Fairhaven, The River

Aviation News

Today's Aviation Week had three relevant articles.

1. Another article on upgrading aircraft to use digital telemetry, GPS, etc.  This time it was discussion of the steps that Delta is taking with some of their aircraft.  Nothing new or radical is reported.  It's just another article how to upgrade at reduced cost.  Long term (assuming the FAA mis-managers don't completely ruin things) the digital upgrades should reduce fuel use, air pollution, noise pollution, and flight times.  Switching from voice to text messaging makes sense for all the routine flight control.  There are two pilots and messaging doesn't interfere with flying the way it does with driving.  It's faster and avoids the confusion over exact numbers that sometimes affects the voice controls.  It also carries a lot more messages per second over the limited radio channels.
2. A report on prototype effort by British Airways, as part of joint effort with Solena Fuels and GreenSky London, to build a $500 million plant to convert waste biomass into fuels.  It's to be built in Tilbury and go operational in 2016.  The plant will take 565,000 metric tons of sorted municipal waste and generate 50,000 tons jet fuel, 50,000 tons diesel, 20,000 tons naptha, and 50 megawatts excess electrical power.

   The feedstock is dry sorted municipal waste. That means metals, glass, and other recyclables have been removed.  (Technically it's called refuse derived fuel - RDF).  Part of the deal is the attraction of using something that somebody else collects and pays you to take, as are airline commitments to reduce carbon impact.  These fuels count as bio-fuels with no carbon impact.

   It's a plasma torch gasification, so plastic, tires, etc. can be processed.  It uses the usual syngas F-T processes, with the latest chemical reactor and catalyst designs.

3. An article about the complaints about latest idiocy on carbon tax for aviation.  The European Parliament has clearly said that they will collect tax on aviation travel outside Europe, has created a bureaucratic monster, and all the non-EU countries (US, Russia, China, etc.) have reacted with immense hostility. This choice abrogates promises to use ICAO international processes for aviation CO2 controls. One of the absurdities is that a charter airline that flies one 747 per week is considered de minimus carbon contributor and avoids most of the paperwork.  A business jet operator that flies one business trip per month is not considered de minimus and must follow the full bureaucratic procedures.

   The annual paperwork cost (filings, people, etc.) is estimated at $100K/yr.  For an airline this is just another piece of the regulatory burden.  For business jet operators this is a big extra cost.  There is a series of "free" allowances.  Again, even for small airlines the cost of filing and qualifying is justified by the value of the allowances.  For business jet operators, the filing cost exceeds the value of the allowances.

   The laws justification was CO2 emissions, but clearly the regulations are designed to eliminate private aviation and business jet operations in favor of commercial airlines.  Extending the reach outside Europe is a simple power and money grab by the EU Parliament.

History repeats with sulfur pollution

The patterns from the 1950's  through 1970's sulfur controls are repeating in the ocean shipping world, where sulfur and NOx limits are being tightened.  There is a mix of scrubbers and fuel shifts to LNG taking place.  Of course the amounts of sulfur and human impact are much smaller.  In the 1950's dozens of people died from the toxic sulfur levels in some of London's fogs.  Now, the worry is long term subtle damage to the environment.  It's still interesting to see steady progress while the patterns repeat.

Eat oysters, fight global warming

Recent travel inspired me to do a little research.  Oysters are a form of carbon sequestration.  They accomplish the same kind of permanent carbon storage as technology costing millions.  The oyster shell is calcium carbonate (mostly) and lasts for many millenia.

I found that your typical oyster has 10gms of carbon, (or 30 gms of CO2).  At current prices of 10-20 Euro/ton for tradable CO2 it's not much per oyster.  The fisheries commision did investigate getting Kyoto credits.

Turns out you don't get credit for revenue generating activities (like growing and selling oysters).  If you grew the oysters and threw them away you might get credit.  But activities that generate revenue don't count as CO2 reduction, even if they do reduce the CO2 levels.  Welcome to Kyoto bureaucracy rules.

So you just get to feel good about helping the environment when you eat an oyster.  It's helped the water quality and helped the climate.

Tidbits from a so-so lecture

I extracted two useful items from an otherwise poor lecture by a Toyota regulatory affairs staffer.  He was explaining their opposition to the flexible fuels mandate.

The two useful items were:

• Take your proposal and remove all mention of global warming or fuel supply security issues.  Examine what is left.  If it's not attractive, you have a problem.  Car buyers (and most of the public) don't consider policy issues when making a purchase like a car.  Too many proposals look like this when those two policy issues are removed: "We want to make cars more expensive, lower quality, less convenient, and less reliable."
• Every administration from Carter on to the present has picked a silver bullet automotive policy, spent tens of billions to subsidize it, then had it fail.  The Obama silver bullet is electric cars.  He listed them back for all the other administrations.  All failed.  The total waste is in the hundreds of billions.  That money could have been better used to make regular modest improvements that would add up to big improvements by now.

