My Comments on:

Jonathan Dresner, Deepwater Horizon, Chernobyl, Bhopal,
HNN News at Home, before  June 9,  2010

Andrew D. Todd

 a_d_todd@rowboats-sd-ca.com 

http://rowboats-sd-ca.com/

Originally Published:
http://www.hnn.us/articles/127605.html (no longer working)

now: http://hnn.us/articles/127605.html


My Responses:


Petroleum  Not Required for Petrochemicals (06/09/2010 03:08 PM).

I don't agree with your assertion that petroleum is fundamental to the chemical  industry.

Petrochemicals are not inherently petroleum-based. Rather, they are  the byproducts of producing a particular kind of chemical-- gasoline-- from oil, and they would also be the byproduct of producing gasoline from coal or biomass. Such chemicals used to be called "coal-tar-derivatives," back in the age of the steam engine. They typically resulted from reducing coal to pure carbon ("coke")  in  order to make steel from raw iron ore. (Fe_O_n + C  => Fe + C_O_2). Another  product was coal-gas for household use,  which had to be refined to remove the more poisonous  components. Trying to produce a pure and uniform chemical product, whether coke, gasoline, or illuminating and cooking gas, out of an amorphous hydrocarbon  mix such as coal or oil, inherently resulted in a certain quantity of "chemical scrap," which could be reprocessed, or used for internal fuel, or sold for other uses.  Interestingly, the Sasol synfuel people in South  Africa combined their coal-based synfuel  plants with electric power plants. Whatever unusable  chemicals resulted from the Fischer-Tropf process got fed into the boiler and turned into electricity.

This is rather like saying that a tailor shop generates rags, as  an inherent byproduct of the act of cutting  out garments. Even if the tailor  starts using  different kinds of cloth, or  starts producing different  styles of clothing,  he will still  generate rags. If you are in the  high-grade paper-making business, you  might  go around and buy the tailor's rags every so often.

It is a peculiarity of the gasoline ("Otto") engine that it dictates fine specifications for its fuel,  in terms of how volatile the fuel is, and how long it takes to ignite, etc. This is inherent in  the mechanism, which introduces fuel into the combustion chamber before the time when the fuel is supposed to ignite. By contrast, a Diesel engine, and even more so, a Gas Turbine, stipulates that the fuel will not be introduced into the combustion chamber  until the combustion chamber is well within "ignition conditions."  For a fuel, gasoline is remarkably like an industrial material, and, as a fuel,  it is of needlessly high  quality. The Otto system is not used for engines of any great size. Depending on whether lightness or durability is most  required, engines over  five hundred horsepower are either  Gas-Turbine or Diesel. The most advanced conventional automobile engines have Diesel modes,  meaning that they operate in the Otto cycle for burst power and quick  starting, but in the Diesel cycle  for sustained  running. However, once automobiles adopt the  electric-hybrid-power system, the engine, the prime-mover, only operates in sustained-running mode anyway. In other words, once the  dust settles,  all cars are Hybrid cars, and a  Hybrid car is a Diesel-Hybrid car, more or  less by definition. An oil  industry primarily geared to producing Diesel fuel instead of gasoline would do less of the kind of refining operations which result in petrochemical feedstocks.

One might add that purely electric-powered  transportation is  likely to increase, one way or the other. The result of all  of this would be that petroleum residues would be less attractive  as a feedstock for  making plastics and other organic chemicals. Coal or  biomass would be used instead. The quantities of feedstock used for plastics are fairly small, and they tend not to constitute a significant fraction of the plastic's cost, so there is a good deal of room for substitution.  The wrapping for five dollars worth of food might be a gram or so of plastic, ultimately  made from a hundredth of a cent's worth of oil. It doesn't really matter if  the price of oil increases tenfold. The cost of the  plastic is overwhelmingly value added by manufacturing, and  even that is small, compared to what it is used to package.

