Crude oil at 28$ from coal.

What could this mean?

• More time to switch to another source of energy for transport
• Right now the amount of Coal reserve compared to Oil is a lot more, what will happen if we use this coal for oil. The depletion rate will go much faster. Here are the numbers as of today for reserves:

Oil: 43 years (43 years using levels and flows above)
Gas: 167 years (61 years using levels and flows above)
Coal: 417 years (148 years using levels and flows above)
Source

• It could also mean that the tar sand oil from Alberta would become uneconomical. At around 40$ per barrel, we would need to cut down the price or shutdown production.

Here's the full report:

ARLINGTON - How would you like to buy gasoline made from $30 domestic coal versus $75 imported oil?

Researchers at the University of Texas at Arlington say they've found a practical way to make synthetic crude from inexpensive coal that's common in Texas.

People have been turning coal into oil for 100 years or more, but researchers at UTA say they've invented a better way to do it.

It is so much better that they expect to sign a deal with an oil company within weeks.

"This is East Texas lignite coal. We go from that to this really nice liquid," said Professor Brian Dennis of a light synthetic crude, easily refined into gasoline.

Professor Dennis and a team of scientists have been working on the process for about a year-and-a-half.

"I had the idea for this while I was walking to my car," he said. "I ran back to the lab and I started drawing it out in my notebook."

They only showed News 8 an early model reactor which doesn't look like much. The current reactor design is secret, extremely efficient, and emits no pollution, the UTA scientists said.

"We're improving the cost every day. We started off sometime ago at an uneconomical $17,000 a barrel. Today, we're at a cost of $28.84 a barrel," said engineering dean Rick Billo.

That's $28 a barrel versus $75 we pay now for imported crude.

Texas lignite coal is dirt cheap - less than $18 a ton. A ton of coal will produce up to 1.5 barrels of oil.

UTA researchers expect micro-refineries to be built within a year, turning coal into cheap oil and producing new jobs.

It's still fossil fuel, but scientists say it could bridge the gap until greener technologies catch up.

So why are the biggest polluters pushing for cap and trade?

Source

I am posting Benchmarking US Air Emissions (2006), a joint report by Ceres, NRDC, and PSEG, because it apparently is no longer available on the Internet, and it contains research relevant to the climate policy debate. For example, many of the nation’s biggest CO2 emitters (e.g. American Electric Power) are also leading advocates of cap-and-trade. Does this make Waxman-Markey a “polluter-crafted” bill, and recipients of EPA campaign contributions “polluter-funded” politicians? Yes, if you apply green “logic” without fear or favor.

My comment to this story:
 
In simplest term… Follow the money.

It is like when I learned that a nuclear power industry was pushing for wind power, because this would push prices of electricity up and thus provide more profits for their installed based of nuclear power stations. This is a profit only logic and as nothing to do with a logic of pushing price down for energy for the benefit of all.

What is happening with NASA, is it being transformed into an environmental green machine?

Is NASA hijacked from its true purpose, the exploration of space and colonization of other planets?

PJTV has a good series of video reports on this as they find that NASA has been used to push a green agenda not based on science.

• Climategate 2.0 - The NASA Files: It’s The Data, Not The Globe, That’s Cooked (Part 1)
• Climategate 2.0 - The NASA Files: Don’t Bet The Economy On Weird Science (Part 2)

NASA released files under the freedom of information act. It took them 2 years to release the files in an unsearchable bitmap PDF format.  I took the liberty of converting them to a searchable text format.

We also saw the return to the moon project from NASA being scraped to concentrate on "Global Warming" research... Thanks M. Obama! To boldly go nowhere!

Then there is this minority report from Environment and Public Works (EPW) minority leader Senator Jim Inhofe. Some of those senators are worried of what is going on.



Here's the link to this report, full of interesting email communication between NASA scientists and others.

Is the green propaganda going too far?

