The DLS of energy and engineering

Watching the speech given by President Obama (transcript) and the reaction by Gov. Palin seen on Bill O'Reilly's show...

... I was struck first and most seriously by the problems that the President has in understanding just what sort of problem the oil well blowout is and how to deal with it.  So lets start with a bit from that from President Obama:

On April 20th, an explosion ripped through BP Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, about 40 miles off the coast of Louisiana.  Eleven workers lost their lives.  Seventeen others were injured.  And soon, nearly a mile beneath the surface of the ocean, oil began spewing into the water.

Because there has never been a leak this size at this depth, stopping it has tested the limits of human technology.  That’s why just after the rig sank, I assembled a team of our nation’s best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge -- a team led by Dr. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and our nation’s Secretary of Energy.  Scientists at our national labs and experts from academia and other oil companies have also provided ideas and advice.

Deep water drilling is a result of policy set by Congress on restricting shallow water drilling on the continental shelf.  It is far riskier and has more unknowns in it than shallow water drilling due to the depth, pressures and what lies beneath the sea floor is harder to understand due to depth.  By policy set up by multiple administrations and Congresses over the past 30 years, we no longer go after the 'easy' to get at oil on land or near shore waters, even when there are demonstrated safer means to do so (safer meaning that they have fewer unknown risks and means to deal with known risks).  Getting energy from any source is a risk-cost-benefit analysis that requires the full understanding of what the risks and costs are for getting the benefit.  Solar cells need rare earth metals that need to be mined and they tend to be in places where they aren't easy to get at, and yield a low percentage yield of sunlight to electricity.  Algae stations on power plants or industrial facilities are re-capture systems for carbon and heat, and so cannot get more energy from the system than the waste materials allow.  Wind power is limited to a very few areas with relatively constant winds, and require infrastructure outlay and maintenance and result in a larger number of bird kills due to the blades of the devices than in the natural setting.

Each of these have a cost to them, a risk to them, a benefit to them, and an energy conversion or re-capture rate to them.  That is, at best, high school physics at work: the necessary equations of energy output, energy conversion and capture can be done with a decent high school science background that includes electricity, biology, and chemistry.  To make these systems work requires this other field the President lightly touches upon.

Engineering.

Engineering is the Dirty Little Secret of getting energy.

Only at the very far edges of energy production (say magnetically confined fusion or laser fusion) do you get to some advanced physics, and making those systems into something that is feasible to create on a mass scale requires good engineering.  Electrostatic contained fusion holds much and extreme promise, if it can prove itself out as the components are readily available for it.  Scaling it via engineering (up to larger facilities and finding the absolute minimum smallest useful system) requires little to know actual new physics or chemistry, but metallurgy and energy systems engineering.  When you are going through nearly a mile of ocean to dig a well on the bottom of the ocean, you have an engineering problem as the physics is pretty staid and well known.  Once you start drilling you have a geophysical and seismic prospecting venue to add in, but engineering gets you there.

So when you are forming up a 'team of experts' what is the role of a Nobel Winning Physicist?  He may be a great physicist, but what sort of a hands-on engineer is he?  Ken Salazar wrote a report on deep water drilling claiming that a panel of experts backed the report when, in actual fact, they did no such thing (Source: The Times-Picayune, 09 JUN 2010, by David Hammer).  Thus we do not have an expert engineer leading the project and the co-leader is a man who misrepresents deep water drilling experts when writing reports about the subject.

If Ken Salazar can't be bothered to write up the truth about his report on this subject prior to this panel, then what is the chance he will actually do so when heading up the panel?  And even an applied physicist is not the best of all possible individuals for heading up this team, while an oceanographer, geologist, or actual deep water engineer would be.  A Nobel Prize does not bestow deific wisdom outside of your tiny specialty, and for a panel meant to do something it requires experience, not prestige to actually address the problem.

Reading the above, knowing that there are dry land sources to be drilled (North Slope of Alaska, oil fields in the Dakotas, oil shale in Colorado, near shore drilling for California which has oil naturally seeping out from the ocean floor, and near shore areas around the Gulf and Eastern Seaboard),  what comes next I can only classify, at best, as misstatement and, at worse, an outright lie:

For decades, we have known the days of cheap and easily accessible oil were numbered.  For decades, we’ve talked and talked about the need to end America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels.  And for decades, we have failed to act with the sense of urgency that this challenge requires.  Time and again, the path forward has been blocked -- not only by oil industry lobbyists, but also by a lack of political courage and candor. 

For decades we have heard the incantation of 'you can't drill there!' by environmentalists and NIMBYists that have restricted getting to the 'cheap and easily accessible oil'.  Now, when we need those 'cheap and easy' oil fields we are told that you can't drill in them... even with this disaster we have ongoing.  We also have another problem in that we haven't built a new refinery in this country since 1976, so we must pay extra for other Nations to refine our petroleum products for us.  That, too, has been done by politicians citing environmentalists and NIMBYists and appeasing them.  And by now blocking deep water drilling the President is seeking to escalate a crisis based on a false premise.  The risks and mitigation procedures get easier the closer you get to shore and damned easy once you have solid ground under you.  Yet that path has been blocked for decades, not by oil industry lobbyists of which BP has contributed a lot to Obama's past campaigns, but the lack of courage and candor by politicians willing to say that the risk for on-land and shallow water drilling are outweighed by the benefits to the Nation.