As for fertilizers, they are inorganic compounds of nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus, potassium, etc. Nitrogen, the historical limiting ingredient, is literally pulled out of the air. Hydrocarbon fuel is used merely as a source of energy to drive chemical reactions in a direction they would not  normally take, to drive them "uphill" instead of  "downhill." Much the same goes for the production of the various acids, bleaches, and salts. Indeed, ethylene, the basic foundation molecule of plastic-making, can be produced by  zapping  methane (natural gas, bio-gas, etc.) with an  electric-arc, and there is no particularly good reason that  the electric-arc cannot be  powered by a nuclear power plant.

Certain electric power plants in Texas were originally built to run on local lignite deposits, a low-value fuel whose bulk required it to be burnt close to the place of mining. When those deposits were exhausted, the power plants began importing coal  from Wyoming. The cost of the coal was fairly small compared to the  value added by converting it to electricity, so it made economic sense to find a way  to keep on using the power plants. No doubt the  Texas chemical industry can make similar adjustments. These adjustments might not prevent the Texas chemical industry from  eventually declining in favor of chemical industries in  other states, where energy  was cheaper, or the distance to markets was less. West Virginia's coal and coal-related industries have  been  in long-term  decline, faced with competition from  cheap western coal, and presumably certain  parts of Texas would have a similar experience.  This,  however, does not amount to a national crisis.

Gasoline presents an economic  issue because of the extent to which we expect  it to be cheap enough for profligate use, and for no other reason. Considered as mere energy, that is, as a source of fuel for generating electricity, oil and gasoline are not serious contenders. Once you find a means  to power transportation primarily by electricity, oil becomes unimportant.

All kinds of little things are happening. For example, the Federal Railroad Administration is promoting a better coupler for freight cars, one  which automatically connects air  hoses and data lines when two cars bang together, and allows uncoupling with a remote-control  unit, similar to a garage-door  opener.  The effect is to make railroads a little more competitive with trucks. There is a kind of virtuous feedback loop which operates for railroads. If  you can get the traffic density up to a certain point, various kinds of improvements such as electric power  and separated right-of-way become economically feasible, and you get something  like a subway, with everything underground, automated, and operating at incredible speeds.



Related Topic: The Phony Afghan Lithium Bonanza (06/18/2010 08:51 AM).

I should like to raise a point which is not immediately germane to the subject  of the oil spill,  but which has arisen within the last  week or  so, the  claim that the United States has to stay in  Afghanistan to mine certain  minerals. Several days ago, James Risen published an article in the New York  Times, effectively ghost-written for General Petraus, presenting  dubious arguments  in  favor of this proposition.

Afghanistan is alleged to have a trillion dollars worth  of minerals, including a large quantity of  Lithium, and this is alleged to be an essential  industrial resource.  I have assembled a collection of reports, and the sum and  total of them is that the  purported Lithium shortage is fictional.  One can alway obtain Lithium from the sea,  in virtually  unlimited quantities,  and the cost of doing so is very  small, compared  to  the cost of working lithium up into batteries or other electronic devices.  Thus, there is no  compelling  need for Afghan lithium. The  limiting factor on the use of  Lithium batteries, incidentally,  is not their  cost  or  resource-availability,  but their   weight. It is possible that one might reach a point where the  battery cannot generate enough power to carry itself for  a certain distance at a  certain speed. The serious prospects for electric transportation involve building roads with electric power built in, and this renders Lithium ultimately irrelevant.