Looking at those pictures and video make me feel sick to my stomach. I think the green agenda as lost grip on reality and see doom and gloom where it does not exist. They only see the worst possible scenario that is not even true.

For example this picture, The hanging of a stuffed polar bear and two penguins. Since global warming started, the polar bear population has been increasing mostly because of men:

Polar bears are currently abundant and not threatened with extinction because of the implementation of the International Agreement for the Conservation of Polar Bears and their Habitat and the development of co-ordinated research and management programmes. Scientists generally agree that improved conservation measures, primarily controls on harvests, have lead to an increase in polar bear numbers over the last 30 years.

“The assertion that polar bears as a species are in imminent danger of extinction or even threatened with extinction in the foreseeable future is both unproven and unlikely.” Source

The oldest known fossil of a polar bear is nearly 70,000 years old. It was found in new Kew, England. This fossil shows a bear whose size is much larger than that of todays bears. So those animals lived and survived for a long time through all those periods that where warmer and cooler than today as shown in this graph.

So I would not worry too much about the polar bear and if a problem arise, we are here to help.

What about the penguins? Well those live in the south regions of the planet, not the north where the polar bear lives.  You can see form this page, that the population of all the species of penguins are mostly doing very well. According to this National Geographic article, the penguins survived the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs 65 millions years ago. So again I would not worry to much about those either.

And then there is this type of propagandist video, made to scare kids:


From this video, the polar bears, chimpanzee and kangaroo are all becoming suicidal, because of global warming.  No more ice for the polar bear, no more vegetation for the chimpanzee and kangaroo.

As you may have noticed, the sea ice extent is growing back and the average in the last 31 years does not look so bad.

As for the vegetation, the increase CO2 content of the atmosphere is having a positive effect on the vegetation cover of the planet:

Results from controlled studies show how a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere, which is expected to occur over the next century, will increase crop yields by 30 to 40 percent, double the water-use efficiency of most of the earth's vegetation and possibly triple the productivity of forests.

Also we need to consider that the renewed popularity of nuclear power, will hopefully make the burning of fossil fuel a thing of the past.  The high density of nuclear power, also means that we would use less land for electricity production, thus more land for forest, parks and animals.

Please spread the word that the situation is not that dire and that we can do better.  Educating our kids with facts instead of scaring them with green propaganda will save our planet.

Enough nuclear waste for 3000 reactors of 240MW

General Atomics is proposing a program to build small 240MW reactor that would use spent fuel from big reactors. Source

Those reactors small enough to fit on a truc, could be installed where power is needed and cut the cost of transmission lines. 

Why spend 80 billions on Yucca mountain to get rid of the nuclear waste when 90% of that fuel is still usable in new type of reactors like the one proposed by General Atomics and others.

General Atomics is not the only company proposing new type of rectors.

Small and medium reactors with development well advanced

Name	Capacity	Type	Developer
KLT-40S	35 MWe	PWR	OKBM, Russia
VK-300	300 MWe	PWR	Atomenergoproekt, Russia
CAREM	27 MWe	PWR	CNEA & INVAP, Argentina
NHR-200	200 MWt	PWR	INET, China
IRIS	100-335 MWe	PWR	Westinghouse-led, international
mPower	125 MWe	PWR	Babcock & Wilcox, USA
SMART	330 MWt	PWR	KAERI, South Korea
NuScale	45 MWe	PWR	NuScale Power, USA
MRX	30-100 MWe	PWR	JAERI, Japan
HTR-PM	2x250 MWt	HTR	INET & Huaneng, China
PBMR	200 MWt	HTR	Eskom, South Africa
GT-MHR	285 MWe	HTR	General Atomics (USA), Minatom (Russia)
BREST	300 MWe	LMR	RDIPE, Russia
SVBR-100	100 MWe	LMR	Rosatom/En+, Russia
FUJI	100 MWe	MSR	ITHMSO, Japan-Russia-USA