"Solving technical and marketing problems for companies in the energy and environmental industries."
-The Freebie-
Geoff Dolbear’s Freebie Newsletter
- Issue 69 September 2008 -
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The major question surrounding electric cars centers on prices and capacities of batteries. Many advances as have been made in battery technologies, but the devices are still far from perfect. Hybrid vehicles solve some of these problems by complementing the battery with a small engine powered by gasoline or, in some cases, diesel, leaving us with fewer concerns over running out of juice at an inconvenient time or location.
It is possible to retrofit your hybrid car with a connector to charge the battery overnight. This greatly reduces the use of gasoline for those whose trips are mostly short. But, and this is a large but, doing so may void the warranty on the battery. The reason for this that Chevron, which owns the lithium battery technology used in hybrids, appears to have a vested interest in our using gasoline to run our cars.
To overcome the battery problem, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur named Agassis has founded a company called Better Place. This company will be in the business of renting and charging batteries. Since the company will own the battery, the car’s owner no longer has the financial liability for maintenance and replacement. Better Place also has plans to exchange batteries “on the fly” in facilities that will look like gas stations, so the driver will not need to wait around for a couple of hours for the battery to recharge. Electricity for recharging will come from wind and solar, reducing the carbon footprint and all that.
First applications will be in Israel and Denmark, perhaps within the next couple of years. There are rumblings that Hawaii will follow. Better Place is well capitalized ($200 million at last count) and managed by some very bright and successful managers. Cars to use the batteries will be built by Renault and Nissan; success will cause others to follow.
It is not possible for me to make this sound anything but simplistic in a short item here. A longer article describing the people and the company appeared in Wired magazine, and is available on-line at (http://www.wired.com/cars/futuretransport/magazine/16-09/ff_agassi?currentPage=all). For additional information, see the company’s web site (www.betterplace.com).
Timing
High Technology is anything invented after you were born.
Alan Kay
To Drill or not to Drill
Offshore drilling is a major topic for discussion in the current presidential campaign. Both candidates appear to agree that we need strong action now on all sides of the energy front, and the Republicans argue that we need to open up every possible area for drilling today, or maybe yesterday, if civilization as we know it is to survive. Democrats are saying that offshore drilling is probably a good idea but it won’t do much good for 7 or 8 years and, besides, oil companies already have lots of public land leased for drilling and ought to try there first. Both sides are right, of course.
The first thing to understand in this argument is that drilling for oil is what oil companies do. Just as surgeons solve problems using surgery, oil companies solve problems by drilling more wells, at least when the price is right.
Given today’s tight supply situation, it would have been great if oil companies had drilled more holes in the last decade. It can take years to find and evaluate a field, create a development plan, buy or build the necessary equipment, and drill production wells and setup a pipeline network. However, the price of oil 5 years ago did not justify the financial investment, so oil companies did not do a lot of exploration in those days. This can be verified by looking at the “rig count” data for the period. (The rig count is a simple number telling how many oil well drilling rigs were active in the field for any given week.) During the 2002 to 2004 period, the rig count was generally low because oil companies could not justify the cost of drilling new wells when oil prices were in the $40 or so range and they had no faith that the price would rise. This is strange, in retrospect, but I guess it made good sense at the time.
The rig count is high today because oil is over $100/bbl.
Next consider the question of opening new leases offshore in places like California and Florida. Lumped with them is the question of drilling in ANWR, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. All are considered to be excellent prospects, and none are available for environmental reasons. Lots of other areas are available and already under lease to various oil companies. I suspect, without any backup info, that the oil companies are using the current supply crunch as a pry-bar to loosen constrictions on drilling. This is just a hunch, mind you.
I think we all know why these closed areas are closed – it goes back to some egregious messes made by oil companies in the not-so-distant past. Oil companies argue, of course, that they are much more careful nowadays. I humbly suggest that we adopt a tactic used by the Japanese emperor in the old days to ensure this. The emperor did not entirely trust the people ruling various provinces to behave themselves. To ensure good behavior, he required that each local warlord send his first-born son and heir to Tokyo for safekeeping. The implication was that if a provincial ruler misbehaved, the first born would come to an unpleasant fate. Maybe if the CEO of each oil company had to provide a first-born as hostage there would be fewer screw-ups resulting from field people cutting corners in the field. Just a suggestion, you understand.
Book of the Month
The thought or gedanken experiment is a valuable tool used in the sciences to teach us more about a system of interest. It begins with a question, with the answer provided not by specific experiments but by application of results from experiments that we already know about. For instance, we might ask about the conditions under which life might be found on a planet other than earth, either inside or outside the solar system. We would apply information from a system we already know, arguing that temperatures within a relatively narrow range – perhaps 0 to 140ºF – are a necessary condition. There would be an argument about the need for water, but we would probably conclude that the planet must either have water or have had bulk water at some time in the past.
This month’s book follows in that tradition by carrying out a very interesting gedanken experiment to answer the question, “What would happen if all the people on earth were to suddenly disappear?” The results of the experiment, performed by author Alan Weisman, are collected in the book, The World Without Us. He concludes that some changes would take place very fast as critical machinery stops working for one reason or another. Suddenly there would be no electricity, bringing many automatic functions to a halt; subways, for instance, would flood without pumps to expel ground water.
Understanding these changes helps us to see the real impacts that people have on the environment.Some man-made structures would disappear quickly, while others would last much longer. Wood frame buildings would begin to deteriorate from water damage in a few years, while concrete buildings would hold up much longer. Domesticated animals, except perhaps for housecats, would fare poorly as food runs out; cats would continue to live on mice, birds, and the like. “Weeds” would tend to take over the land from the kinds of plants that we purposely set out. Over time, dams would fill with silt and be washed over by rivers, perhaps collapsing. Many fish and birds would rapidly expand their numbers, without people to harvest them for food and sport. For instance, Weisman quotes an estimate that 100 million sharks are killed yearly to provide the key ingredients of shark fin soup.
What would survive the longest? Weisman argues that it would be plastics, which are pervasive throughout the environment and have no natural enemies. I expect that eventually microbes will mutate to be able to digest various synthetics, and perhaps that is already happening.
We know all of these things for a variety of reasons. First is logic and familiarity with the world around us. Second, we can study particular places abandoned by people for reasons of war (Korea’s DMZ is an example), radiation (the area around Chernobyl), or treaty (a vast old-growth forest on the border of Poland and the Ukraine.) We can also compare places where people live to similar nearby places that are uninhabitable because of tides or the rapid encroachment of the jungle, such as in Central America. We can include observations, such as the fact that asphalt roadways that no longer see traffic deteriorate and disappear only a few decades. We can compare today’s observations of familiar locations (Manhattan Island) to early descriptions, knowing that in Manhattan’s case the springs and creeks are kept out of the way by a network of immense pumps that would stop when the electricity shuts off.
Information like this, and much, much more, has been brought together by Weisman in his well written book. He also indulges the question of what happens if mankind continues to increase in numbers and overwhelms the carrying capacity of the environment.
http://www.worldwithoutus.com/
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G.E. Dolbear and Associates, Inc.
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