Now here I am going to take a swipe at Gov. Palin for mis-stating the triad of energy.  She puts for the triad of energy in America as:

1) Conventional fuels  (oil, natural gas, coal, nuclear)

2) Alternative fuels (wind, solar, biomass)

3) Conservation of energy

The actual triad that keeps the US powered?

1) Petroleum, including natural gas and derivatives

2) Coal

3) Nuclear

While conservation has made us more efficient, it does not contribute one single direct erg of energy to the grid, to your gas tank or to our energy reserves.  It reduces use, it does not increase supply.

Alternative fuels, combined, are in the neighborhood of 5-10% of our energy generation.  That is not a player in the energy game, save as a 'feel good' source to claim you are 'helping the environment'.  Well, good!  And the facilities that made all the solar cells, smelted the ore for the hardware, and transported all those lovely alternative fuel options around?  The actual Triad of energy.  This is a DLS of alternative energy: it isn't cost effective because if it were it would be beating out someone in the Triad.  When alternative fuels or energy sources can actually get into the 20% range of energy production, then it can look to beat out nuclear... although we are, finally, starting to build new nuclear plants of modern design that are far safer than the old style generation 1 and 2 plants.  If we could get some of the regulations out of the way designed for the old style plants, that is.

If you want to be generous you can lump coal in with petroleum, move nuclear up to #2 and put Conservation in the #3 spot... but there is a difference between drilling for oil and mining for coal.  And mining for uranium ore.

To let you know how bad this pipe dream of alternative energy is, you can go to this paragraph by the President:

This is not some distant vision for America.  The transition away from fossil fuels is going to take some time, but over the last year and a half, we’ve already taken unprecedented action to jumpstart the clean energy industry.  As we speak, old factories are reopening to produce wind turbines, people are going back to work installing energy-efficient windows, and small businesses are making solar panels.  Consumers are buying more efficient cars and trucks, and families are making their homes more energy-efficient.  Scientists and researchers are discovering clean energy technologies that someday will lead to entire new industries.

Well GE announced a new wind turbine factory!  And it will create 1,900 jobs!  In the UK (Source: Business Green, 25 MAR 2010, James Murray):

The UK's position as one of the world's leading offshore wind energy markets was forcefully underlined today when General Electric (GE) announced plans to invest €110m to build its first British wind turbine manufacturing plant.

After months of speculation that it was considering locating a manufacturing facility in the UK, the US engineering giant said that it plans to create up to 1,900 new clean energy jobs across both GE and the new factory's related supply chain with the development of a new site on the UK mainland.

Ok not so good, but Ingeteam is opening one in the US along with a solar plant (Source: Renewable Energy World, 26 MAY 2010):

At the Windpower 2010 Conference, Ingeteam, a Spanish renewable energy manufacturing company, unveiled plans for its new US $15 million wind manufacturing facility in Wisconsin. At full capacity, the Milwaukee plant will employee 275 people and supply equipment capable of producing 7,500 megawatts (MW) of wind turbines each year for the U. S. renewable energy market.

And why are they building a power facility in the US?  I mean isn't Spain supposed to be the be-all, end-all of 'green' energy?  Well for that you can look at this from JSONLINE, Tom Daykin, 16 FEB 2010:

Also new: details on the public financing assistance for Ingeteam.

Governor Jim Doyle's office announced that the state is providing $4.5 million in tax credits, and a $500,000 Wisconsin Development Fund loan to Ingeteam. Usually, those loans are forgivable if a company meets job creation goals.

Ingeteam has also received $1.66 million in federal clean technology manufacturing tax credits, and will receive "further assistance" from the city, Doyle's office announced. I'll update that information at JSOnline.com as it becomes available.

Yes 'loans' that don't need to be repaid if they reach employment promises, tax credits which are a form of subsidies, and 'further assistance' from city government.  So for $2.1 million they need to create 275 jobs.  And then get subsidized via tax credits... this is economical how?

At American Thinker, Andrew Walden looks at the pirates of wind energy on 15 FEB 2010:

Some say that Ka Le is haunted -- and it is. But it's haunted not by Hawaii's legendary night marchers. The mysterious sounds are "Na leo o Kamaoa"-- the disembodied voices of 37 skeletal wind turbines abandoned to rust on the hundred-acre site of the former Kamaoa Wind Farm.

The voices of Kamaoa cry out their warning as a new batch of colonists, having looted the taxpayers of Spain, Portugal, and Greece, seeks to expand upon their multi-billion-dollar foothold half a world away on the shores of the distant Potomac River. European wind developers are fleeing the EU's expiring wind subsidies, shuttering factories, laying off workers, and leaving billions of Euros of sovereign debt and a continent-wide financial crisis in their wake. But their game is not over. Already they are tapping a new vein of lucre from the taxpayers and ratepayers of the United States.

[..]