You can tell he is from the Toyota production system experience.  They concentrate their design and engineering on regular steady improvement, based on measurement and experience.  Toyota does not like big radical changes.

The rest of his talk needed a lot of work on clarity and presentation. 

The core of Toyota's opposition to the flexible fuels mandate is that the cost will be much more than the politicians estimate, and the other savings minimal.  Instead of mandating that automobiles run on any mix of gasoline, ethanol, or methanol as long as it is at least 15% gasoline, he suggested mandating a mix range with at least 75% gasoline.  This would make a huge difference in cost and reliability.  He argued that the fuel impact of that difference would be nil.  If you take the largest prediction of ethanol/methanol production for 2030 and the smallest prediction for gasoline needs by assuming that mileage targets are met, there will only be enough ethanol and methanol to make a 25% methanol/ethanol 75% gasoline mix. 

The good, bad, and the ugly

Summary: Examples of good climate investment and a bad investment.  Unfortunately, the environmentalist hucksters are pushing the bad investments constantly.  The crony capitalists are doing worse.

The good

This summer the Tower 55 project got funding.  It's a $90 million construction job fixing a major railroad bottleneck, eliminating mutual traffic interference with local highways, and improving traffic flow for rail and roads.  It will be $40 million of government funds (for the highway work) and $50 million in private funds (for the rail, environmental, legal, admin, etc.).  Esitmated carbon reduction is 180 million lbs, giving a cost of $1000/ton for carbon reductions.

There are many projects like this, both large and small: CREATE, Heartland Corridor, TIGER,...

The bad

I reviewed the financial proposals for a local solar power park.  This will be a $12 million investment, paid for primarily by tax credits on the contruction (3 million) and green energy credits for electricity production (9 million).  The unadjusted revenue from power generation basically covers the operation and maintenance costs.  It will eliminate 3 million lbs of carbon, giving a cost of $8000/ton for carbon reductions.

There are far too many projects like this being pushed.  In terms of both economic impact and climate impact, this money should go the projects like Tower 55.  But this one will probably be funded.  The environmentalist hucksters want publicity, shiny toys, etc.  Actual climate impact comparisons are not part of their creed.

The ugly

The extensive corruption and mismanagement of government agencies and funds is surfacing with new stories weekly from the US, India, and elsewhere.  Crony capitalism is well entrenched and has found many ways to extract money from environmental concerns.

Part of dealing with this is to always ask "what will the cost per ton of carbon reductions be?"  Cost must include construction costs, subsidies, tax credits, incentives, etc.  Look at the total social cost.  Then compare projects.  For organizations with a track record, also compare their original estimates with the actual results upon project completion.  It's a modest step that is easy to explain and easy to justify.  It's enough to make a big shift away from bad projects to good projects.

A note on energy efficiency

I haven't ranted much lately about energy efficiency for the simple reason that it's becoming widely adopted and its saving a lot of energy.  The eco-activists are still unhappy.  I've even read some VC complaining bitterly that people are spending their money on energy efficiency rather than the VC's new alternative energy thing.

Press coverage is rare because the buyers are doing this to save money, so why waste money on PR efforts?  Sometimes you do get energy control companies that think the PR is worthwhile, especially for famous buildings.  But most of the saving is from small renovations and replacement of facilities and equipment.  Those don't make the news.

So it was nice to see the net effect is large enough that it now sometimes makes the news.

Hurricanes and Global Warming

Since there is a hurricane approaching the US coast, it's time to finally write this one.

A few years ago a paper was published in Nature that basically said:

If A, and B, and C, .... then there would be more hurricanes globally.

This is a fairly typical structure for a hypothesis.  But it struck me as odd that it was published in Nature.  Simple hypotheses like this are usually published in more specialized journals where they can attract the interest of other specialists who can contribute analysis of the proposal and data to confirm or deny the hypothesis.  The synchronized PR campaign and publicity explained this anomaly.  I've seen this before where a hypothetical is used as the basis for political campaigns. 

This particular hypothesis included two initial hypotheticals:

1. It hypothesized that hurricane frequency and intensity would increase if the temperature gradient between equator and poles increased.  This is not proven.  There are theoretical reasons that this might be the case, but there are others that would indicate the contrary.
2. It hypothesized that global warming would increase this temperature gradient.  Again, there are good theoretical arguments for and against.

After lots of publicity came the big lie, and it's a whopper.  It's another example of facts being irrelevant.  Examination of global hurricane data shows no significant change in hurricane frequency.  At the same time the press were bellowing about the increase in hurricane activity, the actual level was slightly below average.  The difference was that Katrina and a few other hurricanes hit the US.  That generates lots of publicity.

