Techtrend

A new report out last week from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) has doubled estimates of “technically recoverable” oil and gas resources available globally. The report says that shale-based resources potentially increase the world’s total oil supplies by 11 per cent.

Acknowledging fault-lines in its new study, contracted to energy consulting firm Advanced Resources International Inc. (ARI), the EIA said:

“These shale oil and shale gas resource estimates are highly uncertain and will remain so until they are extensively tested with production wells.”

The report estimates shale resources outside the US by extrapolation based on “the geology and resource recovery rates of similar shale formations in the United States.” Hence, the EIA concedes that “the extent to which global technically recoverable shale resources will prove to be economically recoverable is not yet clear.”

Two years ago, following the publication of the EIA April 2011 report a New York Times investigation obtained internal EIA communications showing how senior officials, including industry consultants and federal energy experts privately voiced scepticism about shale gas prospects.

One internal EIA document said oil companies had exaggerated “the appearance of shale gas well profitability” by highlighting performance only from the best wells, and using overly optimistic models for productivity projections over decades. The NYT reported that the EIA often “relies on research from outside consultants with ties to the industry.”

The latest EIA shale gas estimates, contracted to ARI, is no exception. ARI, according to the NYT’s 2011 article, has “major clients in the oil and gas industry” and the company’s president, Vello Kuuskraa, is “a stockholder and board member of Southwestern Energy, an energy company heavily involved in drilling for gas in the Fayetteville shale formation in Arkansas.”

Independent studies published over the last few months cast even more serious doubt over the viability of the shale gas boom.

A report released in March by the Berlin-based Energy Watch Group (EWG), a group of European scientists, undertook a comprehensive assessment of the availability and production rates for global oil and gas production, concluding that:

“… world oil production has not increased anymore but has entered a plateau since about 2005.”

Crude oil production was “already in slight decline since about 2008.” This is consistent with the EWG’s earlier finding that global conventional oil production had peaked in 2006 – as subsequently corroborated by theInternational Energy Agency (IEA) in 2010.

The new report predicts that far from growing inexorably, “light tight oil production in the USA will peak between 2015 and 2017, followed by a steep decline”, while shale gas production will most likely peak in 2015. Shale gas prospects outside the US are incomparable to gains made so far there “since geological, geographical, and industrial conditions are much less favourable.”

Consequently, global gas prices are likely to increase rather than follow the initial US trend. In the meantime, conventional oil production will continue declining, dropping as much as 40 per cent by 2030. The upshot is that the US “will not become a net oil exporter.”

The EGW report follows two other reports published earlier this year also challenging the conventional wisdom.

A Post-Carbon Institute study authored by geologist David Hughes, who worked for 32 years as a research manager at the Geological Survey of Canada, analysed US production data for 65,000 wells from 31 shale plays using a database widely used in industry and government. While acknowledging that shale has dramatically reversed “the long-standing decline of US oil and gas production”, this can only:

“… provide a temporary reprieve from having to deal with the real problems: fossil fuels are finite, and production of new fossil fuel resources tends to be increasingly expensive and environmentally damaging.”

Despite accounting for nearly 40 per cent of US natural gas production, shale gas production has “been on a plateau since December 2011 – 80 per cent of shale gas production comes from five plays”, some of which are already in decline.

“The very high decline rates of shale gas wells require continuous inputs of capital – estimated at $42 billion per year to drill more than 7,000 wells – in order to maintain production. In comparison, the value of shale gas produced in 2012 was just $32.5 billion.”

The report thus concludes:

“Notwithstanding the fact that in theory some of these resources have very large in situ volumes, the likely rate at which they can be converted to supply and their cost of acquisition will not allow them to quell higher energy costs and potential supply shortfalls.”

Report author Hughes said that the main problem was the exclusion of price and rate of supply: “Price is critically important but not considered in these estimates.” He added: “Only a small portion [of total estimated resources], likely less than 5-10 per cent will be recoverable at a low price…

“Shale gas can continue to grow but only at higher prices and that growth will require an ever escalating drilling treadmill with associated collateral financial and environmental costs – and its long term sustainability is highly questionable.”

