Wave Energy

One of the emerging new energy technologies is wave energy. According to the Scotsman newspaper, a £10 million ($20 million) project is set to go online next year.

Edinburgh-based Ocean Power Delivery (OPD) is supplying the four wave-energy converters or "Pelamis", named after a type of sea snake, for the Orkney scheme. Each one is about 520ft long and creates 750 kilowatts of power.

This does not seem to be a commercially viable project right now and requires the support of public funds, but it will teach interesting lessons for the further development of the technology. The Scotish Executive has ambitious goals for renewable energy:

The Executive has targets to generate increasing amounts of electricity from renewables, with them providing 18 per cent of needs by 2010 and 40 per cent by 2020. Scotland is expected meet its 18 per cent renewable electricity target during 2007.

The United Kingdom is not the leading country in wind energy, but has made some progress in this area:

The wind sector now generates more than 2,000 megawatts across the UK, enough to power half the homes in Scotland.

Of course Scotland only has 10% of the population of the UK, so this translates into 5% of domestic energy use. I can't quite square that number with Germany's capacity of 20,000 megawatts that translates into 6% of all electricity use according to Wikipedia. UK and Germany are country of roughly equal size (population 60 million vs. 80 million). I would think that domestic electricity use is a larger part of the total than this suggests.

Saudi Oil Production Peaked?

From Econbrowser some interesting numbers on Saudi Oil production, which are nicely summarized below:



The drop in oil production comes at a time when the oil price continues to stay at high levels of $55-75. Is Saudi Arabia simply restricting supply to support the high oil price? James Hamilton raises another possibility:

The second and more natural interpretation is even more disturbing: the mighty Ghawar oil field is already in decline, and the Saudis don't want anyone to know.

The mystic Ghawar oil field is the largest oil field in the world. Any estimation of future oil supplies is based on continued high supply from this one field.

But one commenter to the article, Hal, calms with his believe in the all-knowing market:

One typical argument against this kind of thing is that if this were true, so many people would know about it that many of them would want to take advantage of this inside information by betting on oil price increases. It would be an almost risk-free way to make incredible fortunes. But this trading activity would itself move the price up. If well-placed insiders knew that there was a major crisis coming, we should see substantially higher prices than we do.

The End of Oil

From the The Sustainable Scale Project, a graph that displays the time and size of oil discoveries over the last decades.



This stunning development suggests that we have already found most of the oil that is recoverable. Even with increasingly sophisticated technology and a rising oil price, the number of discoveries has flattened off. How much future oil will be discovered? Here is one, rather scary prospect.



I got pointed to this fact by the book "Half Gone" by Jeremy Leggett, which convincingly argues that we may already reached the point of Peak Oil, where half of the recoverable oil has been extracted and the amount of oil produced per year will be declining from now on. Running out of oil is one reason to look for alternatives. The more frightening is, of course, the fact that we are poisoning our planet with carbon dioxide.

First Post

This is more of a notepad than a blog. I am interested in the development of the energy sector, especially the expected alternative energy revolution. It is always fascinating to watch transformational events unfold in real time -- be it the end of Communism or the rise of the Internet with its various aftershocks (the "new" economy, open source software, blogging, to name just a few).

The classic phases: First they ignore, then they ridicule, then they fight, then they are won over -- slightly paraphrased. It is not always a fight of us versus them. Of course, it is always more entertaining to view it that way. Maybe a better description of the phases is by the development of the infamous conventional wisdom or common sense, which also progresses from "Huh?" over "This is loony!", "This will never work and is dangerous!", all the way to "I always said that this is the way to go."

We are currently at a threshold from old traditional fossil energy use to the rise of alternative energies. It is inevitable, but the degree of urgency and expected speed of the transformation is not broadly recognized. So, let's enjoy the ride.