It is also claimed that  Afghanistan has a lot of  iron ore, and this accounts for  approximately  half  of the claimed trillion dollars  worth  of mineral resources.  However, like coal, iron ore is cheap and heavy and bulky and ubiquitous, and transportation  costs are always a major concern. If you look at a map  of the world's iron-mining districts, you will find that, while they are distributed all over the world, they are all  within a couple of hundred  miles  of the sea, or a major inland waterway,  such as the American Great Lakes or the Russian Volga. Two to three  hundred miles of rail haulage is about as much as iron  ore can stand,  while remaining economic. New iron ore tends to preferentially used where particular steel alloys need to specified, in building transportation equipment, rather than  providing structural steel. For structural steel, recycled scrap is just as good, and the so-called  "mini-mills" which produce it are sited to economize on transportation. Afghanistan is inland, and behind mountain ranges. There are no  inland  waterways-- and no water to fill them. There are  no railroads-- and while railroads could be built in principle, they would be understandably expensive. The iron and coal reserves of Afghanistan, such as they are, have no  value unless you  build an industrial region on top of them, in which millions of people are employed in thousands of  companies, producing sophisticated machinery such as automobiles and aircraft. 

Another quarter  of Afghanistan's claimed trillion dollars of minerals is copper. It  _might_,  in theory, be economically possible to produce copper in Afghanistan, if there was peace and a stable government. Copper is just valuable enough that it  can-- sometimes--  be  mined inland. However, copper is not scarce enough to support  something like OPEC. The  most basic fact is that  the world has something like thirty to a hundred years of copper reserves at  present rates of consumption, and the copper is not really being  consumed, but  merely being  put into durable use.  The  price of copper,  like the  price of  other metals, steel included, has gone up in recent years because Chinese  demand has out-run the capacity of  the machinery for turning  ore-in-the-ground into ingots or I-beams, or reels of wire. Such  equipment  cannot be built very quickly. This  does not imply that  Afghanistan has any special advantage. Suppose that you are  building a ten-thousand-ton steam shovel, in parts, in Korea, for  mining copper  ore. You  have the choice to  ship  this shovel to Australia, or Chile,  or  Canada, or Arizona, or  possibly even Afghanistan. Why choose Afghanistan? All the cost factors are against Afghanistan, even if it were at peace.   One must bear in mind that many  uses of copper are replaceable by either aluminum or plastic, both of whose ores are fundamentally abundant. The developed countries have  enormous reserves of copper-in-use, in  the  form of wires, pipes, etc., reserves built up over the last  hundred  years or so. As recycling expands, large quantities of copper-in-use will be replaced by something else. The break even point for American copper mines is in  the neighborhood of a dollar-and-a-half per pound. The controlling fact is  that you have to  dig a hundred or two hundred pounds of ore to get a pound of copper. Some overseas mines have lower costs. Given the necessity of building infrastructure from the start, Afghanistan's costs are likely to be on the high  side.

For three different purported minerals,  the cost calculations do not  check out.  In  short, the purported mineral riches of Afghanistan are what  used to be called  a "stoner  fantasy." What is more fundamental is  that the  Afghan mineral report is an example of the  idea of "unobtainium,"  a uniquely rare mineral which justifies extravagant efforts to retrieve it. The scientific conception of minerals and raw materials generally starts from the  idea that a molecule is simply an arrangement of atoms, and that, by arranging fairly common atoms, you can make just about any kind of material you want, or any kind of device you want, within the  limits of fundamental scientific laws. There are only ninety-two naturally-occurring elements, many of which can be substituted for each other. A claim  that one fairly small country has anything  indispensable, is, ipso facto,  suspect. 

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Here is a  short collection of reviews of  published articles, a proto-review essay,  in which I discuss  the subject of electric transportation in a systematic way, with a view to debunking the errors introduced by opportunistic businessmen:

http://rowboats-sd-ca.com/adtodd1a/blog_01.htm
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Materials on Lithium:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium
http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/mcs/
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http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/06/100616-energy-afghanistan-lithium/
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The Afghan government report.

http://www.bgs.ac.uk/afghanminerals/raremetal.htm
http://www.bgs.ac.uk/afghanminerals/docs/RareMetals_A4.pdf

