Sustainable Power Technologies and Infrastructure: Energy Sustainability and Prosperity in a Time of Climate Change

possible.

Chapter 1

Energy and Civilization

In Chapter 1, the sources and utilization of energy are put in perspective with emphasis on several events in history that either have shaped our current energy infrastructure or reveal what is possible. The Standard oil monopoly provides a good example of how powerful energy industries can become. World War II provides an example of what can be achieved in the way of advances in technology when such advances become a national priority. More recently, Tesla Motors marketing and oil fracking technology are providing stability and options in the energy sector in ways that were not predictable 10 years earlier.

Keywords

oil; fracking; nuclear; batteries; technology

Contents

Energy in Today’s World 2

Gasoline from Coal Technology 3

Sustainable Nuclear Energy 5

The Critical Path 6

Sources of Energy 7

Nature’s Methods of Storing Energy 8

Man’s Interaction with Nature’s Stockpiles and Renewable Energies 11

Industrial Revolution and Establishment of Energy Empires 13

Standard Oil Monopoly 13

Innovation in a World of Corporate Giants 15

The Oil Economy Through 2009 17

Energy Sources 21

Oil Fracking and Horizontal Drilling 22

Coordinated Strategic Approaches 24

Nuclear Power 25

Tesla 27

References 28

The remarkable improvement in the standard of living in the United States during the twentieth century is unprecedented in world history. Travel that once took months can now occur in hours. Viruses that had the capability of genocide have all but been eradicated.

These advances are attributed to technology. Technology has proved to be decisive in winning wars, and good technology choices have determined the fate of countries and empires.

Technology is not science; it is the way that science is used to make those things we use such as automobiles, refrigerators, and computers. Science education begins as part of the K-12 education made available to all in the United States. Technology is usually covered in engineering and medical-related education programs. The average person receives an education on technology through conversations with friends and through articles written by journalists who are not educated on technology.

The average person is not well informed to provide informed influence on how nations should proceed to use and develop new technology. While it is not within the capabilities of a single book to provide a complete education on technology, a book is capable of presenting more complete descriptions of the advantages and of specific technologies such as the energy-related topics presented in this book.

A first step to providing more complete descriptions of energy technologies is to identify the source of energy and how all the forms of energy at our disposal share a common origin. We simply tap into energy sources at different stages of its passage through time.

Energy in Today’s World

Sunlight is yesterday’s atomic energy. The energy stored in wood and vegetable oils was yesterday’s sunlight. Yesterday’s wood and vegetable oils are today’s coal and crude oil. Yesterday’s coal and crude oil are today’s natural gas. A description of these natural energy stockpiles and their history sets the tone for subsequent discussion on technology using these energy reserves.

Nature used time to transform the sunlight to wood, oil, coal, petroleum, and natural gas. Today, man can transform these reserves in a matter of hours. Relatively simple processes for converting petroleum into gasoline have evolved into technologies that allow coal to be chemically taken apart and put back together at the molecular level. Fuel cells can convert chemical energy directly to electricity without combustion.

To understand the advantages and disadvantages of nature’s various energy reserves requires an understanding of engines and power cycles. Studying the text on gasoline engines shows in a matter of minutes how these machines work. Likewise, processes for converting coal into electricity that took a couple centuries to develop can now be quickly explained.

At the start of the twentieth century, suitable liquid fuels were rare, and the proper match of a fuel with an engine was an art. Today, we can move vehicles or produce electricity from energy originating in petroleum, coal, natural gas, wood, corn, trash, sunlight, geothermal heat, wind, or atomic energy. Each of these can be used in different ways. Natural gas, for example, can be used directly in spark-ignition engines, converted to gasoline fuel, converted to diesel fuel, converted to hydrogen fuel, or used as fuel to produce electricity.

Today’s world is one where technology can do much more than what might be cost-effective or sustainable. For example, it is possible to use an atomic accelerator to convert cheap metals into gold, and it is possible to separate from sea water many valuable metals including gold and uranium. These technologies are simply not cost-effective either from a dollar or energy input perspective.

So, which technologies are the right technologies to use today to provide us and our children the best possible futures?

The process for unlocking the potential of technology starts with asking the right questions. Both history and science are part of the story we tell.

Gasoline from Coal Technology

In 1940, Germany was converting coal into high-quality diesel and jet fuel, and they were able to sustain this industry (aside from allied bombing) using coal that was considerably more expensive to mine than the vast, rich reserves of today’s Wyoming coal. Wyoming has vast supplies of coal in 40-foot thick seams just less than 100 feet below the surface—it can literally be harvested and loaded into trucks for a few dollars a ton.

