Remember just a few weeks ago Warren Buffett bought BNSF outright? The press blather was predictable: "Our country's future prosperity depends on its having an efficient and well-maintained rail system."

Last night, though, while discussing an oil-poor future, my economist friend mentioned an alternative situation for buying the rail: electrification.

From The Journal of Commerce:

Earlier this year, BNSF Railway’s chairman, president and CEO, Matthew K. Rose, said he was in talks with transmission line companies that want to install new power lines in the railroad’s right of way. And he said BNSF was exploring whether that could help the railroad convert large parts of its sprawling western network to electricity.

Industry sources indicated other large carriers were looking at the same options, as Congress and the Obama administration push to upgrade the capacity of the U.S. electricity grid and tie in more alternative power sources including wind energy farms.

My friend also sent me a post from a rail site (sadly, one locked down to members only) which said:

If the wind- and solar-power crowd are really able to create some critical mass in their plans for mass conversion to such energy generation, transmission corridors for new high voltage lines are going to become necessary in the West. The battles for these rights-of-way are already starting to brew in several places in the West. . . .

Single steel pole towers, which are more easily situated on a railroad right-of-way than the old wider-footprint lattice-work towers, are now capable of handling up to the 765,000 volt lines being discussed for transmission from potential wind and solar fields in the West. . . .

Combine this observation with Buffett's planned wind farm facilities and one sees a definite business plan shaping up.

Buffett started as an oil man. He knows what's coming: Fuel shortages leading to ever higher fuel prices. Electric rail lines -- fed by the power lines sharing the corridor -- give him an incredible advantage, if he can get the major routes powered in time. And because he bought the rail outright, he won't have to dither about with quarterly stockholder reports. This means he can take his sweet time electrifying without worrying about "enhancing shareholder value" every few months.

This is interesting and worth watching.

Wars. We all understand very well that it’s just somebody’s business, somebody’s money. Cruel, bloody money.
Millionaires, multi-millionaires – their money are used in arms traffic, politics. All that happens in order to earn MORE money. I address to all oligarchs whose money are concerned with politics (and it means that they are concerned with all the wars):
BUY these five paintings! Give your fucking money for them! Hang them in your room, look at them and think about death. Think about those who died for your money. Think about death which is represented on these pictures and think about life which they are washed with – these pictures are sodden with my milk, with my life. I did it as hope that HUMAN life would become more important for you than money. Buy these paintings, accept this life and remember about it always. Look at them and think about the fact that you will die too and all the world can perish if we don’t invest money in life. Everything can disappear, and what for you accumulated all these millions and billions?
Buy these pictures and show to all the people fighting for their lives that you are worth being called a HUMAN BEING. After your death the world will remember that you didn’t live here for nothing.
Please! All those who read this – add me as a friend! Help me to extend my manifest. It must find it’s addressees.
LET’S SAVE LIFE! LET’S STOP WARS!

Tuesday night and tonight, I showed my students "The End of Suburbia." The most memorable reactions were "I never understood how anyone was going to make hydrogen work for running cars," "What a shame Americans are so spoiled. The end of oil is going to take away their toys and they'll all cry.", and "Should we really bankrupt ourselves fighting a war we can't win?" The second student wasn't born here, as you could probably tell.

Following is the worksheet I gave them. If you have the time, see how many you can answer.

( Tonight's worksheet )

So probably most of you heard the news, Warren Buffett, the second richest man in the world, just bought the rest of this huge railroad company for billions of dollars. This is the single biggest acquisition of his career.

The news is touting this as "Warren Buffett is betting on America!"

But to me it seems like he's betting on peak oil. What do you think?

http://solarbird.livejournal.com/885364.html?thread=4809076#t4809076




Aside from wondering what she's going to say I did enjoy looking back at the GS superspike report from March 2008...

New 'super-spike' might mean $200 a barrel oil - Goldman's projections foretell persistent turbulence in energy prices ``The core of our 'super-spike' view is that oil prices will keep rising until demand declines globally on a multiyear basis, resulting in the return of excess capacity and a lower cost structure," Goldman's analysts said. "Given this view, once excess capacity returns, we think prices can move sharply lower."''

...with no explanation of how demand would get lower.

The #1 country in searching for "transition towns" and "peak oil" is New Zealand.

http://trends.google.com/trends?q=transition+towns

http://trends.google.com/trends?q=peak+oil

I was really hoping that TPTB were going to try to get the world out of recession for a bit longer by stabilizing the price of oil at $70/barrel but it appears that they aren't.

I guess it's every cartel for itself, damn the torpedoes, etc. That and "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Oil Lunch for China."

