The fuel of 2100: Petroleum

The oil is running out. I talked about this on my blog before. Oil has thousands of uses, but one dominates all the others – petroleum manufacture for our vehicles. Because of this, it’s commonly assumed that leaving behind oil means leaving behind petroleum too … and perhaps even cars. But does it?

New technology currently in the R&D labs suggests another idea – manufacturing our own petroleum in a speeded up, industrial scale version of the same process that nature uses.

Question is, how?

German researchers are working on replicating photosynthesis, with the goal of converting atmospheric CO2 into CO. CO and hydrogen are the main components of syngas which can be used to manufacture gasoline. They’ve managed it too, but their current reaction uses energy from benzene and has low yield. They need to replace that energy input with something else and increase the efficiency for it to be a viable building block for manufacturing gasoline.

Another approach is being pushed by VC firms in the Valley: LS9 is a company genetically engineering microbes to create petrol from biomass. It’s a bit like ethanol manufacture, except that ethanol isn’t backwards compatible with our existing infrastructure (pipelines and engines all need modifications). LS9 claim they have been able to build microbes that eat sugar and expel gasoline … a remarkable feat if true. But like all biofuels, it’ll be constrained by the size of the biomass input. Their website is pretty vague about what sort of inputs the process can take. Even if it can eat more or less anything, there’ll still be huge issues with scaling up such an approach – just moving the biomass to the refineries is as yet an open question, viability wise. They think they’ll be competitive by 2010.

Why it matters

The fact that both techniques can (in theory) produce petroleum is a huge deal. Other than the fact that using it shifts huge quantities of carbon from the ground into the air, petroleum is a really great fuel. It’s amazingly energy dense, easy to transport, and we have a lot of infrastructure built to handle it.

Of both, the German approach appeals to me more. Photosynthesis isn’t particularly efficient and the LS9 approach still relies on it. Although making petroleum instead of ethanol is a big leap forward, as it solves the sticky backwards compatibility issue, the other problems with biofuels (land use, etc) are still open.

Sucking CO2 straight from the air using mechanized, optimized and industrial-scale processes seems like a better way forward. Whilst the air doesn’t contain a whole lot of CO2 proportionally, and using plants lets you cover large areas of land with ease, the ability to build sun-powered carbon-neutral gasoline factories is a very tempting prospect. I need to run the numbers some time on how much air you’d need to process to create a gallon of gasoline, to see how feasible such a scheme might be.

olpc goes to mass manufacturing

Well, the time has finally arrived. The first OLPC units are rolling off the production line.

Previously on this blog I’ve talked about (enthusiastically!) the Sugar user interface. It’s certainly quite cool, and takes into account a lot of the lessons learned over the past twenty years in UI design. The hardware seems pretty interesting too – in particular, the way they’ve got the laptops doing bazillions of suspend/resume cycles with no glitches (Apple could learn from that). But, this doesn’t mean I’m as enthusiastic about the rest of the project.

I installed the XO QEmu image and had a play around with it. Note, the fonts will be super-small if you try this, due to the different resolution of the OLPC screen. The wiki recommends changing your X config, but I found if I do that I can no longer launch all the apps, as the “app bar” at the bottom just clips icons that don’t fit, because the whole UI scales up. A better way is to press Alt-0, su to root (password is blank) and then edit /usr/share/sugar/sugar-xo.gtkrc to up the font size to something better, like 17. Then kill X and fonts will be readable, without scaling the whole UI.

My concerns about the way OLPC is being run aren’t original but I’ll reiterate them here anyway:

• There is, as far as I can tell, no user testing at all. Negroponte is apparently convinced testing isn’t necessary because laptops in education have already been tried and – he says – had great results. Maybe so. But the OLPC is very different even to those projects. But when you’re asking governments to pony up huge sums of cash, you owe it to them to prove the benefits of what you’re selling beyond all reasonable doubt.
• In particular, the Sugar UI does not seem to have been tested on the target audience, which isn’t even well defined (other than being “children”). I’d originally expected multi-year trials before the mass manufacturing stage, but no – they’re ploughing right into it, convinced they got it right the first time. To some extent the UI is separate from the hardware, but what if they find they got it wrong? What if they find the “view source” button is confusing and people hit it accidentally? What if the Sugar UI, despite feeling right to geeks like me, actually is a dud? It’s a bit late to go back to the drawing board now.
• The apps being shipped with the latest builds don’t seem planned – seems they are just a mishmash of things thrown together based on who volunteered to write them. There doesn’t seem to be any coherent educational plan to them. For instance, an RSS feed reader is included, as is a Tetris clone, but there are no mathematical games or geography products.
• There seems to be an overemphasis on learning programming. That bothers me.

