"Solving technical and marketing problems for companies in the energy and environmental industries."

Half Full or Half Empty In 1982, a friend named Harry with a well-deserved reputation for being a good stock picker recommended selling everything because the stock market, then in the 800s, was bound to collapse to somewhere around 600. This call was a bit off the mark, and the stock market immediately began a long march to 12,000 over the next 17 or so years. Incidentally, 1982 will be remembered at our house as the “Reagan Depression”, where a depression is defined by the sentence, “When your neighbor loses his job, it’s a recession; when you lose your job, it’s a depression.” A few years later, another friend recommended a book with the title “How to survive the upcoming world depression of 1987” or something like that. I bought the book and read it, learning that there was no way to avoid the impending world-wide collapse of the financial system. We were all doomed, and our survival depended on converting all our investments to gold doubloons, to be hidden under the bed next to a year’s supply of canned and dried food. This, too, appears to have been a hysterical prediction that succeeded only in selling books. I assume the author is currently penning “How to survive the upcoming world depression of 2009”; if so, he will probably sell a lot of books, again. In “An inconvenient Truth”, we learn that the earth will heat up, glaciers and icecaps will melt, and the oceans will rise 35 feet, inundating Manhattan, Florida, and most of the Gulf Coast. (I know people who think that losing Manhattan and Florida might be a good thing.) I suspect, however, that mankind will survive this deluge if it should happen. During the Summer I read that the price of oil would go to $500 per barrel. This is from people I judge as having no understanding whatsoever of economics, since we are already seeing massive switches away from oil at prices well below that level, and oil has recently dropped toward $60, at least for the time being. Gasoline consumption in the US has dropped by perhaps a million barrels a day. If the experience of the price rises of the 70s teaches us anything, demand will continue to fall over the next five years as people change habits and buy more efficient vehicles.   The people being hurt the most are those in the developing countries. If they are smart (and many of them are), they will adopt technologies that will allow them to avoid using as much petroleum-derived fuels as we do. The net result is that supply and demand will balance (as they always do) and the price of oil will settle out lower that where it was in this year’s speculation-driven marketplace. So what is the point here? The Chicken Little’s of the world have always gotten a lot of press, but they are not usually correct in their conclusions and fears.   Oh yes - And the glass really is half full.   Top of the page Artificial vs Synthetic When you run down to your local Ace Hardware or Home Depot and buy a bag of Turf Builder, you are getting a fully functional lawn fertilizer that contains ingredients fashioned and blended in a factory, or actually several factories. This material is properly referred to as “synthetic fertilizer.” I say this because something I recently read called it “artificial”, a word meaning that the contents are not fertilizer, that they only look like it.  This is perhaps a subtle distinction, but one that is important enough to understand. A good example of something utterly artificial is what we see in many moving pictures. The artists in the movie industry create artificial worlds, often inhabited by beings unlike any we will ever encounter, as a way to tell stories to entertain us. On movie back lots, they create artificial towns for the action to take place. The towns have no residents, no body lives there. Purely artificial. Often, much of the action could actually take place, but most is artificial. Typical adult viewers usually realize that it is not possible for a 180 lb man to stop a roaring train with his fist.    A good example of synthetics are man-made fibers. Take, for instance, polyester clothing. The yarn here, for instance Dacron, is made of fibers synthesized in a factory and spun into threads. These are real fibers that can be woven into shirts or knitted into pants (remember those?) and can be blended with natural fibers such as cotton and wool. Synthetic fibers are the genuine article, made in a factory rather than grown in a field. How about food? All kinds of synthetic, or at least semi-synthetic, foods are available in your local Krogers or Albertsons. An example is high-fructose corn syrup, a ubiquitous synthetic sweetener, widely used in formulating foods and currently getting a lot of (probably deserved) bad press. It is a very sweet material that can be digested to provide calories to support life. This can be contrasted with aspartame, called an artificial sweetener because it provides no food value. And then there is vanilla flavoring, available in two types, real and artificial; the difference is that the artificial vanilla smells and tastes sort of like the real stuff but it is chemically distinct. More examples? Concrete, made from sand, gravel, Portland cement, and water, is synthetic stone, a fully functional replacement for granite or marble. Closely related are ceramics, made from various clays and heated to a temperature below the melting point to cause the grains to fuse to one another while maintaining their shape. Asphalt roofing shingles are also synthetics, performing the function of wood shingles.  