Why isn’t Energy Free

The media often claim that “oil supply won’t last forever”. As with all fuels, this statement is easy to come up with and noone is going to believe that our current sources of energy will stick around without an implied deadline.

However, hysteria sometimes makes newspapers ignore established ways of optimizing different forms of mining. The method I want to tell you about today has been around since the 80’s (yes, I am talking about the 20th century here) and combines two of the most infamous raw materials: mineral oil and carbon dioxide.

Its result is amazing: It seems that pumping carbon dioxide into weakened oil fields will make the whole process more efficient and raise the amount of oil, and hence energy, that can be extracted. There are other techniques being classified as Enhanced Oil Recovery but flooding oil fields with CO2 has been the most popular one and caused a lot of people from different sectors of science to think about possible improvements.

We really seem to witness a weird coincidence here. Wasn’t it the carbon dioxide we wanted to get rid of? If people have been aware of a way to use obsolete greenhouse gases for more than 20 years, what does this contradiction tell us? Well, the moral is that everything in our world offers many forms of application and can be useful in a different context. Some of the EOR projects even include redirecting unwanted CO2 into aforesaid fields, they establish a connection between (for example) fossil energy conversion in a power plant and fuel extraction.

Reading through some research papers you might find a short note saying that some EOR developments could contribute to a possible demand for carbon dioxide… that’s right, I said people want to have it instead of getting rid of it. But on the other hand this isn’t a new phenomenon at all: we even have that damn greenhouse gas in bubbling softdrinks! Sipping on evil climate killers, that’s how we roll.

The power and flexibility of some major players really make you think about whether a certain company actually owns all those massive resources that they offer to people. Could it be that one single provider is truly responsible for a ridiculous amount of cables, power plants and fuels? In a free market it doesn’t have to be like that.

In most cases some of the companies that want to convince you to change your energy provider only have contracts to use the networks that someone else owns but can’t keep from the rest of the world. You probably thought of evil monopolists crushing us like ants and waiting for their precious power lines to become even more valuable. Sorry to disappoint you: With the right strategy, even people that don’t know how to calculate an electrical resistance could be in charge of huge energy providers that basically run the whole country.

Should this really matter to you? Nah, as a customer you do what seems reasonable: look for the best rate and not worry about the rest. But it’s one of the main reasons that the sources of energy will stay in the hands of economists that don’t necessarily care about installing new technologies, financial aspects matter more than constant progress to improve power networks.

Over here in Germany we recently saw a new idea popping up. People are offered a certain quota of gas or electricity that you buy up front. Customers that exactly know how much they consume could take advantage of low fees and good offers… however, it’s obvious that this scheme was created by people that know their statistics and maths and certainly don’t have a problem estimating that the average consumer won’t be able to hit the target. If you exceed your quota, they will charge you extra at a rate you agreed on. In case you don’t manage to consume as much as you expected, noone is going to give you a refund for “remaining energy”. Clever, eh?

And what happens if the market isn’t really that free? Things get more complicated, regulations and laws have to keep the network alive and the state or some institution that was given control over energy resources needs to do an awful lot of planning.

As the markets go for new records, gas gets more expensive and basically everyone comes up with new conspiracy theories about oil prices, I ask myself how many thinkers out there actually know what the black gold really is. If we brag about the fact that we might run out of oil in the next decade, century or whenever, some of us that weren’t lucky enough to have a lesson about the source of oil must be completely clueless.

So let me tell you now that what we use today to turn it into gasoline is mostly a bunch of rotten beings that slowly turned into the sticky oil people are getting crazy about nowadays. You won’t see this happening in your own kitchen or living room, it takes an incredible amount of time and surely won’t happen again considering that we’re around to touch the environment now.

Please notice that this isn’t supposed to be a “green” blog, I just want to explain why using fuels like oil and gas is very different to other forms of energy conversion. First of all we need to ask why the hell you’d be interested in oil anyway. Well, oil contains a huge amount of carbon which we need for producing plastic or other purposes. There are different types of oil out there and if you regularly have a look at the finance section of your newspaper I’m sure you noticed that people use adjectives like light, sour and sweet when they talk about petroleum.

Normally, the oil refinery is the place to convert the precious fuel to a form that would be more suitable for a certain type of use. It is cleaned and distilled to meet your expectations but like with other types of energy, the total amount of what we have on earth almost always stays the same (this reminds me of an interesting question I don’t have the answer to: is there something like “carbon fluctuation into space”?). So what clever geologists generally look at is the carbon cycle which looks at the exchange of carbon between different parts of our environment. A lot of stuff you have around you is part of that cycle, even old toys that noone would ever want to play with anymore. Once they were created from a (probably) stinky piece of rotten organisms.

Have you ever asked yourself why organic chemistry is so popular? Why you probably didn’t have to spend hours in school getting tortured with topics from its inorganic counterpart? Again, easy answer, organic chemistry looks at the two main “ingredients” of petroleum and long before humans discovered how to crack the oil and turn it into gasoline this version of chemistry was a winner by default.

Those are just a few obvious but interesting sides you can discover about oil, I’ll be happy to discuss more detailed topics about our favourite sticky juice later on.

In life we encounter so many situations where something just doesn’t satisfy our needs. We don’t make enough money, we want to work more in less time (sometimes) and we want more successful kids that will save us from worrying about our retirement plan.

What we want to improve in general is efficiency and the reasons for a disappointing outcome can be incredibly complex. Now with energy it’s very similar, although we are heavily reminded of theoretical values that exactly tell us how much energy we -could- transform if our energy conversion efficiency was good enough.

