There is a spot price, but 90% of sales are through long-term contracts straight to the utilities. The spot price peaked in the late seventies at about 40 US$ per kg, but has been on a downward slide, and is now at about 7$ per kg. This is actually below the cost of production. In the mid 1990's prices were slightly elevated, allowing uranium mines to reach temporary profitability, but since then, the price has slid down again.
The cost of the oxide ore makes up only about 1/4 of the real price of the fuel. Enrichment and other processing makes up the rest of the real price.
In 1999, the total amount uranium oxide sold on the world markets to utilties was about 36,000 tons, which is amostly exactly half of the amount used each year by utilitity reactors The rest was made up from stockpiles, which have largely been depleted by now. The drawdown is expected to continue through 2005-2006.
The leading exporter of Uranium was Canada, at around 10000 tons, followed by Australia, at around 7600 tons. Niger and Namibia are the two leading producers in Africa, contributing several thousand tons each. South African production was as high as 5000 tons per year in the mid 1980's, but has dwindled to around a 1000 tons per year.
In the 1970's, the U.S. was the leading producer of Uranium, but production has dwindled as well, to around 2000 tons per year, less than Niger and Namibia. The decrease largely coincides with the drop in price of Uranium. Likewise French production has largely petered out because of a decline in profitability. (see graph) The production figures by country are here.
Another large source of uranium since 1997 is the "Megatons to Megawatts" program whereby Russian/CIS military uranium is sold on the world market at a constant rate of around 12000 tons per year. see graph.
"Because of the cost structure of nuclear power generation, with high capital and low fuel costs, the demand for uranium fuel is
much more predictable than with probably any other mineral commodity. Once reactors are built, it is very cost-effective to keep
them running at high capacity and for utilities to make any adjustments to load trends by cutting back on fossil fuel use. Demand
forecasts for uranium thus depend largely on installed and operable capacity, regardless of economic fluctuations. For instance,
when South Korea's overall energy use decreased in 1997, nuclear energy output actually rose, to replace imported fossil fuels."
The largest Uranium mining company in the world is
Cameco, which operates the two largest mines in Canada and which produces about 1/6 of the world's mined uranium oxide ore. Cameco's McArthur River /Key Lake mine, which is both underground and open bit, currently produces about 12% of the world's mined uranium (4141 tons per year). Their second largest mine, Rabbit Lake, produces about 8% of the world's mined uranium. Both mines are in northern Saskatchewan, which is currently the heartland of Canadian uranium production.
Current Uranium Spot Price
Uranium Mine Ownership in Canada
Map of Canadian Uranium Mines
12:45 AM LINK
Depleted Uranium
It's uranium day. In answering the question about how much electricity is generated by coal, and all the consequences that come along with that, it is impossible to escape the question of nuclear power, which generates around 20% of the electricity in the country. If you're flat-out anti-nuke, then the discussion is trivial. But supposing we cast aside all previous assumptions (as I like to), let's consider uranium as a possible savior from the ravages of coal.
First I need to gather some facts. I took a great nuclear physics class as an undergraduate at Willamette from Roberta Bigelow, who had just started teaching there, and now is the head of the physics department. I learned a lot about how nuclear power plants operate from her.
From the above link, I relearn the following facts about natural uranium, which is the elemental uranium that is extracted from uranium ore mined from the ground:
Natural uranium consists of a mixture of three radioactive isotopes which are identified by the mass numbers U-238 (99.27% by mass), U-235 (0.72%) and U-234 (0.0054%).
...most reactors require uranium in which the U-235 content is enriched from 0.72% to about 3%
That is, the trick in creating uranium fuel is that after you mine it out of the ground and extract it from the ore, you have to beef up the U-235 fraction from its natural amount, as stated. The process of enriching the uranium in this way was one of the big war secrets of the
Manhattan Project. Both isotopes are chemically identical. It turns out that one of the best ways to do this is to take advantage of the difference in mass between the two isotopes by using a
centrifuge. At U.T. a couple years ago, I saw a talk from a physicist who was a UN inspector in Iraq, and he said that when they were always on the lookout for centrifuges.
In previous eras of the earth's history, the fraction of U-235 in natural uranium was higher than it is today. In class, we learned about a famous natural uranium reactor in Gabon.