Another report was put out by the Energy Policy Forum, and authored by former Wall Street analyst Deborah Rogers – now an adviser to the US Department of the Interior’s Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. Rogers warns that the interplay of geological constraints and financial exuberance are creating an unsustainable bubble. Her report shows that shale oil and gas reserves have been:

“… overestimated by a minimum of 100% and by as much as 400-500% by operators according to actual well production data filed in various states… Shale oil wells are following the same steep decline rates and poor recovery efficiency observed in shale gas wells.”

Deliberate overproduction drove gas prices down so that Wall Street could maximise profits “from mergers & acquisitions and other transactional fees”, as well as from share prices. Meanwhile, the industry must still service high levels of debt due to excessive borrowing justified by overinflated projections:

“… leases were bundled and flipped on unproved shale fields in much the same way as mortgage-backed securities had been bundled and sold on questionable underlying mortgage assets prior to the economic downturn of 2007.”

Seeking to prevent outright collapse, the report argues, the US is ramping up gas exports so it can exploit the difference between low domestic and high international prices “to shore up ailing balance sheets invested in shale assets.”

Rogers, who testified last month before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, also expressed scepticism about the EIA’s latest assessment:

“The EIA actually does retrospective assessments of their forecasting and their track record is dismal… They admit that they overestimated natural gas production 66 per cent of the time and crude 59.6 per cent of the time in their March 2013 assessment for 2012.”

She added that “there is definitely a bubble.” Though it would not have an impact as devastating as the banking crisis, she said:

“The oil majors do have losses, but the smaller independents are being shaken out. Chesapeake and others are struggling, like Devon, Continental, Kodiak and Range. Without exception, they all have had a significant deterioration in negative free cash since 2010. This is obviously not sustainable.”

The impact of this would be greater centralisation, with smaller companies and their assets being absorbed by the oil majors through mergers and acquisitions. Rogers said:

“What is most troubling to me is that there appears to be a complacency setting in about transitioning to a more sustainable energy economy. Shales should be used as a bridge. But we are hearing far too much euphoric talk about 100-200 years of natural gas. Therefore no need to worry, it can be business as usual. This is highly problematic in my opinion. We must globally transition away from hydrocarbons.”

http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-06-25/shale-gas-won-t-stop-peak-oil-but-could-create-an-economic-crisis

Bosch schematic for hydraulic hybrid shows pressure accumulator running down center of vehicle.

BOXBERG, Germany – Hydraulic pressure, already key to steering, braking and lifting hoods and tailgates in modern vehicles, also can be effective and efficient in driving the wheels, as proved by a new concept from Robert Bosch and PSA Peugeot Citroen.

The German supplier and French auto maker are working on what is considered to be the world’s first hydraulic hybrid powertrain for passenger cars.

A pressure accumulator filled with nitrogen – and placed underbody in the tunnel between the front seats in a concept on display here at Bosch’s test track – stores braking energy that normally would be wasted, and a hydraulic motor then converts it into propulsion.

The system is designed to provide a boost effect similar to that offered by complex electric drives. Compatible with gasoline and diesel engines and well-suited for compact cars, Bosch says the hydraulic hybrid can reduce fuel consumption in normal driving conditions 30% and in city driving 45%, based on the European test cycle.

No additional battery pack is required, and the system’s overall weight is under 220 lbs. (100 kg). The fuel-economy gain is based on computer modeling, and physical prototypes already are on the road, says Rolf Bulander, president-Bosch gasoline systems division, at last week’s international press conference here, where the concept was unveiled.

For short journeys, Bosch says the vehicle can run exclusively on hydraulically generated power, enabling zero-emissions driving while the internal-combustion engine remains inactive.

For longer trips or when driving at higher speeds, accelerative force comes from the engine, which occasionally gets additional boost from energy stored in the hydraulic accumulator.

The nitrogen-gas cushion within the accumulator compresses kinetic energy from braking, much like a coiled spring. Once the pressure within the accumulator is relieved, the system works in reverse, Bosch says.