Many synthetic materials provide functions not available in nature. Window glass and anything metallic fit in this category. All of these things are synthetic, made by people to solve problems, or at least perceived problems. To one extent or another, all of them are successful. And only the vanilla should be considered artificial. Top of the page Of Batteries and Patents In Freebie 69, I mentioned the strange situation of an oil company (Chevron) controlling the patents on batteries used in Toyota’s hybrid electric Prius automobiles. This led, I had learned, to warranty limitations that preclude converting these cars to plug-in hybrids, which can be charged either from the wall or from the onboard gasoline engines. An old and trusted friend, now at Chevron, wrote me to say I had some of my facts wrong. To correct this I have spent some time on the web, learning some things and filling in some blanks. First, the most important error I made was to refer to this battery as a Li-ion battery; it is not. It is a NiMH battery (see http://www.ev1.org/chevron.htm). Lithium is the next level of evolution and may be used in Toyotas as early as the 2010 models; “may” is the operative word here. Second, the NiMH battery in the Prius is made in Japan by a company that is apparently jointly held between Panasonic and Toyota. The companies developed the battery technology there. However, they were sued for patent infringement by Cobasys, a company controlled by Chevron, and they lost. Cobasys is a JV between Chevron and Ovonics, the US company that developed the large NiMH batteries used in the late lamented GM EV1. Chevron is a more-than-equal partner in Cobasys, holding some preferred stock as well as half the common. For more information on this arrangement, just Google “Cobasys”.  If you own a Prius, or other Toyota hybrid, you will void your warranty by converting it to a plug-in. There are two apparent explanations for this. The first is the simple one – Cobasys is said to have this in the contract with Toyota and Panasonic; nobody knows because the contract is confidential. The clause is there to make sure people charge the batteries using gasoline rather than via the electric grid. The second explanation is more complex. It says that the heart of Toyota’s technology is not the NiMH battery but centers on the control system and software. This software maintains the charge on the battery at some intermediate level chosen to make the battery last a long, long time. For a Prius sold in the US, the battery warranty is for 100,000 miles; in California the warranty is for 150,000 miles. The explanation says that converting the car to plug-in allows for deep discharge, reducing battery life.  This all makes sense except for one tiny fact: Any Prius sold in Europe or Japan has a switch on the dashboard, labeled “EV”, that allows the engine to be bypassed for all-battery use (see http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/01/hack_your_hybri.php). All the wiring, etc., for this switch is in the wiring harness for every Prius sold in the US, but installing the switch voids the warranty. Why Europe and not the US? Are the batteries there different from those in the US? What about the warranties? Do the Cobasys patents prevail in Japan and Europe? If the answer to any of these latter questions is no, then we go back to explanation one. This is a big and complex topic. To learn more about it, Google terms such as Cobasys or EV-1. You can spend hours trying to sort out the information you will find.  You can also read the book Plug-in Hybrids: The Cars That Will Recharge America by Sherry Boschert,  or rent the movie Who Killed the Electric Car?        Top of the page    Book of the Month Much of life depends on “luck”, a long collection of “being in the right place at the right time” chances. (I have told many people of the extraordinary good luck I have had at many points in my life.) Most of us, however, have not thought through how pervasive this factor of chance is in our lives. Think of winning or losing the lottery. Think of the fellows in the first wave to wade ashore at Normandy in 1944. Or think of Roger Maris, a very good hitter who had everything go right in one season to break Babe Ruth’s 60 home run record, all without benefit of steroid injections. Unlike The Babe, Maris never came close to this number again. It is the case of Maris that really caught my attention in Leonard Mlodinow’s book, The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. The author applies the mathematics of randomness and chance to help us understand Maris’ feat, arguing that it was a longshot but not outside reasonable odds for this to happen. Along the way, Mlodinow shows us where the mathematical laws of chance and randomness came from, what they mean, and as importantly what they don’t mean. Then, in the second half of the book, Mlodinow moves from chance into statistics. This topic is familiar to many technically trained people, but the author does a nice job of explaining it in a way that can be understood by people who do not have a strong math background (or have been away from math too long to remember a lot of it.) He applies the concepts to a lot of problems we see in everyday life, which is a real plus.   Top of the page

 

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