As I don’t really want to introduce you to an awful lot of maths I’m relieved to tell you that getting the ratio I mentioned doesn’t take more than understanding one simple division. It’s the WGIWGO principle (that abbrevation means “What Goes In, What Goes Out” and I totally made it up), you’re shoving something into a system and look at the lousy rest that comes out afterwards. In most popular cases, the results you get are just ridiculous but still good enough to cause a certain type of energy conversion to create companies with huge market caps.

Did you know for example that some of the solar cells in use today have an energy conversion efficiency of only 0.1 (or 10% if that makes you happier)? It’s better for various models in space technology (up to about 35%) but they require expensive material you simply won’t find on the consumer market. Now why the hell would the public accept a product that only delivers one tenth of what you put in? The answer is simple: In some cases a part of the energy you need won’t cost you a thing.

Of course the issue is more complex since energy is everywhere. When you put a device together, the whole production chain will consume energy and this quantity is “trapped” in the final product. But since we only want to look at energy conversion now (some people might call it consumption), let’s stick to the task.

Industrial motors sometimes deliver energy conversion efficiency as low as 0.4, which means the electric power you get from another type of power will only be 40% of what you could have. The rest will appear in different forms like heat and grumpy managers. Of course a whole sector is working on recycling the heat and using it for production but you wouldn’t believe how much we could improve if we only had the right machines.

What I find interesting about this topic is that the media generally tell you to turn down the light at home or close your fridge fast enough. It is true that your washing machine or dishwasher will drive up your electricity bill significantly but most people forget that industry takes the main piece of the cake without really changing their whole infrastructure.

Is it clever to just buy new stuff and throw all that old crap away then? Not really, but it would be wise to slowly direct ourselves into a direction where we work on a better energy conversion efficieny for industry motors which probably have the biggest potential to save us a lot of expensive trouble.

If you just loved to emulate a private disco when you were less old but equally silly I’m sure your parents always tried to introduce you to the wonders of electricity and how you should handle them. Our evil ancestors (kind of playing with fire here since I’m German) told us a few things about the wonderful team called voltage and current without knowing that some of them are just ridiculous from a neutral, scientifical point of view.

Today I’d like to talk about one of the biggest legends in every home, it’s especially used (more like abused) to tell kids not to turn that stupid computer on again and let their chubby meat have a taste of fresh air instead. Of course it’s the apparently allmighty claim that activating a device that “runs on” electricity will consume more energy than just leaving it on and not touching it. First of all I’d like to point out that this blog also is for people that don’t even know the difference between the terms electric current, voltage and charge. Furthermore, working with consumer electronics you almost never have to worry about the exact character of an electric field or what the heck it is. So to avoid giving you a detailed shortcut through at least two years of university I will simplify everything for you to get behind the secrets of this electrifying issue.

1. It is true that hitting a switch on any device will have an effect

2. Depending on the type of device this effect can be of a different kind

3. The power button isn’t the only thing on a machine or a computer that will have an effect on how they operate

With these three points in mind, we need to ask ourselves now what kind of change can be observed when you start pushing something. I created a graph about what I’m getting at here, please have a look:

Okay, the picture you see above could be seen in any context, at a certain time you activate a certain process and let’s just say that “something out there” is so surprized you did it that it gets affected in a heavy way before coming down and, more or less, staying at a lower level. The crucial thing about this simple diagram is that I didn’t define how much stuff is happening or how fast it goes. In the real world this could be a bully hitting you at time X making you cry out really loud, afterwards you might just take the beating in a whiny but quiet manner. Of course the time you spend freaking out might heavily affect your overall degree of insanity (slightly exaggerating here). If you really take your time spitting blood you might say that it mainly was the first hit that got you down, otherwise it’s just the usual fight in the afternoon.

Leaving this ridiculous example behind us, let’s go back to electricity, “consuming energy” and all that.

The question is: How do we know how high and wide the obvious spike will be, is it possible to guess? Well, let me tell you that your personal computer, your notebook and your MP3 player have something in common. Not only do they include integrated circuits, certain parts like the power supply unit also have bigger versions of coils and capacitors in them. I promised that you wouldn’t have to know anything about them, let’s just state here that they show a behaviour similar to my funny diagram above: when you turn a device on something significant happens before the whole system goes back to a normal state.

A crucial fact here is: we only get a peak for a very short time… and in the world of electronics this could mean shorter than the lifespan of most blogs (ouch). Depending on which device you have and what circuit’s in there, the peak could be wider which certainly would drive your bills up more than the rest of the operation. But that difference is tiny. At least if you decide not to turn your devices on and off in a rapid movement, like the lamp I was talking about in the first paragraph.

Concluding with a look at “energy consumption” (and folks please remember that you can only turn energy into a different state, it doesn’t disappear), claiming that turning something on will consume more than a constant operational state is…

1. …wrong if you don’t start twitching and hit the button every few milliseconds… but that would make operation impossible anyway!

2. …therefore wrong if you only look at most stuff that’s mainly affected by this theory like computers

3. …correct for devices that need to get to a certain operating temperature and have a bad energy conversion efficiency

The last term I used maybe is the most crucial thing in the world of energy, making certain ways of converting energy more attractive and more profitable. Probably millions of people are worrying about the energy conversion efficiency every day.

And because I would just love your parents to make you worry about this factor as early as possible instead of making you worry about slightly less important things, I will explain the whole issue to you in more detail very soon.