  Squeak EToys is included, complete with a “haha, i am a demon and you must escape this castle” tutorial game, and of course there is the famous view source button on the keyboard. The point of all this was never clear to me. Most people aren’t going to become computer programmers, and the ones that are will need direction and help from adults.

  I remember when I learned programming, I needed a lot of help from my father to understand even a very simple language like BASIC (I was about 6 or 7, I think). Later on I knew enough (and had the motivation) to learn from books and online. I decided to find out how feasible it might be for young children to actually hack on the activities they are given. I chose BlockParty, partly because games are always what appeal to kids and partly because it’s the first on the app bar.

  You can find the BlockParty source code in /usr/share/activities/BlockParty.activity/BlockParty.py or on the web here. In the very earliest days of the Sugar project, I jumped on IRC and asked why Python was being used for all the code. After all, XOs are very hardware constrained and Python isn’t known for being efficient. I was told Python was the language of choice because it’d allow children to understand and edit the source code of their laptop. Let’s see how that worked out in practice.

  First thing you notice is that BlockParty is completely uncommented. Seriously, the only comment in the entire file is the copyright notice at the top. If by some chance a child can read English they won’t find any help in the code itself.

  Second thing is that using Python doesn’t really make the code easier to understand. Maybe a bit easier than if it was written in C++, but not much. Code is code, and there are still plenty of lines like these to puzzle over:

  pix_data = """/* XPM */ static char * invisible_xpm[] = {"1 1 1 1 c None"};"""
  bwpx,bhpx,score,bw,bh,cnt=0,0,0,11,20,0
  msg = "csound.SetChannel('sfplay.%d.on', 1)\n" % self.csid

  You get the picture. This is advanced code that interacts with sound servers, graphics libraries, widget toolkits and so on. To put it bluntly, I am not sold on sacrificing efficiency (and thus unit price) for some vague, unplanned, untested vision of small children learning programming from it. I think they should have stuck with C++.

My conclusion from all of this is that the XO seems like a small replica of the Linux community: a bunch of smart people hacking on good ideas, but without any overall focus or master plan, and an over-strong focus on the importance of programming. That’s not surprising – it is a small replica of the Linux community. But the point of OLPC is not to be free or open source, or a platform for UI research, or even to teach programming – actually, it’s to be an educational aid for the school-age curriculum.

on iran

I cannot believe the comments on the BBCs Have Your Say on the Iranian presidents visit. Three things are striking about this debate.

Firstly, the positions of the posters are very much split down nationality lines. Americans consistently take an aggressive anti-Ahmadinejad and anti-Iran line. Non-Americans do too, but not so much.

Secondly, people are failing to distinguish between “is Ahmadinejad bad” and “is Iran bad”. They assume they must be equal, despite the President of Iran not actually being that powerful (he doesn’t control the armed forces, for one).

It saddens me to watch the buildup for yet another invasion in the East. For the third time, the US administration is pouring out a non-stop river of bile aimed against a foreign nation, despite the immense hypocrisy or outright deception in everything that is said. And for the third time, some people are swallowing it wholesale. How will history judge us? As a civilisation of gullible idiots?

São Paulo: The City That Said No To Advertising

São Paulo: The City That Said No To Advertising

A city stripped of advertising. No Posters. No flyers. No ads on buses. No ads on trains. No Adshels, no 48-sheets, no nothing.

It sounds like an Adbusters editorial: an activist’s dream. But in São Paulo, Brazil, the dream has become a reality.

Cool.

the phrase “open source” goes mainstream

Twice in the past few months I’ve encountered the phrase “open source” outside the context of software. It seems the underlying ideas (which are pretty generic and powerful) and being latched onto by other areas of specialism like the intelligence services, architecture and politics. Try this on for size:

define:open source intelligence

Open source intelligence or “OSINT” refers to an intelligence gathering discipline based on information collected from open sources, i.e. information available to the general public. This includes newspapers, the internet, books, phone books, scientific journals, radio broadcasts, television, and others. The term is unrelated to open source in the computer software community, which refers to programs whose source code is publicly available. …

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/006881.html

David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang are both architects, but to call their company, Living, an architecture firm doesn’t come anywhere near to explaining what they do. Benjamin and Yang create what they call “open source, incremental, small-scale architecture that engages the city.”