The gas expands once more, providing a compressive force on the hydraulic fluid and driving a hydraulic motor. The motor delivers the stored energy back to the vehicle via the transmission. The boost effect occurs when the combustion engine is running and the hydraulic accumulator is discharging at the same time.

Bulander describes the hydraulic-mechanical system as a low-cost, robust and easy-to-service hybrid powertrain that requires no specialized infrastructure and gives the driver loads of torque.

He admits the pressure accumulator has less capacity and range than lithium-ion batteries found in electric cars, and the benefit is less dramatic on long-distance trips. But he says this new concept recharges more quickly and can use extra energy created by the combustion engine more efficiently.

“It can drive short distances completely emissions-free, and its boost effect adds to driving enjoyment,” Bulander says. “Moreover, there are no worries about range.”

City conditions, with a lot of stops and starts, are ideal for the system because decelerating for a mere 328 ft. (100 m) can provide full storage of kinetic energy in the pressure accumulator. “So the next time you accelerate, you can easily benefit from that,” he says.

The hydraulic accumulator allows engine downsizing. Bulander says the system could mate well with a turbocharged engine as small as 1.4L.

Bosch says the system also could work well for light delivery trucks in urban settings.

Bulander says the system remains under development and that PSA has set a 2016 target date for production.

A cutaway of a Peugeot compact cross/utility vehicle was on display with the hydraulic hybrid here at the Bosch event. Bulander says he expects a version will be available for driving at the supplier’s next international press conference two years from now.

The relationship between Bosch and PSA is not exclusive, and Bulander says the parties are free to shop the technology to other customers.

It’s too early to discuss system cost, but he says the goal is to make it less expensive than hybrid-electric powertrains.

Bosch and PSA set up an engineering alliance in 2008 and in 2011 launched the 3008 Hybrid4, the world’s first series-produced diesel hybrid passenger vehicle with axle-split drive.

Another Bosch powertrain development unveiled here is the eClutch, an electrically operated clutch that shifts into neutral when the driver is not accelerating.

In addition to improving fuel economy 5%, Bosch says the eClutch will make driving with manual transmissions more convenient. In traffic jams, drivers can start off in first and second gears without using the clutch.

http://wardsauto.com/suppliers/bosch-touts-hydraulic-hybrid-concept?NL=WAW-04&Issue=WAW-04_20130626_WAW-04_592&YM_RID=sbchoi_1999@yahoo.com&YM_MID=1404557&sfvc4enews=42

베터 플레이스 파산보호 신청

베터 플레이스가 파산보호를 신청했다. 베터 플레이스는 최근 이스라엘의 LDC(Lod District Court)에 파산보호를 신청했고 잠정적으로 영업을 중지하겠다고 밝혔다. 작년부터 적자폭이 커졌기 때문에 더 이상의 영업은 힘들다는 입장이다.

베터플레이스는 배터리 교체 스테이션이라는 참신한 아이디어로 주목을 받았다. 르노-닛산과 파트너십을 체결해 전기차를 위한 인프라를 공급하기도 했다. 2007년 설립된 베터 플레이스는 4년 동안 7억 5천만 달러를 지원받았고, 작년 8월에는 EIB로부터 4,000만 유로를 추가로 지원받았다. 하지만 작년 10월에 창업자인 샤이 아가시가 나가면서 경영이 급격히 어려워졌다.

http://www.global-autonews.com/board/view.php3?table=bd_010&gubun=1&idx=36184

One of 57,900 solar powered plants in Spain. Photo:Shutterstock. Reproduced at Resilience.org with permission.

“We had a lot of hopes and now we’re more skeptical.”

That’s how Pedro Prieto, a 62-year-old global telecom engineer and solar entrepreneur, sums up Spain’s famous solar revolution.

Spain’s renewable dream, of course, began as sunny-multi-billion-dollar boom. Quasi-religious images of fields of photovoltaics and radiant concentrated solar towers wowed North American greens. (Concentrated solar uses 624 mirrors to focus radiation to a receiver that heats steam to drive a turbine.)