Built in 1985, at the end of the boom, Kamaoa soon suffered from lack of maintenance. In 1994, the site lease was purchased by Redwood City, CA-based Apollo Energy. 

Cannibalizing parts from the original 37 turbines, Apollo personnel kept the declining facility going with outdated equipment. But even in a place where wind-shaped trees grow sideways, maintenance issues were overwhelming.  By 2004 Kamaoa accounts began to show up on a Hawaii State Department of Finance list of unclaimed properties. In 2006, transmission was finally cut off by Hawaii Electric Company. 

California's wind farms -- then comprising about 80% of the world's wind generation capacity -- ceased to generate much more quickly than Kamaoa.  In the best wind spots on earth, over 14,000 turbines were simply abandoned.  Spinning, post-industrial junk which generates nothing but bird kills.

The Spanish subsidized 'green' technology went bust when the subsidies disappeared and the investigation into the amount of fraud and corruption is still ongoing in Spain.  Even without that, the subsidies cost tax payers billions for a meager return and NO sustainable energy.  In engineering terms, the cost of building the infrastructure does not get payback fast enough to justify building it without subsidies and the ongoing maintenance costs then eat into revenue.  Plus the winds can be damned unpredictable.

Sustainable?  Really?

And as these manufacturers are already on the move from lack of subsidies, what makes anyone think that the US will do any better?  If you have been running down the US to be 'more like Europe' and Europe is moving away from 'alternative energy' due to it not paying anything back, then how can you support it here?  In fact as this is more engineering than science, and its not profitable, how can anyone justify subsidizing it, anywhere?

There are some places where 'alternative energy' is a great alternative as it is the ONLY alternative, or you can work out the cost/power generation/maintenance schedules to justify it.  That makes it a niche energy source, as the amount of energy to run a modern economy is phenomenal. 

If you want solar, it needs to be built in space where it is reliable, dependable, constant and only orbital mechanics put a facility in Earth's shadow for a few minutes every year.  Best place to get supplies is the low gravity well of the Moon and its resources, not Earth.  Want 'sustainable' energy?  Go to orbit where it is constantly sustained.

I notice that is not on anyone's agenda, but that is only because it is engineering, not rocket science any more.

But the worst part of this speech, and its hard to pick out just what is the worst but I'll give it a shot, is this paragraph where he comes in after wanting 'other approaches' on his road to a quixotic energy future that can't be economical:

All of these approaches have merit, and deserve a fair hearing in the months ahead.  But the one approach I will not accept is inaction.  The one answer I will not settle for is the idea that this challenge is somehow too big and too difficult to meet.  You know, the same thing was said about our ability to produce enough planes and tanks in World War II.  The same thing was said about our ability to harness the science and technology to land a man safely on the surface of the moon.  And yet, time and again, we have refused to settle for the paltry limits of conventional wisdom.  Instead, what has defined us as a nation since our founding is the capacity to shape our destiny -– our determination to fight for the America we want for our children.  Even if we’re unsure exactly what that looks like.  Even if we don’t yet know precisely how we’re going to get there.  We know we’ll get there.  

If he doesn't support inaction, then why didn't he do much of anything for 57 days except finger-point and cast blame around?  That is quintessentially inaction: not doing a damned thing to help the mess.

Then come the strawmen in the wind, that previous challenges to America were 'too difficult to meet'.  I'm afraid that when America had a good half of its industry idle due to the Great Depression it wasn't that we lacked 'industrial capacity' but that we had an insane financial system that was set up by the Federal Reserve and was then getting taxed to death which stalled out the recovery of 1937.  Japan worried that America would awaken from its political torpor and self-destructive finances put in by government.  They bet that we would let our politicians rule us... and that we would ask for an armistice or peace settlement.

As to going to the Moon: that was generally a feat of engineering and applied material sciences, along with the biosciences.  The basics of rocketry had been worked out by the 1930's and was in popular fiction, and then horrific fact with the V-2.  For the most part 'rocket science' was already known, it was just building the systems up around it to make it human friendly and survivable.  It wasn't 'if' it could be done, but 'how much cost and in how much time?'  What President Obama presents is a false representation of what those two achievements represented, and the atomic bomb can be included as it was the creation of nuclear physicists training themselves to become nuclear engineers, the first ever on the planet to successfully move from test reactors to nuclear devices.  The science was known, the engineering was new.

Each of those instances of engineering had a known end state: a goal that could be written down, defined, and have its parameters given.  That creates an engineering feat that can be done.  Goals for the number of aircraft to produce were met and then exceeded by increased worker efficiency as the aircraft were built and then a new set of engineers started designing new aircraft, from scratch, to meet design and threat envelopes, testing them and putting them into the air in weeks... something that would have taken years prior to the war.  And the moon landings were large scale system integration into how many pounds could be lifted from Earth to the Moon and returned, including a human crew.  The ratios were those of lift capacity, consumables, mass, endurance and trying to put in any leeway for contingencies as each ounce counted.  These are not things that can be done with 'alternative energy' as the economics of them are known on the engineering base and that base is slow to change as what is involved are easy to understand physics and chemistry.

