EROEI - the unseen enemy of the bright future

We Albertans are widely-derided within our own country for being insensitive to the environmental consequences of our oilsands development. It is true that we have an out-sized carbon footprint and there are many Albertans that would like to see better environmental stewardship. In fact, despite the ugly pictures of tailings ponds around Fort MacMurray, a lot of Alberta looks like this:

We have invested a lot of money in carbon sequestration, the process of capturing carbon during the burning of fossil fuels and burying it, typically in old oil reservoirs. Of course, the environmental groups disapprove of this approach, preferring the oil to stay in the ground and the energy production replaced by renewables. Well, it turns out the environmentalists may have it all wrong, a future of wind and solar is just not possible. The villain is EROEI, energy-returned-on-energy-invested.

A recent paper by John Morgan, a prominent Australian expert on energy storage technology, lays out the problem. In order for a power plant to be viable, it must return more energy over its operational lifespan than it requires to build it. Dr. Morgan calculated the minimum EROEI of 7:1, once maintenance and operational requirements are included. Anything below that and the project makes no sense. Under current conditions, that is, an energy grid with ample baseload supply from fossil fuel and/or nuclear plants, wind and concentrated solar power (CSP) comfortably surpass that minimum EROEI. Interestingly, photovoltaic solar doesn't even achieve the threshold now, so you might want to reconsider any plans to install solar panels on your roof.

Anyway, a future without fossil fuels would require extensive energy storage capacity for times when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining, a problem fossil fuels don't have since the energy is already stored in the fuel. There are two main ways of storing energy, batteries and pumped hydroelectric. Batteries are more mobile but are ten times more energy intensive to produce per unit of energy storage. In other words, batteries will have to become an order of magnitude more energy efficient just to achieve the current EROEI of pumped hydroelectric and, of course, batteries require lots of rare metals which have their own scarcity issues to deal with when considering massive scale up. So, the best case scenario assumes pumped hydro, which involves pumping water to a place of higher elevation, then releasing it to run turbines like a normal hydroelectric dam. Even with the assumption of using pumped hydro for energy storage, wind power falls well below the threshold and CSP is just marginally above (and even then, only in ideal conditions for solar power). Nothing short of a miraculous new technology unlike anything we are currently working on can turn the trend line on this. We simply cannot maintain our civilization without fossil fuels or a huge increase in nuclear power generation.

-Rognar-

Inspiration Mars

I watched the Inspiration Mars press conference yesterday. Dennis Tito, aerospace engineer, entrepreneur and most famously, world's first space tourist, is spearheading the effort to launch a private manned flyby mission to Mars in 2018. The goal is to take advantage of a favourable planetary alignment to send two humans, one man and one woman, within 100 miles of the Martian surface, then slingshot them back to Earth. The entire mission would take 501 days. The risks involved in this mission cannot be overstated. There will be no abort option. The crew will be subject to cosmic radiation for a prolonged period of time and the re-entry will be, by far, the fastest ever for a manned spacecraft. All of this will be done on a shoestring budget from private donors. Only the Americans would have a hope in Hades of pulling this thing off. I wish them well.

-Rognar-

More on Election 2012 and the bright future

Seems I may have been a bit hasty in suggesting the Obama administration is uninterested in manned space exploration. NASA has unveiled ambitious new plans for future missions in light of the election result. Manned deep space missions, visits to near-earth asteroids, even a possible manned mission to Mars by 2030, that's some pretty exciting stuff. Admittedly, it will require a commitment from future administrations, but any momentum is encouraging.

-Rognar-

Election 2012 and the bright future

I can't say the final result is unexpected. Outside of the partisan bubble, most sources were predicting a fairly convincing win for Obama. I was surprised by the vote, however. The final tally isn't quite in yet, but Obama looks to be down about nine million votes from 2008. Clearly, the enthusiasm has ebbed dramatically in four years. Yet, Romney got about two million votes less than McCain. The Republicans definitely own this defeat. Either they couldn't bring themselves to vote for their guy, in which case, shame on them. Or, there just aren't as many of them as there were even four years ago. If the Republican party is declining at a rate of half a million voters per year, they definitely have to redefine what they represent. I wish them well as many of the best values of America seem to be Republican values.

So what does it mean for the bright future? Sadly, I don't think it's at all good. In general, Democrats do seem to be a bit more pro-science. They certainly don't adhere to some of the strange views of the religious Right. However, I don't think they're all that interested in space exploration. Democrats tend to think small. They see America as smaller than Republicans do. Sure, America is exceptional, they say, in the same way Greece or Brazil is exceptional. Grand visions of humans in space seems like fantasy to them, especially when there are so many social issues down here on earth that require immediate attention. Money that could go to space science will more likely be directed to green energy and you can bet the military will not have a lot of discretionary spending capability to direct toward establishing strategic assets in the high frontier. President Obama has done a decent job of encouraging private industry to participate in space exploration and, for that, he should be applauded, but for the most part, I think over the next four years little will be accomplished in the effort to hasten the arrival of the bright future.