Thursday, April 11, 2002
10:38 PM LINK
Solar Radiation Map of Australia
Shades indicate daily exposures in megajoules per square meter. Down in Tasmania, it is around 11-15 MJ/m^2 per day. In the desert, it gets up to around 25 MJ/m^2 per day. It makes much more sense to give the figures in terms of energy/area per day, instead of power area. You could divide the energy figure by the number of seconds in a day, to get megawatts per square meter, but this is the average, which is not typical of course, since there is no energy harvested at night. Converting megajoules to kilowatt-hours means that down in Tasmania, the sun yields at most 3-4 kWh per day for every square meter of surface area. Out in the desert, you the sun yields 7 kWh per day. The actual harvestable amount is always less. The electrical energy harvested by a panel is much less than 100% of the amount of sunlight that falls upon it. How much less? Well, I am going to find that out...
Wednesday, April 10, 2002
4:09 PM LINK
Caspian Pseudo-information from the Press
Article in today's "World Business" section by Birgit Brauer, "Oil Field Hopes to Become World Power," buttressing idea that Caspian is the "new Middle East."
What a piece of jibberish. I am so tired of this crap:
The article is supposed to be about the Karachaganak oil field in Kazakhstan, several hundred miles north of the Caspian Sea, and how it could become an important source of oil and gas.
So I'm reading the article, and asking when the author is going to deign to tell me how much oil this field is supposed to hold. Finally, about eigth column inches into it:
"Karachaganak, one of the three premium Kazakh fields being developed in the northern Caspian region, was discovered in 1979. Though it is smaller than the other two, Kashagan and Tengiz, its 116 square miles contain more than 1.2 billion metric tons of oil and condensate and more than 1.35 trillion cubic meters of gas..." (italics mine)
What the f** is wrong with the Times? I AM SO F*ING SICK OF THE NUMERICAL JIBBERISH. Haven't you guys heard of
barrels, the commonly accepted unit in the United States for describing reserves of crude oil?
It's all part of the same story, the "confuse 'em with numbers because no one is really paying attention" routine I've come to expect. It's like on television, where newscasters with their "large number" voices, drawing out the word "million" or "billion" without any context of what the number actually means. It's a continuation of the hypnosis of innumeracy to give the illusion of providing fact.
Tell me how many barrels, for cripesake, so I can decide for myself, as an informed citizen, how important this place supposedly is.
So I have to dig around on the net, as usual, to find the elusive conversion factor between metric tons of crude oil and the same amount in barrels.
After Google, I return. Evidently there are 7.33 barrels in a metric ton of crude oil. So we are looking at around 9 billion barrels of oil in this field.
O.K. that's more like it. Then I think: wow, only nine billion barrels. This is the third largest field in the Caspian? That's about ANWR sized. Small potatoes if it were in the Middle East. Why doesn't the article say that? And why couldn't the Times editor spot a simple stylistic problem of units regarding the only truly inportant piece of information in the entire article?
12:10 PM LINK
Oil as the Great Equalizer
Interesting article from Jeremy Rifkin in the L.A. Times. He's writing a book about hydrogen power.
"Many younger Muslim fundamentalists view
oil as "a soft loan from Allah." They see
oil as the great equalizer, a spiritual as
well as geopolitical weapon that, if
Islamized in the service of Allah, could
lead to the second coming of Islam."
Tuesday, April 09, 2002
10:45 PM LINK
Juneau, Alaska kWh/year residential average
10,090 kilowatt hours annually per residence, according to this article from the The Juneau Empire.
10:42 PM LINK
Canadian kWh/year residential average
the Canadian Clean Power Coalition says the average is 7000 kWh/year per residence in Canada.
Funny. I'm noticing a pattern that the sites where I am finding these numbers are all alternative energy sites. Fits in with the typical patterns of hard numbers being hard to dig up in the conventional energy industry.
10:37 PM LINK
Residential kWh/year for Indiana
from a Univ. of Indiana site. Wish they would give their sources for this:
"Residential electricity sales per household in Indiana averaged 13,018 kilowatt-hours in 1999, which was the 20th highest usage level in the nation...At 16,790 kilowatt-hours, Tennessee led the
nation in usage..."