This isn't 'conventional wisdom' but hard and fast engineering and known science.

One cannot toss billions of dollars at this and expect it to improve, because the advances necessary are not monetarily driven, but driven by testing and refinement of techniques that are known to get better productivity and marginal increases in energy generation capacity.  This is a huge disconnect between the political elites and their understanding of the actual, physical reality around them: they are so intelligent they aren't smart enough to figure out the basics of how it works.  I really am impressed by the strides made in such things as photovoltaic cell costs as our understanding of fabrication moves from clean-room fabrication plants to roll-to-roll printing on metal substrates.  Bioenergy recapture systems are a nice add-on to generate some fuel from waste heat and effluent, and should be investigated for larger potential.  Whole plant biomass conversion, particularly of pest plants and other non-productive plants, holds some promise at the fringes.  In a decade all of that might even break 5% of our energy needs... unfortunately our needs grow faster than marginal sources can provide.

Wholesale change of the type President Obama wants requires a fundamental restructuring and re-orientation of how we gather and use energy as a system.  Orbital solar power satellites are key to that due to cost efficiencies in orbit.  Electrostatic confinement fusion may play a huge role if it proves out, perhaps even a leading role.  Nuclear fission at generation 3 and 4 style plants will offer a long term shift for electricity production to augment e-stat fusion and sps systems.  If you want your car to be all electric, we need a brand new, from the ground up, electrical distribution system with storage capacity that is slowly coming together.  High density capacitors will play a role, as will superconductive materials as their physics and material properties are understood.  Liquid and solid high density energy sources will remain a staple for decades as we have a good system for gathering, transporting and utilizing them: fossil fuels aren't going away any time soon.

None of this can be subsidized if you want it to work right.  Incentivized, with prizes for given goals and achievements and then handing out production contracts?  Yes, that got us the modern aviation system back in the 1920's via postal contracts for air mail.  A prize scheme backed by actual contracts to do something is worthwhile as long as the prizes push the envelope and the contract work isn't critical... airmail wasn't critical, but helped build a critical part of the economy.  President Obama and the elite political class is unwilling to do that with 'alternative energy' not only because they can't figure it out, but even if they did it requires incremental achievements that lead to long lasting structural changes build by private industry in an economical fashion.  Subsidies don't do that, and can even retard achievement as you get paid off for what you have not what you can make that is better.  Challenging industry isn't bestowing it with gifts and subsidies, but putting down hard goals and prizes to be won... and 'first past the post' should be ditched for 'limited time achievement by anyone' sort of prizes so that multiple different ways of making things work gets rewarded.  Not all will be the best, but you don't know that up front.

Instead of an outward, future oriented programmatic view of energy needs, President Obama is sticking to known failed methods and procedures.

And he still isn't doing all that much to clean up the Gulf.

When our friends from the Netherlands and Norway, and other Nations, asked to help us on the clean up, we should have said YES and THANK YOU.  Instead they got NO and GO AWAY.

That is piss poor diplomacy.

It is worse management of a disaster.

And the job that has that in its purview rests on one person.

The lack of competence is stunning.

The lack of vision is lethal.

21st century gold rush

The following is cross-posted at The Jacksonian Party.

In the midst of the economic recession in the West and the deepening debt and banking problems leading to the insolvency of Nations, there is one, small, bright spot now coming to light.  It is not in the West nor Middle East but central Asia.  The place is the war torn Nation of Afghanistan.

The mineral riches, if reports are accurate, are phenomenal.

Although this is the NYT (13 JUN 2010, James Risen) reporting this, so take it with a grain of salt, but the DoD has confirmed the survey results and analysis:

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.

Yes, all those Lithium Ion batteries for devices need good, old fashioned lithium.  Apparently Afghanistan has that in abundance.

The importance of iron and copper, which is in so much of our equipment, buildings, electronics, vehicles... indeed the industrial revolution was built on iron then steel, and the electronics industry built on copper... that vast resources of minerals bearing these two in abundance could spur a major change in pricing downwards for much of daily life over a decade or two.  What happens if the bottom falls out from the lithium, iron and copper markets?  We just might find out.

How big is this discovery?  It is truly phenomenal:

While it could take many years to develop a mining industry, the potential is so great that officials and executives in the industry believe it could attract heavy investment even before mines are profitable, providing the possibility of jobs that could distract from generations of war.

“There is stunning potential here,” Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the United States Central Command, said in an interview on Saturday. “There are a lot of ifs, of course, but I think potentially it is hugely significant.”

The value of the newly discovered mineral deposits dwarfs the size of Afghanistan’s existing war-bedraggled economy, which is based largely on opium production and narcotics trafficking as well as aid from the United States and other industrialized countries. Afghanistan’s gross domestic product is only about $12 billion.

“This will become the backbone of the Afghan economy,” said Jalil Jumriany, an adviser to the Afghan minister of mines.

Will every investment work out?  No, of course not.

Will the net influx of mining capital transform Afghanistan in profound ways?  Yes.

