I’ll come back to the news about the oil servicing contracts, but wanted to slip in a bit of interesting good news first.
This week, the Pentagon hosted a conference call with Dr. James Valdes, a biotechnology expert with the US Army. He was discussing the Tactical Garbage to Energy Refinery (TGER) – a portable 40Kw generator that runs on diesel or garbage – converting solid trash to low-grade methane through high-temperature digestion, and wet garbage to ethanol via fermentation.
The generator burns 5ga of JP8 an hour with no trash input, or <1ga per hour - still producing 40Kw while consuming waste. This reduces both the incoming logistical tail as less fuel needs to be hauled in, and the outbound one as less trash needs to be hauled out. Which in turn reduces the fuel for operations required even further. As well as the exposure of the troops and contractors doing the hauling. Two prototype TIGR units are deployed (in Iraq, I believe) - it will be interesting to see how they do. I've dreamed for a while of a neighborhood cogen station that generated electricity, heated water from the generator cooling jacket, and now - burns trash. Pretty cool.
The Pentagon is one of the major backers of Alternative Energy Sources. ‘They do not want to go to war for energy nor do they want to lug it around.
There is a good presentation by Amory Lovins at *Ted.com*, _(I apologize, but I find the instructions on how tho make a link to be opaque)_ that is worth looking at. His Rocky Mountain Institute has been getting funding from the Pentagon for years in order to study the problem.
TOC: You enter the text you want to put in your post for the link between double quotes. You follow that immediately with a colon character. That text may include one or more spaces.
“Like so”:
You follow that immediately with the URL — that’s what is also sometimes called the web address — use no spaces, no line break, no extraneous punctuation such as quote characters.
“Energy Video on TED”:http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/51
Here are some reviews of Lovins, his Institue and his book from people involved in Defense and Military issues.
William Martin
Chairman, Council on Foreign Relations Energy Security Group
“Amory Lovins has had more impact on our energy use than any single person in the world. Now his team has produced one of the most important energy studies in decades. It merits careful examination as a profitable strategy for achieving energy security, economic prosperity, and environmental quality through smart business strategies accelerated by efficient government policy.”
Robert C. McFarlane
National Security Advisor to President Reagan
“Recent expert analysis suggests…that…within a generation we can be truly independent-free of all reliance on foreign oil….Perhaps the most rigorous and surely the most dramatic analysis…was tasked by the Pentagon and carried out by…Rocky Mountain Institute, a respected center of hard-headed, market-based research….[T]he book’s powerful summary…argues persuasively that by 2035 we can be entirely independent of imported oil and that ‘it will cost less to displace all of the oil that the United States now uses than it will cost to buy that oil.’…[T]he means of achieving near-term energy security and ultimate independence from foreign oil are at hand. Courage and leadership are all that it takes to get us there.”
George P. Shultz
Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University
former Secretary of State, the Treasury, and Labor
“We can, as Amory Lovins and his colleagues show vividly, win the oil endgame…[A]n intriguing case that is important enough to merit careful attention by all of us, private citizens and business and political leaders alike.”
Richard N. Cooper
Maurits C. Boas Professor of International Economics at Harvard University
“…[T]his fact-filled study…[p]art technology handbook, part cool-headed advocacy…argues that a dramatic reduction in oil dependency is both possible and desirable during the next two decades, at economic savings compared with business as usual.”
Printed in Foreign Affairs, February 2005
Bill Glover
Director, Environmental Performance Strategy, Boeing Commercial Airplanes
“Winning the Oil Endgame is a masterpiece in terms of stimulating ideas and discussion around how we move forward to realistically address our energy future. Rocky Mountain Institute has developed and analyzed the data in a compelling way—worthy of much consideration.”
Lovins is a freaking genius. His book “Soft Energy paths” is still one of the best energy policy think pieces on my bookshelf.
He’s a deeply pragmatic idealist.
A.L.
What I cannot figure out, for the life o’me, is why the US hasn’t, in the last forty years, managed to dope out, and perfect this technology, including the requisite, and now available, biotech, (i.e., breeding, or engineering really robust, really efficient bacteria to do the job) to make this sort of stuff work on a major scale.
IIRC, back in the early days of the _Whole Earth Catalog_, c. 1970, various techno-hippies had pulled open various (USDA? USAID?) pamphlets, and learned that they could generate methane, (and maybe ethanol) from, well, crap, waste silage (i.e., otherwise not very useful biomass)or miscellaneous compostible garbage, via fermentation. I have a vague recollection of a guy named “Bate” who’d built a special “chicken-methane trailer” which allowed him to run his car off chicken-shit. Admittedly, it lacked some of the aesthetic appeal of the folks in my neighborhood who run their bio-diesel-converted Mercedes’ on used restaurant grease (leaving a french-fry-scented trail of smoke behind) but it’s my impression that we, as a country have still got a bigger disposal problem with both human and farm animal crap, than we do with fry grease.
r gould-saltman
For the most part, people are afraid of new ideas. I remember 25 years ago showing people how computers work and their being terrified to even try. Intelligent and relatively young people, I was 35 at the time.
Five years before I had worked on an Industrial Film for Xerox about their new Word processor. It was a line editor, which *Amazingly!!!!* eliminated the need for white out. Of course, it had amber lettering and a box half the size of a desk that came with it.
Stunningly, I just saw a clip on Google where McCain Says he is computer illiterate and his wife does the computering for him.
_________
-The world is in the process of creating a new multi-trillion dollar industry
-The Sustainable Energy industry is now in its infancy, Just recently surpassing $1 Trillion in investment
-The industry will grow at so torrid a pace over the next few decades that it will not only dwarf the Information Technology and Computer businesses in terms of size, it will exceed the unprecedented and ever accelerating speed of customer acceptance that the Computer and IT businesses have enjoyed over the past 30 years.
The growth industry is being driven by a confluence of tidal forces that have never come together before on a world wide scale and that these forces will provide the impetus for this massive and universal expansion. Among them, though not all of these forces are:
-Basic Economics – A growing need in the market for the industry’s product at a time when present supplies are rapidly shrinking
-Economic Benefits that can be gleaned by everyone from the world’s poorest individuals to its largest corporations
-Growing Tax Incentives
-Daunting Environmental Concerns
-Federal, State and Local Legislation
-International Treaties
-Government’s Fears of Conflicts and Social Unrest