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Power

Submission + - Copper Peak? (theoildrum.com)

Submitted by Gooseygoose
Gooseygoose writes: Copper has been an important mineral in the world growth, in use for at least 10 000 years. The Bronze Age is well known for having replaced the Stone Age, and bronze is the alloy of copper and tin.

Copper has the second highest electrical conductivity after silver. Its price went so high that copper cables are now often stolen, disturbing telephone and Internet communications. Copper is used in piping (water supply, refrigeration and air conditioning). Measured by weight, it is the third most important metal used by man after iron and aluminium (Radetzki 2009). Its use is challenged by new substitutes, but copper production will peak because it is a limited resource amounting to around 1400 Mt. Unlike oil, copper can be recycled, but developing countries’ needs are huge.

What follows is a country by country evaluation of copper production, many charts and graphs.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6307
Power

Submission + - Surplus Energy and Biological Evolution: ERO(E)I (theoildrum.com)

Submitted by Gooseygoose
Gooseygoose writes: 1.1. Background: The History of Formal Thought on Surplus Energy

Energy surplus is defined broadly as the amount of energy left over after the costs of obtaining the energy have been accounted for. The energy literature is quite rich with papers and books that emphasize the importance of energy surplus as a necessary criteria for allowing for the survival and growth of many species including humans, as well as human endeavors, including the development of science, art, culture and indeed civilization itself. Most of us who have thought about this issue deeply would even say that energy surplus is the best general way to think about how different societies evolved over time. To chemists Frederick Soddy and William Ostwald, anthropologist Leslie White, archeologist Joseph Tainter, historian John Perlin, systems ecologist Howard T. Odum, sociologist Frederick Cottrell, economist Nicolas Georgescu-Roegan, energy scientist Vaclav Smil and a number of others in these and other disciplines, human history, including contemporary events, is essentially about exploiting energy and the technologies to do so.

http://netenergy.theoildrum.com/node/6284
Power

Submission + - An Updated Look at Lithium Production (theoildrum.com)

Submitted by Gooseygoose
Gooseygoose writes: Just over a year ago, and spurred by an article in Time, I wrote a post on the possible global supply of lithium, which is used in renewable batteries, and a major choice for use in the batteries of electric vehicles, such as the Chevy Volt. Since the story has acquired more recent interest this week, and with new information, it is worth re-visiting the topic.

I began the original post by noting that our first introduction to these batteries was in our role as an Explosives Lab when we found out — in a series of experiments a long time ago — that they can blow up if handled wrongly. And it turns out that such a risk is still around, though not that common.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6228
Security

Submission + - Inside the Zeus Banker Trojan (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: Banker trojans such as Zeus, URLzone and Clampi have become the bane of the Internet, generating millions of dollars for the attackers behind them. Threatpost has a detailed look at the inner workings of Zeus, from the way it infects machines to the way it steals credentials and the method the attackers use to extract the stolen funds and cash them out.
Power

Submission + - Ethanol's Redundant Subsidy (theoildrum.com)

Submitted by Gooseygoose
Gooseygoose writes:

Even if you are a staunch proponent of U.S. biofuel policy, it is hard to argue that the current subsidy on grain ethanol serves the purpose it was designed to serve. Further, it does not help ethanol producers compete against oil companies. Why? Because we now have mandates. As I will explain here, this nullifies the purpose of the subsidy.

But first, how did we get to this point? In an effort to spur development of a domestic renewable fuel industry and wean the U.S. off of foreign oil, the U.S. government introduced tax credits for ethanol usage with the Energy Tax Act of 1978. The tax credit was an exemption to the Federal Excise Tax on gasoline, and amounted to $0.40 for every gallon of ethanol blended into gasoline at the 10% level (increased to $0.60 per gallon in 1984 and gradually decreased to the current level of $0.45 per gallon).

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6225
Power

Submission + - The Price of Energy (theoildrum.com)

Submitted by Gooseygoose
Gooseygoose writes: The price of energy has a very strong influence on the energy choices governments and individuals make. I sometimes hear people ask "Why are we still building coal-fired power plants?" or "Why don't we replace more petroleum with biomass?" One reason is that biomass is generally more difficult to use from a logistical point of view. Another is that there just isn't enough biomass to meet present energy demands. But a major factor comes down to price.

The price and convenience of energy sources are ultimately the keys to customer acceptance. Homes can be heated with wood, heating oil, natural gas, or electricity. Automobiles can be fueled with gasoline, ethanol, natural gas, diesel, electricity, and a wide variety of more unconventional fuels. If consumers have a choice and the supply is convenient, they will tend toward the cheapest energy source they can get.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6161
Power

Submission + - The Avatar Movie and the Mining of Oil Sands (theoildrum.com) 1

Submitted by Gooseygoose
Gooseygoose writes: The movie Avatar [avatarmovie.com] gets the mining bit wrong. And not by just a little – but then us villains are rarely understood, so what should we expect? OK so what is a popular [online.wsj.com] , nay perhaps even genre changing [bleakonomy.blogspot.com] movie got to do with technical talks about fossil fuel production? Well, fairly early in the movie it is made clear that the sole purpose for the plot is to mine “unobtainium” which is a mineral with all sorts of value. Now I’m not going to give away much of what goes on in this movie (and I agree with most of that review by the way) but the fallacy over how they mine the deposits on the planet is one of the lessons learned from the mining of the oil sands in Alberta, which is actually what I want to discuss a little today. In the movie they use a variation on a bucket wheel excavator – which in today’s world looks like this...
Power

Submission + - Chinese Transportation Growth (theoildrum.com)

Submitted by Gooseygoose
Gooseygoose writes: The Chinese National Bureau of Statistics [stats.gov.cn] has a lot of interesting data. The web site is hard to use, at least in my browser, but after poking around in the html source of the pages, I've managed to figure out how to get to all the annual data, which let me make some graphs. I don't know how accurate these numbers are, but here, at any rate, is the official story.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6126
Power

Submission + - The Wheels Come Off the Biodiesel Wagon (theoildrum.com)

Submitted by Gooseygoose
Gooseygoose writes: Domestic Biodiesel Production Plummets

One of my Top 10 Energy Stories of 2009 involved the actions taken by the EU against U.S. biodiesel producers. U.S. tax dollars had been generously subsidizing biodiesel that was being exported out of the U.S. European producers couldn't compete against the subsidized imports, so the EU effectively cut off the imports by imposing five-year tariffs on U.S. biodiesel.

This was a big blow to U.S. biodiesel producers, and was one of the factors leading to a disastrous 2009 for U.S. biodiesel production. But there were other factors as well, which I will describe in this post.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6119

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