talking too much about things i know nothing about, or, preaching mostly to the converted (part one)

I've been singing again. Just a little. I have to turn up the accompaniment to very loud so that people can't hear me over it. Then I can do it. I haven't been singing any of the good training music, though - I've been singing anime theme songs. *@_@*;; (kathrynt, please don't kill me. ^_^;;)

(I have corrected the romanji a couple of places on this lyric sheet I pulled off the net, too. I need to learn hiragana properly so that I don't have to deal with ambiguous constructs anymore. :-p)

In HAS EVERYONE GONE COMPLETELY INSANE?! news, I just need to say thank you, MSNBC and Reuters! Please, continue feeding us the spew of Oil Industry Publicity Spokesman's furious masturbation as news! That's linked to by a story noting record (unadjusted) gasoline prices at the pump, of course. (Somewhere around $3/g national average is the record, adjusted for inflation.) It also links to a story from last month talking about how we can expect gasoline prices to fall in July and August, which was inexplicable even at the time, and, as is now clear, isn't coming true.

Here's the thing: just looking at the markets, OPEC appears to be producing pretty much at capacity. They raised quotas and crude stockpiles responded by falling, not rising. Hell, Saudi Arabia has even said it's no longer capable of acting as a swing producer. (And then later contradicted themselves in a way nobody should believe, saying they have infinite oil for the foreseeable future.) More recently - and this is surprising - refineries appear to be processing ahead of production. (That big jump in processed reserves last month was paralleled by a fall in crude stockpiles, indicating that the refining rate was eating into stock.) The latest crude stockpile numbers out last week was not encouraging.

A - perhaps the - key guiding principle of OPEC production has been, "How high can we keep prices without spurring conservation efforts or alternative energy research?" In other words, how to maximise profit in a market while maintaining that market. Oil is now above that price level, and has been staying above that price level, as has been demonstrated by interest in alternatives amoungst people other than environmentalists. Historically, that has not been something Saudi Arabia has been willing to tolerate; quotas or no, they open the spigot enough more to bring prices down. But this time, so far, they haven't.

Results of this can be seen in Canada. The Canadian oil sands - mostly in Alberta - have a lot of oil, but it costs about three times as much energy to extract as more traditional sources and it only makes sense to do so at around US$80/barrel. (One gallon of oil yields 10 in Saudi Araba; one gallon yields three to four, in oil sands.) Crude is currently trading in a range around $60/barrel, but development firms are down here in the American PNW hiring as many people as they can get - skilled craftspersons in particular - to ramp up Alberta production as quickly and as much as possible. It's a big project that I know too little about, but when they're having labour shortages trying to implement their plans, particularly in skilled labour, you know it's large.

What does that all say? It says get ready for and used to a trading range of $80/barrel oil - or higher, if you get inflation or a further fall in the dollar - fairly soon. Major investors are banking on this; you should be too. If you have an SUV, sell the fucking thing. If you have a choice between a larger house further away from Stuff You Need (tm), and a smaller house closer to Stuff You Need (tm), maybe you should buy the smaller, but more convenient, house. Be happy that China has managed to scale back its economic growth a bit - as intended - which will help slack off the growth rate of demand. Hope that, as one analyst put it at a seminar last year, China will get old before it gets too rich. (Growth in China and India both will increase demand for oil, which will raise prices, which will retard economic growth proportionately to your country's oil dependency. China's attempt to buy an oil company isn't speculation; they want to own crude reserves. They're banking on needing them.)

The moral of the story is that we are done with cheap oil. Expensive oil is not the end of the world; unlike my favourite architecture crank has been railing, we won't be grinding out a subsistence farming economy, raiding old strip malls for antique aluminium signs to roof our ramshackle shanties. The economy will adjust, as it has while crude prices have tripled since 1999.

But people whose lifestyles are banking on cheap oil, are depending upon cheap oil, are in for various degrees of trouble. (To some degree, that includes "everyone in America." But even here, there's a range.) If you're one of these people, please: look at what you're doing, and start doing something else.

It's not an accident that I can walk to two separate downtowns in 15 to 20 minutes. (Kenmore, .75 miles; Lake Forest Park, 1 mile.) It's not an accident that I'm an eight minute walk from transit and bike corridors. It's not random that, for most things, I don't need a car.

I have a car. About twice a week, I drive it somewhere. But I don't have to have it. For me, the car is a tool; it's not life support. If you're making living decisions in the next couple of years, it might be worth keeping that kind of goal in mind for yourself, too.

Token Tuesday: 0.2
Miles Wednesday: 12 (Biked to McLendon's, in Woodinville)
Miles out of Hobbiton: 274.95
Miles to Rivendell: 182.35

talking too much about things i know nothing about, or, preaching mostly to the converted (part two)

This was originally going to be part of my previous post, but I decided that one should stand alone as a single topic. Maybe this can be a series.

HAS EVERYONE GONE COMPLETELY INSANE?!

I heard a guest commentator on NPR this morning waxing ecstatic about how the hydrogen economy will usher in a new industrial revolution. Would someone please tell me how?

I mean, sure: it's great for portable devices, and that's really, genuinely exciting to me. Also, it's clean. It's quiet. I'm pro-hydrogen as a technology. But it's not an energy source, and its energy density is 1/4 that of gasoline and similar products even when stored at 10,000 PSI, which is a lot. (Alternatively, you can get better density by storing it in supercooled liquid form, but that has its own problems, not the least of which being that you need to use it to maintain it, and enough to give a vehicle decent range is going to be gone in a couple of days, just maintaining its own refrigeration.) Even after you solve the energy density problem, the energy that you're storing via hydrogen has to come from somewhere.

Coal and oil helped create the first industrial revolution because it was high energy density and high energy output for relatively little energy expenditure in; It's compact with a large net energy gain. It also proved to have an assortment of useful chemical applications. Hydrogen yields less energy than is put in (because nothing is 100% efficient), has lower energy density, and isn't all that interesting chemically - therefore having none of the primary energy qualities of coal and oil.

So where does this great "industrial revolution" come in? Aside from power for portable devices - it's got great battery-replacement potential - and the seriously good reduction in pollutants of all sorts (which provides many good things, none of which are new types of power or lead to new uses of power, as far as I can see)...

...where's the revolution?

Why are people acting as if this is free power? Free or cheap, limitless, nonpolluting power? The hydrogen-battery economy may be valid, but hydrogen isn't a replacement for oil.

And it's not fusion either. Is that what's going on? Do people have some subconscious connection to this and fusion power? Do they think there's a whole hell of a lot of hydrogen out there - it's part of water, after all - and that therefore all they have to do is come up with some way to mine it and viola, literal oceans of fuel, free for the taking?

Is this a fundamental failure to understand thermodynamics? Are people hoping for some kind of physics cheat? That seems kind of... unlikely. Or, to put it more bluntly, I think we'd have about as much luck waiting to discover an antimatter mine. On Earth.

So. Am I missing something? Or is this spirit dancing for the modern era?