Synthetic fuel production, as an alternative to crude oil that was not available, was sustainable in Germany in 1940. Why is it not sustainable today with cheaper coal, 60 years of scientific and technological advances, and pipeline distribution that does not rely on costly petroleum tanker shipment from the middle east? Originally, the German synthetic fuel process was designed to produce refinery feedstock. Can the synthetic fuel industry compete today by producing a fuel that can be directly used in engines? If the refinery could be bypassed, the cost advantages of synthetic fuels might advance it over petroleum alternatives but not at the low price of petroleum in January 2015.

South African synthetic fuel (the German Fischer–Tropsch process) facilities were able to sustain production of synthetic oil from coal in competition with world crude oil prices at $10 per barrel in the late 1990s. Canadian syncrude (synthetic crude oil) facilities are reported to be producing petroleum from oil sands at $10–$12 per barrel. The oil sand reserves are estimated to be about the same size as world reserves of petroleum. Today, Canadian oil sands are used instead of imported oil—the technology is sustainable and profitable.

Why have South Africa and Canada been able to incubate these industries during the past few decades while the United States failed and, today, remains without a significant synthetic fuel industry to replace crude oil imports that exceed $200 billion per year? Lack of competitive technology is not at fault.

Repeatedly, US voters have given the mandate to foster cost-competitive alternatives to imported petroleum. Do US policies foster the development of replacements for petroleum, or do US policies lock in competitive advantages for petroleum over alternatives? When you get past the hype of fuel cells, ethanol, and biodiesel, a comparison of US tax policies on imported crude oil relative to domestic fuel production reveals practices that favor crude oil imports. These and similar policies are the economic killers of a technology that might eliminate the need to import fuels and would create quality US jobs.

When considering alternative fuels understand that the liquid fuel distribution infrastructure and the refineries are controlled by corporations with vested interests in gasoline and diesel fuel. With this and other barriers to commercialization in the United States, the most likely options to succeed are those that do not rely on new fuels and distribution infrastructure. The two options are electrical power and natural gas, and of these, natural gas imports have recently been significantly reduced by production of natural gas from domestic shale oil deposits.

Natural gas provides limited advantage over petroleum, but recently the price of natural gas per unit of energy has become competitive with gasoline. Electrical power provides a domestic alternative that does not rely on a new fuel distribution infrastructure—a reliance on diverse indigenous energy supplies creates stability in prices and reliability in supply. Electricity is the one option that can substantially replace petroleum as the transportation fuel. Of the options to produce electrical power, nuclear stands out due to its abundance and its fuel supply provides electrical power without the generation of greenhouse gases.

The utility of electrical power is extended to automobiles with plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs). PHEVs can use electrical power to replace all imported oil without producing air pollution. Use of PHEVs could reach cost parity with conventional gasoline vehicles in a matter of months if development and production of the technology was made a national priority. In a decade of evolution, the average consumer could save $1,000–$2,000 over the life of a vehicle using these technologies rather than the conventional gasoline engines.

Having missed the entry positions on technologies like Fischer–Tropsch fuels and Canadian tar sands is PHEV technology an opportunity? If PHEV technology is the right opportunity at the right time, is it also the last real opportunity before other nations challenge the economic might of the United States?

What about nuclear energy and nuclear waste? Can the fission products in spent nuclear fuel be separated from the bulk of the waste—the bulk being mostly uranium that when recovered can be valuable as fuel?

Sustainable Nuclear Energy

Figure 1.1 summarizes the legacy of 30 years of nuclear power production in the United States. While much attention has been paid to the radioactive spent fuel generated by commercial nuclear power, the fact is that 30 years of fission products from all the US facilities would occupy a volume less than the size of a small house. On the other hand, the inventory of stockpiled fissionable material in the form of spent fuel and depleted uranium could continue to supply 18% of the electrical power to the United States for the next 350 years without additional mining and while reducing any waste or hazard. This fuel inventory is a valuable resource and represents material that has already been mined, processed, and stored in the United States.

Figure 1.1 The legacy of 30 years of commercial nuclear power in the United States including 30 years of fission products that are of little value and sufficient stockpiled fissionable fuel to continue to produce electrical power at the same rate for another 4350 years.

Reprocessing spent nuclear fuel emerges as the key to sustainable, abundant, and cheap electricity. Reprocessing is removing the small fraction; that is, "the fission products" from spent nuclear fuel … recovering the bulk that is potentially valuable nuclear fuel. The removal of the fission products is easier (its chemistry) than mechanically concentrating the fissionable U-235 isotope (isotope enrichment), used to convert natural uranium into reactor fuel grade uranium. The energy inventory illustrated in Figure 1.1 is available with chemical reprocessing of the spent nuclear fuel. Generation IV nuclear reactors should be developed to use the whole ton of natural uranium. These technologies can actually use the nuclear waste generated by the existing fleet of commercial nuclear reactors. This electrical power would be generated producing little to no greenhouse gases while eliminating the spent fuel stored at the nuclear power plant facilities. About 3.4% of spent fuel is fission products. Less than 0.5% of the fission products require long-term radioactive storage or