Mind you that $12 billion figure for GDP may not count the drug trade for another billion or two.  Even with that, no amount of opium traffic can equal what happens when modern mining concerns roll into action, and the money that will flow through Afghanistan will be tremendous.  Even with no local firms, the country will make money on a transactional basis and most likely have some minor amount put into the Nation's coffers.  That is a double edged sword, as the government may think of that as government money while it is, in actuality, the money of the people who have the sovereignty over their land via government.

Afghanistan had, at one time before the Soviet invasion, a relatively ethical government.  Reading Michael Yon and others, there was even some evidence of that going through to today: that government functionaries at the low levels understood that they must do their job.  Thus the question of how far and how deep the corruption of the current government is worrying:

Instead of bringing peace, the newfound mineral wealth could lead the Taliban to battle even more fiercely to regain control of the country.

The corruption that is already rampant in the Karzai government could also be amplified by the new wealth, particularly if a handful of well-connected oligarchs, some with personal ties to the president, gain control of the resources. Just last year, Afghanistan’s minister of mines was accused by American officials of accepting a $30 million bribe to award China the rights to develop its copper mine. The minister has since been replaced.

The question on the replacement is: was this done only because of US power or done due to US complaint.  The first is no safe harbor for the Afghan people, the latter is a demonstration that some accountability exists within the system to deal with corruption.

China, of course, is involved seeking mineral deposits to fuel their economy, which has such structural bad debt that anything that can be grasped as helping to mitigate that is seen as essential.  The mineral deposits, however, will take a decade or two to see full utilization and that is of no help to China in the present.

And Afghanistan is not ready for the 'big league's of being a top international player in anything, especially vital mineral ore:

The mineral deposits are scattered throughout the country, including in the southern and eastern regions along the border with Pakistan that have had some of the most intense combat in the American-led war against the Taliban insurgency.

The Pentagon task force has already started trying to help the Afghans set up a system to deal with mineral development. International accounting firms that have expertise in mining contracts have been hired to consult with the Afghan Ministry of Mines, and technical data is being prepared to turn over to multinational mining companies and other potential foreign investors. The Pentagon is helping Afghan officials arrange to start seeking bids on mineral rights by next fall, officials said.

“The Ministry of Mines is not ready to handle this,” Mr. Brinkley said. “We are trying to help them get ready.”

This started with a USGS and Afghan Geological Survey group that pulled out the old British and Soviet era maps for the country and then stage an initial fly-over of promising sites.  That led to indications of much larger than expected deposits and a wider and more comprehensive survey in those areas in 2007.  The results sat in files until recently as US officials were looking for some way, any way, of getting Afghanistan on its feet economically.  When they got a better look at the results and compiled them, the extent of what was there became apparent, and the need for skilled hands to help in this was paramount:

The handful of American geologists who pored over the new data said the results were astonishing.

But the results gathered dust for two more years, ignored by officials in both the American and Afghan governments. In 2009, a Pentagon task force that had created business development programs in Iraq was transferred to Afghanistan, and came upon the geological data. Until then, no one besides the geologists had bothered to look at the information — and no one had sought to translate the technical data to measure the potential economic value of the mineral deposits.

Soon, the Pentagon business development task force brought in teams of American mining experts to validate the survey’s findings, and then briefed Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Mr. Karzai.

Yes, experience in Iraq counts and now offers an asymmetrical way to approach the Afghanistan conflict.

Asymmetrical?  In what way?

Whenever you find mineral deposits in strata there is a very good likelihood that much of the surrounding strata has similar deposits as they may have been put down by similar environments.  Over time with folding, thrusting and erosion the exact linear extent of such deposits may be warped, but the wider they were to start with means that it is unlikely that the resources sit just within the original finding areas.  That means that in the NWFP of Pakistan and other 'tribal' border regions, there may be mineral wealth beyond what has been found there to-date... which is nothing.  But then no one was looking that hard, were they, what with all the tribal and Islamic unpleasantness going on there.  So into the middle of an active, ethnic war zone comes some of the largest mineral discoveries seen in modern times.

Pakistan now has a great and deep incentive to push hard for surveys in its territory from the air based on the nearby deposits in Afghanistan and see what it can find.  I don't expect such finds to actually make things 'better' for Afghanistan or Pakistan, but then we are in the age where the lone prospector with a shotgun to defend himself has been replaced by multi-ton trucks the size of houses. 

And those will come, war or no war.

If there was any wisdom going into this, an amenable peace could be arranged for the final turning in of private war groups and a multi-ethnic, multi-Nation agreement to end hostilities and allow the local people to go to work which would enrich both Nations and all peoples of those Nations.  That would take a master statesman to do.

We are out of those, at present.  So is the rest of the world.

If you thought the fight for natural resources by the old Great Empires prior to WWI was a nasty business, then you ain't seen nothing yet.  That was orderly exploitation that built up local infrastructure which, though meager, has been lost after decolonialization in many Nations.  There are no high-minded, grand visionaries to see that giving people a job and a leg up in the world is a path to freedom and liberty for those involved.

America has a chance to help and do it right.