… and another one about architecture ….

http://osdir.com/ml/politics.oekonux.english/2004-10/msg00016.html

Subject: [ox-en] Open Source Architecture: NOW!

Hello,

We are sorry for cross-posting, but we would like to inform you about a
project in Forum Stadtpark in Graz (Austria), the project initiated by
ortlos architects, on one of the most interesting topics in contemporary
architecture and net.art practice: >>networked creative collaboration< <
based on principles of open source architecture.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20041122/sifry

The rise of open source politics ….. Applied to political organizing, open source would mean opening up participation in planning and implementation to the community, letting competing actors evaluate the value of your plans and actions, being able to shift resources away from bad plans and bad planners and toward better ones, and expecting more of participants in return. It would mean moving away from egocentric organizations and toward network-centric organizing.

global population

I’ve written a bunch about oil supply on this blog. That’s pretty unusual – most people today, if asked to identify the biggest crisis about to hit humanity, would identify climate change. A few would talk about water supplies, fewer still would talk about oil.

But there’s another problem, one which is spreading rapidly but hardly anybody talks about, perhaps because it’s so counter-intuitive. That problem is that our population is spiralling out of control – downwards.

sub-replacement fertility

The spread of sub-replacement fertility (ie, not having enough babies to replace the parents) is one of the great demographic surprises of recent years. Originally believed to be limited to just the wealthiest developed nations, now even “3rd world” countries have dropped below the replacement rate. Places where they are having lots of babies are now exceptional on the world stage.

This runs counter to our embedded notion that the worlds population is too high, and that like a yeast culture we’re poisoning our environment with our effluence. People worry about the Chinese, the Africans, all without realising that almost everywhere we’ll soon have too few people, not too many.

One interesting exception to this is America. With a replacement rate of 2.01 (see the CIA world factbook for the figures) they are not that far below the needed rate in industrial countries of 2.1 (2 children to replace the parents plus a fudge factor to make up for infant mortality). According to Wikipedia, if you break it down into states the picture becomes clearer – the coastal states have more European like birth rates reflecting similarities in culture, whereas the southern/border states have higher than replacement birth rates – probably due to different value systems.

the causes

Nobody really knows why birth rates are so low worldwide. My speculation about value systems above is just that, speculation. All kinds of explanations have been proffered – the desire of women to have a career and their reluctance to sacrifice to have children, the spread of birth control, the increasing social acceptability of being “child-free” and so on. Given the wide range of cultures the problem affects its tempting to suggest a biological cause, but the existence of exceptions like the American south, the Gaza strip and Saudi Arabia seem to disprove that.

But if birth rates are too low, how comes our population is still going up? The main reason is extra longevity. If people take longer to die, even if we are adding new people too slowly, there’s still going to be a period of time in which the old guard haven’t died off yet – so the population will rise, before crashing down as the older generations start to pass away.

Another reason is that China and Africa are not afflicted by this trend yet, and they are pretty huge places. Partly this is economic (death rates are very high in Africa so there is incentive to have more kids), and partly cultural – see the recent reports of civil unrest in China caused by the 1-child policy, spurred in part by an ingrained preference for boys.

While some nations like the UK are sustaining their populations by allowing immigration, the immigrants soon adopt the lifestyle of the host country and also stop breeding, so this can only be a temporary fix. Even if a massive wave of immigration were to be allowed from Africa and China, people aren’t simply assets that can be moved around the globe to make the numbers work … the social and racial tensions huge waves of immigration would cause in Western countries are considerable, especially in time of economic downturn.

In other words, it’s meaningless to talk about “world overpopulation” because it’s possible for some societies to be overpopulated and others to be underpopulated simultaneously.

the effects

Nobody is really sure what the effects of firstly an aging and then a rapidly shrinking population would be. The only parallels we know of are after huge, devastating epidemics like bubonic plague …. but these occurred when society was structurally much simpler, and the amount of critical infrastructure that needed to be maintained was lower.

We can see some of the micro-level effects right now with localised skills shortages in areas like engineering and infrastructure. These aren’t caused by population decline yet but are perhaps a preview of coming attractions, if nothing changes. Major projects, some of which are needed to keep things running, keep getting delayed due to lack of experienced workers. This problem is especially acute in the oil business but affects others too – for instance, there is apparently a lack of linesmen in the US electricity industry.