But the revolution rapidly collapsed into a messy economic bust that has left more questions than answers. Moreover, Prieto and his Spanish compatriots are still counting the unpredictable casualties of the nation’s stalled energy transition.

Now the engineer is no stranger to solar power. As a telecom engineer he has worked with photovoltaic panels in remote locations since the 1970s. Nor is he a cheerleader for fossil fuels. As the co-founder of the Spanish Association for the Study of Energy Resources, Prieto has long advocated abandoning oil before its volatile pricing and pollution leave the globe in financial and atmospheric chaos.

Since 2004 he has designed, consulted and helped to build more than 30 megawatts (MW) of solar photovoltaic (PV) plants. He even manages, operates and partially owns a PV plant that spills one megawatt of juice (enough to power up to 1,000 homes) onto the national electrical grid in the province of Extremadura.

Given his vast technical experience Prieto also consults with governments around the world on solar renewable prospects. And he has also teamed up with ecologist Charles Hall to produce a provocative book: Spain’s Photovoltaic Revolution: The Energy Return on Investment.

These days Prieto ends his presentations, more often than not, by asking to his audience to “pray for alternatives to nuclear.”

Prieto is also the sort of guy that practically beams out inconvenient statistics. In 2007 installed solar power amounted to .0006 of the world’s electrical consumption and did not keep pace with the growth of electric consumption.

Or as Prieto put it in 2008: “The Energy Consumption Chariot goes over 200 times faster than the Solar Power horses.”

Spain, of course, has gained some fame and notoriety as a global solar pioneer. One-tenth in 2009 and one-fifteenth of the world’s installed solar power modules now dot the Spanish countryside. But these expansive operationsprovide but 4.3 per cent of Spain’s electricity.

The sun’s sheer abundance has always made it the world’s most popular renewable form of energy. Of all green alternatives solar energy is the only one whose potential harvest far outstrips the demand for fossil fuels. Enough radiation hits the earth every hour to meet all of the world’s electrical needs for a year. By some very optimistic estimates the rapidly growing solar industry could account for 10 per cent of the world’s electrical production by 2020.

Sunny climes

Spain, of course, gets more irradiation than any other European country. The nation’s sunny plains and deserts absorb about 1,500 terawatt hours of solar energy every year. That represents at least three times more power than what Spain’s 46 million citizens actually consume. (A terawatt hour by the way represents enough energy to operate one billion washing machines.)

But achieving that goal might come with some staggering financial costs, significant land disturbance as well as disappointing energy returns. Prieto has even come to view solar power in its current big industrial mindset as just “another extension of fossil fuels.”

And he’s not short of examples. The sun is renewable but photovoltaics are not. Just to make the silicon used to trap the sun’s rays on manufactured wafers requires the melting of silica rock at 3,000 Fahrenheit (1,649 Celsius). And the electricity of coal-fired plants or ultrapurified hydrogen obtained from fossil sources provide the heat to do that. It also takes a fantastic amount of oil to make concrete, glass and steel for solar modules.

But Spain’s interest in renewables is no mystery. Not only does the world’s 14th economic power rely on fossil fuels more than any other European nation (consumption has doubled in the last decade), but it suffers from a 90 per cent dependency on foreign imports.

This energy servitude combined with the nation’s concerns about climate change spurred an unusual revolution in 2004. That’s when the government offered generous subsidies or premium tariffs for solar and wind-made electricity added to the national grid. The initiative guaranteed 25-year-long profitable returns of at about 20 per cent for solar entrepreneurs. The government also came up with an inviting mantra, “The Sun Moves Us.”

Solar boom

Within short order farmers signed over orchards and plots of land for solar PV farms. Next came concentrated solar tower installations. Unlike Germany’s solar revolution, which planted thousands of modules on rooftops, Spain focused its solar growth on installed ground facilities. They are, says Prieto, much more efficient and easy to maintain.

In response to the subsidies factories making silicon wafers and/or assembling modules popped up like orange trees across the nation. Sensing a financial killing, global banks and pension funds poured money into Spain’s solar boom the same way they funded financial derivatives or the shale gas revolution in North America.