There is a recent increase in North Atlantic activity, which definitely excites lots of publicity.   There are claims that this is evidence for global warming, but the hypothesis was about global affects, not a local Atlantic effect.  The North Atlantic variability is a known weather cycle, although the underlying physics remain a mystery.  The current higher levels were first predicted in a 1955 report to the US Insurance industry.  The only reason it's a surprise to the public is the unwillingness of the public to hear the associated message about the dangers of building in dangerous locations.

But this all has nothing to do with the understanding, reality, or characteristics of global warming.   The absence of a global increase in hurricanes does not mean there is no global warming.  It might mean that global warming does not increase the temperature gradient, or that increased temperature gradient does not increase hurricane activity.

This could have been a quiet internal working paper.  But instead it was turned into a big political campaign, complete with misrepresentation of the paper, the real data, etc. 

2009 Paper Recycling

About a year ago I was wondering how the recession would affect paper recycling in the US.  The answer is that it probably increased recycling percentages.  The 2009 figure was 63.4% recovered paper, up a lot from 2008's 57.7%.  I guess people took advantage of every opportunity to save pennies.  Now I get to wonder whether this will stick.  The long term trend has been an increase of about 1% per year since 1970, with noticeable flat spots and jumps in recycling.

I wouldn't be surprised to see the percentage stay flat for a few years.  The economic recession did reduce paper production, making it easier to collect the 64% because new factories and systems were not needed.  Instead production could shift from lower percentage facilities to higher percentage facilities.  I also expect it to continue to increase as more people and commercial users learn techniques to gather used paper with less inconvenience and cost.  Their experience will show that there are definite financial benefits to well organized recycling efforts, and this experience will continue to spread.

CFLs are succeeding

The latest NEMA numbers for CFL sales indicate significant success.  Unfortunately, the press release doesn't do the numbers for the press, and the press and public are innumerate.  So they are interpreting the numbers as indicating problems.

The past three years have shown CFL sales at 28, 20, and 24% of total bulb sales.  This is after a fairly rapid ramp up from a few percent.  This indicates a huge success, but that is obscured by the difference in bulb lifespan. 

Consider a steady state situation where half the use is CFL and half the use is incandescents.  CFL's last 8 times longer than incandescents.  So for every CFL that needs replacing, there will be eight incandescent replacements.  That's an 11% market share for CFLs.  The following matrix shows the bulb sales share for different steady state situations, with both a five and eight times life (because for several years there were quality problems with some of the CFL makers).

Expected CFL sales percentage

Market penetration	5* Longer	8* Longer
50%	0.19	0.11
60%	0.23	0.16
70%	0.32	0.23
80%	0.44	0.33
90%	0.64	0.53

If the present situation is steady state, the current sales percentage would mean 60 to 75% of installed bulb usage is CFLs.  If lifespan is 8 times longer and current installed bulb usage is 50%, then installed usage increased by 13% last year to 63%.  Either way these numbers indicate a substantial success for CFLs.

(This analysis does not incorporate the lag effect from longer life.  CFLs sold this year will not need replacement for several years, which means that each sale that replaces an incandescent means no bulb sale at all for a few years.  This will also cause a temporary dip in CFL sales as they replace the incandescents but don't yet need replacement themselves.)

Public acceptance of CFLs

I see a new push of frivolous polls about the public attitudes toward various energy efficiency activities.  I call them frivolous because they seem designed to confuse rather than inform.  They paired questions like "Is it good to walk to work?" (lots of yes answers) with the responses to "Do you walk to work?" (lots of no answers).  It's impractical for people to change this sort of behavior.  They have to change jobs, relocate, or both to make this kind of change.  Substantive change will take many years.  This makes questions like these frivolous.

More serious and accurate answers are available for some kinds of behavior.  For example, the statistics for CFL usage can be obtained with accuracy by looking at sales data.  People may lie and polls can only statistically sample at best. Actual sales figures are available.  Unfortunately, 2009 is not yet published, but you can see a serious change start in 2005 and accelerate through 2007.  The energy impact is larger than the graphs would imply.  CFLs last 5-10 times longer than incandescent sales.

Those graphs are also normalized to 2006.  In 2006 the actual CFL bulbs sold was about 100 million, and the actual incandescent bulbs sold was about 1,600 million.  So that gradual drop in incandescent bulbs sold is actually a large reduction.  The 24% CFL sales means continued substantial erosion of incandescent sales.  The longer life should also result in both  incandescent and CFL sales dropping.  There are early hints of that in the 2008 data.

There is an new example of how the Congressional micro-management and mercantilism can be counter productive.  The DOE just this month issued the regulation allowing stimulus funding to be used for purchase of CFLs.  There are no US makers of CFLs, so the "buy american" portions of the spending bills has prevented use of stimulus money for their purchase.  Now it is permitted.