Chinese Oil Demand Resumes Uptrend in September After August Dip ``Chinese oil demand climbed out of its August trough to 33.8 million metric tons in September ... a 12.6% spike in September oil demand''

China's oil thirst spurs race ``Crude prices rose sharply Tuesday after the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) said world oil demand will be stronger than it had expected this summer.''

So here we go again. How far up will the price go? What will the consequences be this time?

If we hit $100/barrel or more what will the crummy excuses be this time when the economy craps out? An "extend and pretend/delay and pray" crisis?

Well, not all agriculture requires lots of sun.

As apart from urban design proposals such as New Urbanism and some of the so-called "green" architecture being designed by experimental design offices, semi-urban farms like these do not propose a bright and new future where environmental problems spur fantastic Disney-like living, and nor do they suggest, as in the case of New Urbanism, a over-dependence on historical precedent to solve design problems. Instead, a project like the above becomes viable through its novel and creative use of the infrastructural landscape (in this case, an abandoned infrastructural landscape) which is by far the most dominant type of landscape in the modern human world: urban centers are not just busy streets, markets, and high-rises, and nor are they dominated mainly by suburban sprawl. Any urban center is fed by a network of support mechanisms that extend far beyond anywhere we would call the "city". After all, Chicago's treated sewage effluent eventually finds itself in the Gulf of Mexic. It is this infra-structure that provides opportunities for new adaptations of agricultural production - production that has generally been assumed to be somehow totally dependent upon the rural landscape. Even in the usual proposals for urban-agriculture, rural and somewhat pastoral surfaces are zoned, demarcated, and often decontaminated, apart from the unwanted city, in an effort to "restore" open space that is often considered to be a pre-requisite for the growth of food and of a new "post-industrial" urban reality. But really, there are forms of agriculture that depend on nothing but the urban and industrial / infrastructural landscape, and we should take advantage of them. 

True, this specific example is one of the re-use of an abandoned  infrastructure (or so called abandoned infrastructure), but it forms in a way its own linkage to the city that could not have come about without the realities of industry and its support networks. And in an energy-scarce world where food production will need to be re-introduced as a visible and highly activated center of urban life, it's worth considering embracing infrastructure as a medium on which to construct the future city.

It's not that alternative (ie wind, solar, biomass, etc.) isn't a good idea. It's not that we shouldn't pursue it. It's about "what does it really buy us in comparison with petroleum?" and "this is why we do stick will have to stick with petroleum as long as the EROEI is still positive."

Since there's so much written about this I defer to paraphrasing:

The Joule Standard
Maurice Adema

The “Joule standard” is an initiative to start using the Joule as the standard unit for all energy types; and in this way start addressing an enormous global problem of “energy illiteracy”. The world's population is highly energy illiterate; which is mainly due to the fact that we never talk about energy volumes or quantities in the correct unit for energy.

[...skip ahead...]

Most people have absolutely no clue about how a liter or gallon of fuel compares to a kWh of electricity because they are completely different forms of energy. But we would be very well able to compare them if they were expressed in the same unit.

I would like to butt in with a comparison between this idea and unit prices which help with shopping at grocery stores.

[...skip ahead...]

In today's fuel industry many new fuels are appearing on the market but every different type of fuel has in fact a different energy content and what you really need from a fuel is the energy that it contains not the volume in liters or gallons. A liter of "fossil" diesel contains for example 38.7 MJ per liter and a liter of Bio-Diesel only 30.5 MJ per liter. If you change from fossil to Bio-Diesel don't be surprised to consume up to 25% more liters. Gasoline contains 34.7 MJ per liter and ethanol only 20.5 MJ per liter and thus any mixture of the two will be lower than 34.7MJ per liter. Consumer protection agencies should be aware of this and it should be enforced that oil companies start mentioning their energy content of their various products and maybe even base the price per MJ.

In short, petroleum has more energy in it than the liquid alternatives. This, not some conspiracy by oil corporations, is why we use it.

As for solar, by using Joules as our unit for comparing energy how much does a given amount of solar compare to oil and coal?

1 barrel of oil contains over 6 billion Joules of energy. (See also What a barrel of oil is worth.)

The world currently consumes over 80 million barrels of oil a day, admittedly not 100% for energy since there are other products but we are working with very round (and huge) numbers here.

So what sort of solar contraption would produce 6,000,000,000 x 80,000,000 = 480,000,000,000,000,000 Joules in a day? 480 quadrillion Joules a day should be easy to produce, right? It can't be that this would be the issue, it's got to be some conspiracy that keeps us from switching away from oil, right?

1 kWh is 3.6 megaJoules (MJ). One barrel of oil contains 6,100 MJ (6.1 GJ) so 6,100 / 3.6 = ~1.7 mWh. 80 million barrels contains about 136 pWh. What does it take to generate 136 peta-Watt/hours per day?