10:33 PM LINK
Boulder, Colorado residential kWh/year
According to this site from the Boulder County Civic Forum (scroll down to middle of page), the average residence usage has been increasing since 1983 from just over 6000 kWh/year to just under 8000 kWh/year. Makes you wonder what the source of the increase is. Computers? Recall this is the average per residence, and therefore has nothing to do with a population growth. I am tempted to say "McMansions." Boulder itself has growth restrictions, but outside the boundary, many of the new houses could well be described by Thorstein Velben's famous phrase.
10:28 PM LINK
Siemens Figures for kWh/year for Los Angeles
This is from a site on earthsafe, a solar energy system that Siemens makes. It is passive, mainly for residential rooftops.
"The earthsafe[tm] systems can meet any power need. The power production of the earthsafe[tm] systems depends on size. A two kilowatt system installed in Los Angeles will produce approximately 11 kilowatt hours per day, which is over 50% of the power required an average household using 20 kilowatt hours per day."
Here we see a figure of 20 kWh/day. This comes out to 7300 kWh/year, which is slightly higher than the other California figure, but in the same ballmark. Dividing 11 kWh/day by 2kW yields 5.5 hours per day of full sunlight exposure, which is about the same as the other California figure for solar exposure. I guess 5 hours of exposure is considered the typical dosage you can receive in California.
10:22 PM LINK
Klickitat PUD Electricity Consumption
utlity figures from Washington state. They are over double the figures reported by the California web site. Perhaps it is due to the electric generation of heat in a colder climate.
"Last year, the average household used 14,418 kilowatt hours of electricity. In 1998 the average residential consumption was 14,059 and in 1997 it was 15,328."
So we have a range of typical figures developing, from 6500 kWh per year upwards to around 15000 kWh/year.
10:17 PM LINK
CO-2 per kilowatt-hour
This EPA site says "1.64 pounds CO2 per kilowatt-hour" is the average per household.
Other "carbon coeffcients":
natural gas: 117 pounds of CO2 per million BTU, or 0.12 pounds per cubic foot of gas.
fuel oil: 161.44 pounds of CO2 per million BTU, or 22.29 pounds per gallon
7:35 PM LINK
Average California Household Electricity Usage
According to the California Solar Energy Industries Association:
"The average household in California uses about 6,500 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year. If your usage is typical of the average household, a system in the 3 to 4 kilowatt (kW) range would be adequate to meet most of your electricity needs.
"A system with a capacity of 1 kW can produce about 1750 kWh per year...Divide your annual electricity usage (in kWh per year) by 1750 kWh to get the system size (capacity in kilowatts) that would meet most of your electricity needs.
Interesting numbers. Diving 365 days by 1750 hours gives 4.8 hours/per day. That must be the average number of harvestable sunlight hours per day in California. But certainly this varies with location. It is not the same in Reading as it in Palm Springs. Vague numbers like this drive me nuts.
6:51 PM LINK
Electricity Puzzle
Using a little arithmetic:
The U.S. power demand averaged 670,000 megawatts in 2001.
Since there are 8760 hours in one year, and there are 1000 kilowatts in one megawatt, it means that the total demand for electricity was 5.9 trillion kilowatt hours.
10:59 AM LINK
U.S. Electricity Production
How to replace coal? Is it possible?
The U.S. government classifies electricity production by two different categories: utility and non-utility. In 1999, the net electricity generated by both categories, in units of billions of kilowatt-hours, was:
Total: 3,691
Utility: 3,174
Nonutility: 517
1 billion kilowatt hours = 1 terawatt hour = 1 trillion watt hours.
You can see that electricity for utility use is the largest component.
What fuel is used in generating this electricity? For 1999, the breakdown was as follows:
coal 51%
nuclear 20%
nat. gas 15%
hydroel. 8%
petroleum 3%
other 2%
A good question is: how much electricity does the U.S. generate each year by burning coal? Just using the 1999 figures as a benchmark, coal accounted for 1.882 billion kilowatt-hours in the two sectors. This is about 6.8 billion megajoules.
Thus, if we are going to replace coal as a fuel completely in the U.S., we should think of ways of coming up with at least 7 billion megajoules (about 6.4 trillion BTU) of energy each year from some other source.
Monday, April 08, 2002
6:15 PM LINK
Oil in Equatorial Guineau
Interesting feature in the Nation by Ken Silverstein. Calling Equatorial Guineau the "Kuwait of Africa" is an enormous exaggeration. Equatorial Guineau probably has no more than 1/100th of Kuwait's reserves. All they have in common is that they are tiny countries surrounded by larger neighbors.