I am deeply afraid that we are about to screw things up royally for the next few decades and a resource that could lead to ending current hostilities and enriching the poor through hard work will, instead, plunge that region into chaos.  The last time that happened we got 9/11.  That was done on a shoestring.  Now imagine tens of millions of dollars going into Islamic terrorism not per year, but per month over the next decade.  Say an extended al Qaeda and Hezb-i-Islami doing about ten times their current income from narcotics, gem and gold smuggling and antiquities looting... every month perhaps every week.  As things stand they will get their terrorist 'share' of the pie and impoverish the people around them unless something is done very, very soon to end them.

You tell me what that looks like to you.

Because I do not like the look of it at all.

No data? No theory!

There are two highly related concepts to come from the science fiction field, although they were both present in the general society far before the rise of SF, and these two forms would hinge upon the basis for science itself: information.

Scientific information has value in that it is put into a regularized formulation of conceptions usually expressed via mathematics, but often through other means when good and rigorous mathematics cannot properly be applied. A field that has experienced much in the 'trial and error' mode is biochemistry, particularly that of longer chain structures in living organisms. The math is, actually, well defined, but the calculation amounts necessary to tell of how a protein forms and interacts with its surroundings is far from simple. Similarly medications that may prove effective in a test tube may prove to be harmful or even lethal in living organisms, thus requiring trials of medications first through complex chemical analogs, then into similar biotic systems (usually animal trials) and then into actual human test subjects. At any point in that process results indicating negative reactions in the target biological system are discarded: for every *new* drug there are thousands or even tens of thousands that went nowhere and were sidelined during this systematic approach to examination. And each of those trials is recorded and become part of the larger literature in that field, so that others can learn by the things that did not prove out. Modern and near future computing power may change that system radically as extremely complex and non-linear functions between molecules may prove amenable to newer computer platforms based on quantum physics.

Geology is a scientific realm that tends to require some of the tools of the trade across multiple fields as it has under its umbrella everything from astrophysics (planetary motion and the motion of the solar system in the galaxy) all the way down to figuring out how cells function in past observed biotic systems. While it involves all of the sciences in that umbrella, it depends upon a naturally recorded history that has had non-regularity of record keeping: the entire Earth's history is not recorded at any one spot of the planet, but is a massive cross-indexed system of observations going from direct observations of the Oort cloud down to the sedimentary strata seen on old fashioned slate chalkboards. Physics and biology have played major and determining roles in geology, but so have biochemistry and astronomy: the greatest insight into the K-T extinction event was *not* made by a geologist but by Luis Alvarez a physicist who was working with his son Walter who was a geologist.

In a tragi-comedic event Luis Alvarez pointed out that the K-T boundary layer, seen in both terrestrial and water sedimentary deposits was most likely deposited simultaneously. This was not very new but the 'what did it mean' brought everyone up short, until Luis Alvarez suggested the simple idea of getting an elemental analysis of it. The world-wide geologic community went on a scramble to start doing this thing known as: looking at the record and analyzing it. The results were astounding, indicating a high incidence of Iridium not found in normal terrestrial processes, large quantities of 3-axis shocked quartz (rarely seen in even extreme volcanic activity) and a lot of carbon particulates. Iridium, shocked quartz and soot... all in quantities only an inch or so thick, but evenly distributed on a global basis as seen in sea floor cores and uplifted rock strata. If you had a continuous transition from the Cretaceous to the Tertiary, you had this boundary layer. Taken as a whole it indicated a large astronomical event from a boloid 6-10 miles across impacting the planet.

That is not the only case of geology not doing its job, and rigorous work on such things as Piltdown Man would demonstrate that a hodge-podge of bones were being passed off as 'the real thing' while, in fact, they bore none of the developmental traits expected from such an animal nor did they have the same age. Piltdown Man was created to try and bolster a theory of human development that was popular, but ultimately wrong. It was done with intent to defraud the community and raise the status of a theory and those backing it and it remains a waypoint on the line of human hubris in the sciences.

In the non-fraud realm one can be absolutely certain they are right and have no coherent theory to back them up. In one of the earliest pieces I wrote, the case of Alfred Wegener came to the forefront. He is not well known outside the scientific community even when his observational capabilities were excellent. For that he was given proper credit and praise. He also recognized that the idea of static continents was contra-indicated by his field observations and would seek to overturn all of uniformitarianism that postulated fixed continents that went up and down, but basically stayed in place. There he ran afoul of the physics of his theory and it was not held by the scientific community at large. Only the post-WWII released observations of US submarine magnetic records would allow the first major pieces of this revolutionary idea to be put together properly. In 20 years all of static uniformitarianism had been replaced by motion-based uniformitarianism in this thing known as plate tectonics. By having a regularized understanding of how and why continents could move, the resultant Tectonic Theory explained not only all the observations that uniformiatrianism in the static mode could not, but made the ability to predict outcomes of this process. That was a global scientific community revelation and gave a new framework for the basis of Earth history and uniformity of process that went across all the sciences. Many would not be effected deeply, while others, such as biology and embryology, would start to piece together the puzzle of Ernst Haeckel's observation that "ontologeny recapitulates phylogeny".