By 2008 Spain’s solar explosion eagerly swallowed half of the globe’s photovoltaic module production. Facing module shortages the country even started to import products from Germany, the U.S. and China.

This unexpected development undermined the goal of growing a renewable Spanish industry, says Prieto. (At one point China-based Suntech, the world’s largest solar panel manufacturer, sold 40 per cent of its product to Spain. Last month Suntech declared bankruptcy.)

Meanwhile, the boom surpassed every government electrical target says Prieto. The government set an initial goal of creating 400 MW of power from solar power by 2010. But industry surpassed that goal in 2006-7. “Banks and investment funds treated solar like a financial product. These were the days of wine and roses.”

But by 2008 the excesses of the boom became readily apparent. For starters, the government realized that it could no longer subsidize renewables for 25 years to the tune of 2.5 billion Euros a year.

And so it issued new royal decrees cutting promised returns from 46 cents a KW hour to 32 cents for investors. Later decrees forced more reductions putting brakes on the entire solar module industry.

“There have been 15 royal decrees on renewables since 2004,” explains Prieto. “Each one tries to fix the unanticipated problems of the last one. Each one is worst than the last. But each decree makes renewables less credible.” A raft of lawsuits has predictably clogged the courts.

The crash

An industry poised for a massive build-up based on guaranteed returns, explains Prieto, then laid off workers as a debt-heavy government cancelled or lowered promised financial returns from the sun. The solar PV sector now estimates that 44,000 of the nation’s 57,900 installations are on the verge of bankruptcy.

During the solar “craziness” as Prieto calls it, other problems emerged too. Investors often planted installations of poor quality and design across the landscape. Many facilities weren’t even located in the sunniest parts of Spain.

Spain’s renewable boom (wind installations now make up 17 per cent of Spain’s electricity supply with peaks covering up to 56 per cent) also created havoc with the nation’s energy balance. Government investment in natural gas fired plants (a backup for intermittent wind) combined with renewables resulted in overcapacity in the system. Even the nation’s nuclear power plants had to power down from 7.7 to 6.7 gigawatts for a while.

“The energy industry is much more complicated and integrated than anyone thought. The left side of Spain’s energy planning brain didn’t know what the right side was doing.”

But what troubled Prieto most were the paltry energy returns of some 57,900 solar plants, both big and small. He reviewed Spain’s excellent data on the energy outputs of the nation’s solar network and than compared those findings to actual energy inputs. To his dismay Prieto found that solar offered only slightly better returns than biofuels. Or 2.4 to one.

“That is not enough to maintain society as it is today.”

His finding surprised many researchers and for good reason. Previous studies put solar returns as high as eight or even up to 30 to one in some cases, or almost on par with conventional oil.

But most of this research used the same sort of best-case scenario modelling typically employed by car industry mileage studies. As long as the roads are flat, the fuel is good, the tires full and the driver competent, then great mileage can be achieved.

But real life experience can be different for car mileage as well as the energy output for solar installations.

Solar power, fossil fuel inputs

Spain discovered, for example, that the earth is rarely flat (a big issue for tracking and directing solar rays in the right direction). Moreover the modules (only 15 per cent efficient on average) rarely perform as expected. Not only do the panels require regular maintenance but constant cleaning to remove films of dust. And they only last 25 years.

But Prieto added together another 24 factors illustrating the industry’s profound dependence on fossil fuels. They included road maintenance, rights of ways, module theft, intermittent loads, as well as the cost of natural gas fired back-up stations. In the end he concluded that the solar industry “eats and spends considerable energy.”

Moreover countries such as Germany which receive but two-thirds of Spain’s sunlight in the best case and on average deploy much less inefficient rooftop arrays will probably have returns one-fifth to one-third lower than Spain.

“Solar installations are dependent on a fossil fuel world and there are difficulties scaling up the power of the sun,” says Prieto.

And what does Prieto think of big plans to industrialize the deserts of the U.S. southwest to provide power for the east? Or plans to colonize the Sahara desert of North Africa for European delights?