This report  claims deposits of 450,000 tons, 130,000 tons, 124,000 tons, 127,000 tons, 187,000 tons, and 253,000 tons of Li_2_O in various locations, for a total of 1,271,000 tons Li_2_O, or about 600,000 tons of pure Lithium, worth anywhere from three to thirty billion dollars, less mining and refining costs. Bear in mind that this is effectively a company promoter's prospectus,  likely to be on the  high side rather than the  low  side. This would be only a tenth of the deposits in  Bolivia, and and a thirtieth of global  reserves. 
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JAMES RISEN, U.S. Identifies Vast Mineral Riches in Afghanistan, New York  Times,   June 13, 2010

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/world/asia/14minerals.html
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/06/14/world/asia/14minerals-graphic.html

"I have a bridge I want to sell to Mr. Risen..."
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M. Steinberg and V.D. Dang, "Preliminary design and analysis of a process for the extraction of lithium from seawater," Sept 1, 1975 (OSTI Identifier    OSTI ID: 7351225, Report Number(s)    BNL-20535-R; CONF-760112-4)(Symposium on United States lithium resources and requirements by the year 2000, Lakewood, CO, USA, 22 Jan 1976) [ABSTRACT]

This  is a notice of some research done in 1975, concerning  recovery of Lithium from seawater to be used as nuclear fuel in a "breeder" fusion reactor. The idea was that lithium would be irradiated and become Tritium (heavy hydrogen), and then fuse into helium. Of course, nowadays, people merely want to use lithium as a  durable battery.

"The energy requirement for lithium extraction varies between 0.08 and 2.46 kWh(e)/gm for a range of production rates varying between 10/sup 4/ and 10/sup 8/ kg/y;"

http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/product.biblio.jsp?osti_id=7351225

At worst case, that is 2400 KwH/kilogram. Taking electricity at a  wholesale rate of perhaps 5 cents/KwH, that would be $120 per kilogram of lithium. In short, there is an unlimited supply of Lithium lapping at our shores.
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http://www.lithiumsite.com/Lithium_Market.html

Price information for lithium carbonate, ranging from $2000-$5000 /ton. Lithium Carbonate, Li_2_C_O_3 is  14/74 metallic lithium, so this is equivalent to $5-$12 per pound  of pure Lithium (approx $10-$25 per kg).
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William Tahil, The Trouble  With  Lithium: Implications of Future PHEV Production for  Lithium  Demand. 2006

http://www.evworld.com/library/lithium_shortage.pdf
http://www.meridian-int-res.com/Projects/Lithium_Problem_2.pdf

 Tahil quotes Lithium Carbonate at $1000-10,000 per ton, ie. $2.50-$25 per pound  of pure  Lithium (approx $1-$10 per  kg).  [p.13]  Also cites  a requirement, for current Lithium-Ion batteries, of 0.3 kg  (metal equivalent)  of lithium per KwH of power storage, estimates a typical requirement of 5-9  KwH per automobile for 20-30 miles range (at  undetermined speed) [p. 6]. Expected production cost of Li-Ion batteries,  $350 per  KwH [p. 11], which is at least a hundred times the cost of the  Lithium at the highest market  price, and twenty times the cost of getting Lithium from seawater. 
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N.B. Note that the original Toyota  Prius required a battery of only 1.7 Kw-H to achieve its dramatic improvements in gas  mileage via  dynamic or regenerative braking, whereas the Tesla has a battery  of  70 Kw-H, which weighs about a thousand  pounds, of which only about forty pounds are Lithium. The Prius's regenerative braking system  is intelligently designed to keep the battery's  energy requirements small enough  that almost any kind of battery  would do at a pinch.

One clever system  I have heard of in China involves a bus which uses ultracapacitors, and recharges itself at every bus stop, every couple of blocks. This is less expensive than running a full wire along the  bus's  route.
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http://www.ecogeek.org/automobiles/2918-lithium-supply-fears-are-total-bs

http://www.prism-magazine.org/sept04/briefings.htm

http://www.evworld.com/article.cfm?storyid=1434

http://gas2.org/2009/08/05/battery-shortage-slows-prius-sales-will-batteries-hold-back-hybrids/

http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/charged_with_salt_and_batteries/



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