The article estimates a possible ultimate recovery of around a billion barrels. It is expected to eventually produce around 500,000 barrels per day (1/40th of U.S. daily demand).
Under this scenario, EG would experience a very pronounced and short peak in its oil production, probably lasting no more than a decade until everything is gone. The peak production would probably be sustained for no more than a year or two.
You gotta wonder what that oil revenue will do for the country during that decade. I imagine it will bring tremendous prosperity to dozens of people there.
2:02 PM LINK
Newsweek Special Edition: "Beyond Oil"
"When the Wells Go Dry" is a spotlight article on Deffeyes and Hubbert's Peak. Must be cribbing my blog.
Author is Fred Guterl, a senior editor at Discover Magazine.
1:58 PM LINK
Tom Tomorrow's ANWR Proposal
Brilliant.
suggested by Adam.
Sunday, April 07, 2002
11:45 PM LINK
Map of the Power Grids in the U.S.
The Eastern grid is actually called the "Eastern Interconnect", etc. The map is from this Scientific American article on how electricity from different generators is synchronized in the grid. As a physics question, this is non trivial, since AC (alternating current) is produced in cycles, and the currents must be synchronized by having the same phase at the same point in the line.
11:33 PM LINK
Electrical Supply and Demand Fact Sheet
source: U.S. DOE
Electricity is propogated throughout the lower 48 states by three power grids, called the Eastern Grid, the Texas Grid, and the Western Grid. The demand in each of the grids in 2001 was (in units of megawatts):
Eastern grid: 501,405
Texas grid: 53,414
Western grid: 114,830
Total U.S. demand: 669,649 megawatts
I wonder about these figures. I assume they are the
average over the course of the year. Gigawatt (one billion watts) is a unit of power, which is a time rate of energy production (one gigawatt is one billion joules of energy per second).
Thus these figures don't make sense unless they indicate an average. That being so, the fact that the report says nothing about this is so incredibly typical for these statistics. I get the idea that no one is paying attention to the numbers at all.
The generators in the respective grids actually can produce more electricity than is required by demand. In the energy business, this is called the capacity margin. The current nationwide capacity margin is about 15%:
Between 1978 and 1992, America's utilities' capacity margins averaged between 25 and 30 percent. Since
1992, the capacity margins have declined to less than 15 percent nationwide. However, in 2001, the decline
is expected to reverse, as capacity margins reach 15.6 percent nationwide, with planned capacity expected
to grow by 27.1 gigawatts and demand by 15.8 gigawatts.
3:32 PM LINK
Coal to Hydrogen
source: Los Alamos Natl. Lab.
"...a zero emission process for
converting a coal and water slurry into hydrogen,
which is in turn converted to electricity via a
high-temperature solid-oxide fuel cell. Hydrogen
gas is produced from water and coal using a calcium
oxide (CaO) to calcium carbonate (CaCO3)
intermediary reaction. Through a subsequent
reaction, the calcium carbonate generated by
hydrogen production is converted back into
calcium oxide and a pressurized stream of pure
CO2. The calcium oxide is recycled to drive further
hydrogen production, and the CO2 stream is ready
for easy disposal."
3:12 PM LINK
Annual U.S. Coal Production
source U.S. DOE
in millions of short tons
1997: 1,089.9
1998: 1,117.5
1999: 1,100.4
2000: 1,075.5
In other words, unlike crude oil, the U.S. produces slightly more coal than it consumes. Most of the oil goes into generation of electricity. About 50% of the coal in the U.S. is extracted from the Rocky Mountain West. About 40% is extracted from Appalachia. About 10% is extracted from Interior regions.
Here is map of the coal producing regions.
Here's a graph, showing how the West overtook Appalachia in the mid 1990's.
The dominant coal-producing state is Wyoming:
"In 2000, coal production in the Western Region declined for the first time in 16 years, dropping by 2.5 million short tons to 509.9 million short tons, a decrease of only 0.5 percent. Coal production in this region (as well as in the entire United States) was dominated by Wyoming, which accounted for two thirds of the regional production and nearly one third of U.S. production in 2000. Wyoming produced 339.3 million short tons of coal--only 10 percent less than the next three largest coal-producing States combined."