At noon on the equator our sun gives us one kilowatt of free energy per square meter! Too bad it's not noon on the equator all day long. Too bad we can only capture solar energy at a maximum of 42.8% efficiency.

Brazil Faces the Oil Curse << the potential for self-destruction that goes with it. As many nations have discovered, drilling oil generates money but not necessarily development. Economists call it Dutch disease, after the affliction that hit the Netherlands in the 1960s, when a natural-gas bonanza in the North Sea overwhelmed the small economy with dollars and foreign investment, inflating the value of the guilder, which gutted Dutch exports and crippled national industry. Mostly, though, this is a poor nation's problem. Three decades after oil started flowing in Nigeria, a study by the International Monetary Fund revealed, per capita income had fallen slightly, but the number of people living on $1 a day or less practically doubled, from 36 million to 70 million, between 1970 and 2000. Venezuela pumped nearly 3 million barrels of oil when Hugo Chávez came to office in 1999. A little more than a decade later, Venezuela pumps 800,000 fewer barrels a day, the once stellar oil company PDVSA is a government cash box, poverty is little changed, and Chávez is entrenched in power as never before. It's no different in the Andes, Central Asia, or the Middle East, where oil fuels tyrants and leaves a deep stain of poverty and backwardness. >>


Not to mention http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movement_for_the_Emancipation_of_the_Niger_Delta and good old http://www.iags.org/iraqpipelinewatch.htm

---

Brazil Petrobras Makes 4th Oil Discovery In Key Santos Basin Block ``Petrobras has so far released estimates for three subsalt fields: Tupi, Iara and Guara. The three fields combined hold recoverable reserves of between 9.1 billion and 14 billion BOE.''

Article: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-cal-oil24-2009sep24,0,3884900.story

Which is about 2-days of world demand. Oh well. It's something, at least.

Edward Burtynsky: Oil

Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
October 3 – December 13, 2009
Traveling through 2012

This touring exhibition surveys a decade of photographic imagery exploring the subject of oil by artist Edward Burtynsky. The Canadian photographer has traveled internationally to chronicle the production, distribution, and use of this critical fuel. In addition to revealing the rarely-seen mechanics of its manufacture, Burtynksy photographs the effects of oil on our lives, depicting landscapes altered by its extraction from the earth and by the cities and suburban sprawl generated around its use. He also addresses the coming "end of oil," as we confront its rising cost and dwindling availability. This exhibition, premiering in the capital city of the United States in Fall 2009, represents a look at one of the most important subjects of our time by one of the most respected and recognized contemporary photographers in the world.

A world-class art museum with an installation that includes the "end of oil" as part of the theme. I wonder what corporate sponsors are funding this?

---

A related work by the artist:

``We all know that stuff comes from somewhere but we're disconnected from that." -- Burtynsky

Sacred Demise: A Book Review ''Carolyn Baker's newly released book Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Collapse is the first book devoted entirely to the psychological and spiritual aspects of today eco-nomic [sic] challenges.''

Robert Hirsch of the Hirsch report fame is interviewed by Tom Whipple. This report is available in a PDF from the September 7, 2009 edition of Peak Oil Review, a publication of ASPO-USA. Fortunately, it's also available as HTML on EV World.

visibility apparently got so high that NETL was told to stop any further work on peak oil -- Hirsch.

Hey guys,

I'm doing outreach for this dystopian indie drama-doc on global warming called The Age of Stupid and would love your help spreading the word.
The film premieres in the US 9.21.09 and 9.22.09 in the rest of the world for ONE NIGHT ONLY.
Watch the trailer, tell everyone you can to see it at a theater near you! :)





More about the film:

“The Age of Stupid,” directed by Franny Armstrong (“McLibel” and “Drowned Out”) features Oscar-nominated actor Pete Postlethwaite as an archivist looking back from the devastated year of 2025 asking the question: why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance?

Six interweaving stories are juxtaposed together to frame the argument of why climate change can ruin the earth—and how we can stop it. From the troubled mind of a hero in Hurricane Katrina to a Nigerian woman whose life’s choices are decided by oil companies, the movie compels viewers to restructure their own lives and prevent a global meltdown.


For more info and to show your support check these sites out:

For more info, tickets, trailer and more: http://www.ageofstupid.net/usa
Become a Facebook friend: http://www.facebook.com/ageofstupid
Twitter en español: http://twitter.com/eraestupidez
Twitter: http://twitter.com/ageofstupid
Tumblr: http://ageofstupid.tumblr.com/
Promote 'Stupid' and Win prizes: http://www.ageofstupid.net/promote

Hey, its with Tom and Ray Maillotzi (sp) aka Click and Clack, the guys from Car Talk on NPR. Maybe it makes points worth knowing.