In that realm, too, Haeckel had done good work to actually draw out the stages of embryos from first development to final, pre-birth life form. As an observation it is excellent, but the concept that each embryological form represents the adult formulation of a previous species is incorrect: growth patterns of previous developments are retained, genetically, which may give a temporary outward appearance to that of predecessor species, but at no point until birth is the final form of any species represented. By having an understanding of past climates and biotas, the parallels between modern embryos and past life forms is one that is parallel in track, due to ancestry, but not definitive at any step along the way. This would give a spur to genetics to examine just how and why the tempo and mode of developmental changes in embryos happen which would lead to the modern analysis of gene timing in embryology and being able to record which genes (or gene suites) influence what growth patterns and for how long. By looking at base patterning for body type and how that is influenced by climate biologists can now look for the genetic trait types that allow for the formulation of these body parts. The question of how those pattern and timing changes are reflected in the final, resultant animal are, however, still to be figured out, but the genetic backing for them is unquestionable and puts a solid understanding of how and why species can arise from parent species and allows us to look for modern climate equivalents in places like Australia or off the coast of Bosnia.

In these endeavors the primacy of data that is analyzed is supreme: when data contraindicates a theory or hypothesis, no matter how well held, that conjecture either needs to be 'patched' or tossed out completely. Einstein's Special relativity had a measurement that could be done during a solar eclipse and when a mathematician pointed out an error in his math, Einstein scrambled to ensure that the proper rendition of his formulas was given to the wider community. Relativity, itself, would seek to give a new framework to encapsulate and replace Newtonian physics, which had been patched to the point of falling apart by the early 20th century. Without that change we might have even a lower opinion of Einstein's ability at math than we do today! His problem was to develop an encompassing framework that explained all the problems with the older system as seen by data, and give it a new system which explains the problems and postulates effects that are predictive. General relativity would, finally, solve the problem of 'why is Mercury's orbit so irregular?', and give frame-dragging as the answer. Einstein cannot be considered alone, just 'first to publish' and others had been on the cusp of both special and general relativity in the same era, so even without Einstein our world would still have many of the same features we see today because it was a large-scale endeavor that many tried to solve and publication by months or weeks or days or hours gets primacy of place in the history books.

This brings us to a modern- day problem that is put forward by a number of people: Global Warming. GW, as a hypothesis, is built upon data sets: it has to be to have any scientific credence. One of the main data sets and data processing points has been the NASA group at Goddard Space Flight institute. Much of the data they processed seemed to indicate a growing in temperatures over time. An entire industry to hype this grew up and purported to show other effects of this climate change, and man-made global warming was posited due to carbon dioxide emissions. Way back when I first started blogging I looked at the carbon dioxide data vs. global temperatures for a period of 800 million years and found a general non-coincidence of measurements, save for the extremely low end of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Personally, I demoted GW from 'theory' well backed and having a good mechanical understanding of what it was presenting, to that of 'hypothesis' which is more speculation on less data than by hard-backed data. And note the data, itself, for such a long term sequencing of global temperature invalidates carbon dioxide as a driving force to a 'runaway greenhouse effect' as we have had much higher atmospheric concentrations (by an order of over 20 times) than today.

As a data-driven concept it was, at best, hitting in the league of Alfred Wegener: it might be right, but not by the process being backed. Later, in another post, I posited that some of the largest scale geologic functions, that of plate tectonics, *does* offer a good driver for 'climate change'. Further, the star Sol, itself, if having minor (sub-1%) variations in output due to natural stellar processes, would have a huge impact on climate for our planet. In AUG 2007 the bottom started to drop out of GW as even a hypothesis: NASA had been demonstrated to have a calculation error that effected all data sets in a determinative way and their calculations were actually no longer coinciding with actual temperature readings. When processed data no longer correlates with actual readings, then the processing is in error and all previous work built on that must be set aside and re-examined. That is how science operates and that massive dataset dropping out from GW took the hypothesis with it. Without the data you are now purely speculating and have no fundamental backing by observation. Then the mean sea level records have demonstrated to have been analyzed without regard to plate tectonic activity and the re-adjustment of that demonstrates no significant change on a global basis of mean sea level. That is absolutely contra-indicatory of Global Warming as that conjecture has this dataset as one of its prize foundations: that foundation has been removed from it.

In science 'one strike and you're out' usually does it. Two strikes is lethal. In 2006 NOAA released a report that indicated that not only were global mean sea temperatures not rising, but they were falling. Some of this was traced to instrumentation error on research vessels that were not conforming to wider-scale satellite data observations. This is not only contrary to Global Warming, it is a key part of the GW conjecture: that mean sea temperatures were rising. Then comes a killer for GW, when the 2007 student project by Anthony Watts to actually map and photograph weather stations in the US turns into the surfacestations.org site. If science is based upon observations, then assuring that the actual observation sites for gathering data have a commonality to them is essential. This mapping and photography project, now with many contributors, is showing up the high degree of variability within the US weather data recording system due to poor site placement and increasing density of buildings around previously isolated sites.

Those are strikes three and four, respectively.