Not much, he replies sadly. The engineer calculates that just one plan proposed by former French prime inister Nicolas Sarkozy was so big that it was obsolete before it harvested one solar ray. The plan would have covered 400 sq. km of land and burned three to six million tons of coal to erect 1.8 to 3.6 million tons of steel and two to four million tons of glass. Vast amounts of clean water and lakes of desalinated water would have been needed to maintain the plants. Yet the plan would have generated only three per cent of the electricity that nations of the Mediterranean basin now consume. Such a scheme would exchange the political insecurity of oil and gas pipelines with high voltage cable lines.

“It would be far more rational to strive for a world with far lower levels of more localized demand and widely distributed, small and local generation and distribution networks where possible,” the engineer concluded in a recent editorial.

Nations as solar plantations

Big Solar would also turn poor countries like Morocco into virtual solar plantations or colonies that feed electrical power to wealthy at a project cost of $60-billion. (Another unrealistic forecast suggests that industrial solar plants in the Sahara could produce enough energy for 100 million homes for half a trillion dollars by 2050. Prieto says this plan, dubbed Desertec would be lucky to achieve 30 per cent of Europe’s electrical needs.)

But the big issue for solar is simply scaling up the enterprise to capture enough of the sun’s rays to retire just a fraction of fossil fuels. Prieto calculates, for example, that to replace all electricity made by nuclear and fossil fuels in Spain would take a solar module complex covering 6,000 sq. km of the country at the cost the entire Spanish budget (1.2 billion Euros in 2007). It would also require the equivalent of 300 billion car batteries to store the energy for night-time use.

Prieto is not alone in reaching such sobering conclusions. A 2013 Stanford University report, for example, calculated that global photovoltaic industry now requires more electricity to make silicon wafers and solar troughs than it actually produces in return. Since 2000 the industry consumed 75 per cent more energy than it put onto the grid and all during its manufacturing and installation process.

Moreover it won’t pay off this energy debt or energy consumed in its construction until 2016. As a consequence, ramping up of industrial solar production produces more greenhouse gases than it saves for nearly a decade. The study also recommended that reducing the fossil fuel inputs for a next generation of photovoltaic systems be a key priority.

“We have to leave oil before it leaves us,” says Prieto paraphrasing the famous Fatih Birol quote, “and it is not good for nature or the planet.”

Back to the village

“In my opinion we can use solar PV energy, as far as it is available and we can afford it for specific applications,” says Prieto. But he now views solar PV systems as “non-renewable energy systems that can only capture a portion of the renewable energies temporarily.”

Moreover there is no way solar power can sustain “our present wasteful way of living.”

In Spain where nearly a quarter of the workforce sits idle and political unrest smolders in the cities, there is much talk about “La vida buena” or what the French call “decroissance” or degrowth.

The grassroots movement is all about living better by consuming less and sharing more. Prieto suspects the future may be determined more by behavior change than by investments in renewables.

“In general terms, I would suggest we make every possible effort to move towards a lower consumption and lower mobility society,” sums up the 62-year-old.

“We need to deurbanize and localize as much as it is possible, and to return to the countryside, as much as it is possible, and to use more animal draft force.”

When asked for advice on what other nations should do, Prieto thoughtfully pauses.

“It is difficult to give advice.”

http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-05-03/solar-dreams-spanish-realities

폭스바겐이 제 34회 인터내셔널 비엔나 모터 심포지움에서 새 파워트레인 계획을 발표했다. 이번 발표에 따르면 폭스바겐은 새 10단 DSG와 고성능 디젤을 개발 중이다. 고성능 디젤의 리터당 출력은 134마력이 될 것으로 알려졌다.

자세한 제원은 공개되지 않았지만 새 파워트레인은 아우디의 새 수퍼카에 탑재될 가능성이 높다. 아우디는 스콜피온이라는 프로젝트로 F10을 개발하고 있다. R10의 경우 3.7리터 디젤이 올라가며 종합 출력은 700마력에 육박할 것으로 알려졌다. 새 V6 디젤의 적용되는 고압 분사 시스템의 압력은 3,000바에 달한다.