-Rognar-

Government and the bright future

On the verge of an historical US election, it seems an appropriate time to discuss the role of government in the "bright future". I identify politically as a blue Tory. In the lexicon of Canadian politics, that means fiscal conservatism and relative indifference to social conservatism. As such, I prefer free markets with, at best, a light touch of government to ensure everyone plays fair. However, I do not share the antagonistic view of government of American conservatives. Government, as I see it, is inefficient and large. For this reason, it should stay out of anything in which size is unimportant. We don't need, for example, government broadcasters or oil companies or airlines (all things which we in Canada currently have or have had in the recent past). The private sector has proven amply capable of providing these services. However, I think really big things are beyond the purview of the private sector and space programs seem to be a good example. Sure, big companies like Apple or Exxon Mobil could probably afford to bankroll a project like the Apollo program. A modern version of the Apollo missions would cost about $10 billion per year for about 15 years. Apple, for example, had net profits over the last year of about $40 billion. So theoretically, the largest corporation in the world could afford to fund something like the Apollo program assuming all of its shareholders could be convinced to relinquish a portion of their dividends. However, the mandate of corporations is not to invest in projects which can pretty much guarantee not to be profitable. That is not to say there isn't any money to be made in space. Energy and resources are in glorious abundance in the Solar System and eventually, fortunes will be made, but not on timescales that good capitalists can abide. A long-term investor is someone planning for his retirement in 40 years, not his great-great-grandson's in 140 years. Of course, I don't mean to suggest that governments take a long view either. Most can't see beyond the next election. However, they can commit to projects that aren't profitable as long as enough of the citizenry is inspired by the effort to represent an attractive voting bloc. Now, it might be a bit mercenary of me to say so, but when it comes to motivating governments, a small, but vocal group can often have influence far in excess of its size. In 2004, George W. Bush beat John Kerry by only about three million votes out of over 120 million votes cast. The presidential election of 2008 was one of the more one-sided in recent memory, yet Barack Obama beat John McCain by less than ten million votes. Imagine how much influence a solid block of five million Americans who are committed to space exploration and willing to vote that way could have on the US political landscape. It is certainly more likely to succeed than trying to get that same five million to fund a private space program at $2,000 per person per year for 15 years with no hope of a return.

The real trick and one I don’t know how to overcome is to convince politicians on both sides of the political spectrum that those five million votes really are available to the guys with the best offer for future space exploration. In the recent Republican primary race, Newt Gingrich made a rather surprising pledge to establish a lunar base within eight years of his presidency. Not surprisingly, he was widely-ridiculed within his own party. Setting aside the question of affordability in tough economic times, Republicans are likely to be wary of chasing votes within the scientifically-literate community of space exploration enthusiasts. Their sometimes bizarre views on evolution and climate change and, more recently, human reproduction make many of them seem to be a bunch of ignorant hicks or conspiracy theorists. In order to influence them to embrace space exploration, they need to know that space enthusiasts would be willing to overlook the occasional weirdness from the fringes of the party in exchange for a firm commitment to the bright future. Too bad Newt didn’t win.

-Rognar-

The bright future

Lately I find myself thinking a lot about what I tend to call the "bright future", the future I thought I'd be living in today when I was a kid. I was a space-crazy introvert with visions of Star Wars and Star Trek in my head. The Americans had already sent men to the moon, there was Skylab and Viking and Voyager.  Then there was the space shuttle and Marc Garneau, the first Canadian in space. We in the West had bested fascism and outlasted communism. Infectious diseases were becoming a thing of the past and despite our ever increasing global population, we always seemed to find a way to feed most of them and when we couldn't, it was invariably because of bad governments, not inadequate food supply. As I entered adulthood in the mid-80s, it seemed obvious that the awesomeness would continue. I wasn't naive enough to believe I would be moving to Mars someday, but I certainly would have imagined there'd have been a manned Mars mission by now.

Well, it hasn't quite worked out that way. It isn't all bad, of course. NASA still sends those marvelous little rovers to Mars and the International Space Station still passes overhead 16 times a day. But we don't send people to the Moon anymore, Marc Garneau is a politician (a Liberal MP, no less...talk about destroying my adolescent hero worship) and a manned Mars mission seems more like science-fiction now than it ever has. As for things down here on Earth, we still can't cure cancer or AIDS or the common cold. Nuclear fusion remains stubbornly elusive. We may (or may not) be facing a climate catastrophe unless we wean ourselves off fossil fuels, which we won't without embracing nuclear energy, which we won't because...well, I don't know...radiation scary! We have declining birthrates because we're rich and spoiled and children tend to get in the way of our jet setting lifestyles, so we're aging quickly. Soon, nobody will be able to go to space because our osteoporosis-ridden skeletons won't be able to handle the Gs. Besides, there's no internet on Mars and cellphone reception on the Moon is terrible. How are people supposed to follow their twitter feeds under circumstances like that?

This post is an introduction, of sorts, to a series of future postings in which I will share my thoughts and observations on getting back to the spirit of '69. Feel free to disagree, but be civil about it, if you please.

-Rognar-

SpaceX Dragon - mission accomplished

This is awesome. I am of a certain age that I can remember a time when landing men on the moon was something the USA could do with some regularity. At the time, it was generally accepted that the Soviets could probably do it too and eventually would. We also had supersonic air travel. Admittedly, flying on the Concorde was a rich man's game, but it held the promise of a bright future. Then came the space shuttle. There was also nuclear fusion, which they assured us, was only twenty years away. Could lunar bases and manned missions to Mars be far off? Where the heck did all that go? It's been forty years since a human has visited the moon. There's no more shuttle program. No SSTs. Nuclear fusion, they assure us, is still twenty years away. Instead of moon bases, the height of our technological advancement is the Chevy Volt and the iPhone.

Thankfully, it appears we are crawling out of this new Dark Age. The Chinese are talking about sending a man to the moon. While I certainly don't relish the thought of the future belonging to Communist China, it will hopefully spur western countries to reinvest in space exploration if we see a successful Chinese moonshot. In the meantime, American industry seems ready to keep things going for now. I doubt I will see a manned Mars mission in my lifetime, but it's enough to know we haven't completely abandoned the future

-Rognar-