When I refer to Anthropogenic Global Warming as a religion, it is due to the fact that it has no substantive underlying data to it. Even worse the data it depended upon has actually demonstrated to be giving *opposite* or non-coincidental trends to those purported. When your own data can no longer support a hypothesis, then the hypothesis must go: gather lots more data and try to make sense out of it as the limited data sets given are not there to back any AGW or GW theory. It can't even meet the scanty standard of Haeckel, which was far more detailed and is still useful for the actual developmental drawings he made.

The data is just not there, therefore the theory is inoperable along the parameters it has been built upon... and will have a damned hard time finding *any* other parameters save for solar output. It would sure be nice to have a space based economy if that is the case...

Once this current era of plate tectonics having the continents racing around the globe that started some 70 million years ago simmers down in a few millions of years I do expect traditional processes to come back and regression towards the mean to happen. Until then, until the Isthmus connect the Americas goes under, the Himalayas get out of their current location and Antarctica stops being a heat sink for the planet by moving northwards, all I can say is that the outlook for inter-glacial periods during our current arrangement will remain with highly variable temperatures and climate for thousands of years, trending towards rapid onset of continental glaciers lasting for tens of thousands of years if not longer.

It seemed like a good idea at the time

One of the great things about geology is that one can, indeed, learn from the past! Yes, strange but true the remote past can tell us much about the goings on with planet Earth. Unfortunately the more recent past seems to escape some folks... lets flip back to the 1960's when the Cold War was still a chilly and ongoing thing, 'atoms for peace' was still a concept and the Rocky Mountain Arsenal was injecting waste into wells deep in the subsurface.

This was one of those 'unplanned learning experiences' in science that really makes one wonder just what was going through the heads of those in charge. The concepts of plate tectonics and such was just coming out as a great idea to sweep away all other ideas and fix things up a bit, but even before that the concept of 'fault lines' being associated with earthquakes was not unknown. Mind you the tools for finding faultlines were still very primative, and one would think that if you get below an igneous rock layer you should, in theory be able to get rid of some fluids down there for long term storage. Semi-reasonable at least. Thus the US Army started to inject lots of liquid into a deep borehole to see it this was, really, a good idea. I mean it was a 'good idea at the time'.

Mother Nature is really quite grand, with all sorts of things ready to be tested out! With a few glass spheres one can deduce the fact that light is composed of many colors. Two rocks of different densities but the same size fall equally fast in a gravity well, with the expedient of dropping them together and watching. And a half-million gallons of water injected deep into rock strata can reactivate fault lines. All so simple! Perform the experiment, get the result! Mind you if you are working on nuclear material at the surface then starting up earthquakes may not be such a great concept.

There are a couple of quick and easy lessons learned from this little experiment by the US Army:

1) Injected liquids in deep rock strata must go someplace.
2) Said liquids are less dense and more viscous than rock.
3) Said liquids are what as known as 'lubricants' to fault lines.
4) Later folks wanting to liquify carbon dioxide for 'carbon sequestration' are idiotic if they do not learn the first 3 facts.

So, lesson learned, right? Everyone knows that if you like to inject lots of fluid below the Earth's surface in a relatively quiescent environment, that the liquid tends to go places and do things and perhaps not just sit there like you wanted it to. Easy lesson from a not so easy experiment. We learned much and may even, one day, if we can find some nice, easy fault lines to play with that we can be absolutely, positively sure that won't destroy a major city or three, get to start mitigating the forces behind earthquakes.

Now, fast forward to the oh-so-wise, environmentally friendly present and I give a major hat-tip to Instapundit for having this article put up:

"The glass vases on the shelf rattled, and there was a loud bang," Catherine Wueest, a teashop owner, recalls. "I thought a truck had crashed into the building."

But the 3.4 magnitude tremor on the evening of Dec. 8 was no ordinary act of nature: It had been accidentally triggered by engineers drilling deep into the Earth's crust to tap its inner heat and thus break new ground — literally — in the world's search for new sources of energy. . . .

In Basel, the first shaft was bored last year by a 190-foot-tall drilling rig towering above nearby apartment buildings. Water was pumped down the injection well in the test phase in December, and as expected, it heated to above 390 F as it seeped through the layers of rock below.

But that's where the water remains for the time being; it caused the rock layers to slip, causing the tremors and rumbles that spooked the townspeople.

Geopower Basel, had forecast some rock slippage. In fact, it said the location on top of a fault line — the upper Rhine trench — was an advantage because it meant the heat was closer to the Earth's surface.

Well, NSS! How is that for a bright idea? Can you guess which parts of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal 'lessons learned' they did not learn?

Yes, all of them! Save for 4, but the idea that this is a grand and good idea for an energy source by injecting lots of water into such a place is purely nuts. Not only do you have high pressure but you have much, much higher temperatures than at the RMA site and a much better known and major fault line. To grossly paraphrase Einstein:

Ignorance is lack of knowledge.

Stupidity is doing the same experiment over and over expecting to get a different result.

Send the geologists back to school at Geopower Basel. Time to study 'injection of fluid into fault lines'. And they might want to test it out where there isn't a population center nearby, first.

'But it seemed a good idea at the time....'

I am convinced that will be the last words of the last survivor of mankind. Just before the 'good idea' gets 'em.