Market economics would suggest that as pay rises more people would enter the industry to meet demand, but that doesn’t actually seem to happen …. turns out salary is only one of many factors people weigh when choosing a career (assuming they choose at all, most don’t). A factor repeatedly identified is that a lot of the people who would have gone into industrial engineering or other “heavy skills jobs” in an earlier time are now choosing careers in IT, which provides both good pay and a respectable desk job where you run no risk of injury and don’t have to wear a hard hat. The IT industry appeared out of nowhere in the 70s and has grown at a ridiculous pace since then, it’s perhaps not surprising that it worked by siphoning off people that would have been doing other things.

my lost theory

Everybody who watches ABCs “Lost” has theories about the island and what’s happening there. Here’s mine. It might not be original but I haven’t seen it discussed anywhere else. I’ve had this theory since about the start of season 2, but I see more evidence for it all the time, so now I’m gonna document it so if I’m right I can prove it For reference I just finished watching “The man from Tallahasee”, but I mentioned my theory to family and a few friends a long time ago.

I think the Losties have had their memories tampered with. The reason they keep meeting people on the island they see in their flashbacks is because it’s not really their lives they are remembering, but rather somebody elses (or perhaps a fictional life). In their *real* past, they were scientists – members of the DHARMA initiative that volunteered for a memory replacement program. It gave them new lives as new characters. This is how the others know so much about every character despite having apparently not met them before.

Sawyer – who was given the character of a hillbilly con-man – is in reality a highly educated person, hence his interest in intellectualist literate (Ayn Rand, etc) and good knowledge of geography. Locke awoke on the island able to walk, despite having been paralyzed until then. Either the island cured him – or he was never really paralyzed in the first place. And Kate, a desperate murderer on the run, is reborn as a nice person who is loyal to her friends.

But the treatment is not 100% effective. Details of their past lives have been leaking through and mixing with their implanted memories. Scientists they worked with in their real past re-appear as characters in their memories/flashbacks. The black horse Kate saw on the road that night appears in the jungle – a detail of her past working with the zoological program on the island. Lockes father, in an apparent impossibility, appears on the island …. not really his father of course but a former colleague, now fearful of what his old friend will do to him. Christian Shephard is in far too many of the Losties flashbacks to be explainable by pure chance – and he has also been seen on the island, albiet only for a short period watching Jack.

This theory also neatly solves the one of the biggest mysteries of them all – how did they survive the crash of the flight? Surviving the mid-air breakup of an air liner just isn’t possible, and the shows creators are too smart to pretend it is. This is the original and best mystery, the one that unlocks all the others. What if the people on board the flight DID die, but were recovered by the DHARMA scientists and had their memories extracted? The join-point between the implanted memories and reality is when they awake on the beach surrounded by burning wreckage. There are some obvious issues with this theory though, like where did the obviously fresh wreckage come from.

There are other problems. Time on the island clearly is a bit strange, for instance, Desmond can see the future and appears to have travelled back in time – how? Is there yet more memory tampering going on? Is it in fact the island experience that is being implanted and not the other way around, explaining how you might be able to get a sneak preview?

This theory doesn’t explain anywhere near all of the bizarre events on the island. It doesn’t explain why they might want to do memory replacements. It doesn’t explain the monster, or the Black Rock, or who the Others are, or the numbers.

And finally the biggest mystery of all – why? The “Lost Experience” alternate-reality game has a story about something called the ‘Valanzetti Equation’, the factors of which control the fate of humanity. The DHARMA initiative was set up to study the Valanzetti equation and try to change its factors, thereby forestalling the destruction of civilisation. It’s not clear to me how this fits in with my memory replacement theory yet.

tick tock

This is one of the most alarming reports I’ve read for a long time.

For those who don’t want to read the whole thing, it claims the Saudi security team just destroyed a terrorist cell 178 men strong which was preparing to target their oil infrastructure with heavy weapons and planes.

This sort of thing has been going on for some time now, but the sheer scale of this latest bust is terrifying. Previous attacks on key pieces of Saudi infrastructure (and by extension, our own), like the Abqaiq stabilisation facility, have been relatively small and amateur affairs. The last one was stopped when the Aramco private army guarding Abqaiq opened fire on a van as it slammed through the compunds outer gates. The vehicle, laden with explosives, detonated before it reached the heart of the facility.

These giant industrial complexes in the desert process significant amounts of the worlds daily oil supply … Saudi Arabia alone provides 6% or more. According to Wikipedia the loss of Abqaiq would reduce Saudi production from 6.8mbpd to only 1. This may not sound like much, but given the extremely tight supply/demand balance we are currently in, the disruption of 6% of our supply would trigger a 1970s style oil shock overnight (think about it … losing 5% of supply means one person in 20 doesn’t get any oil).

Unfortunately, there is a clear trend with these attacks – they are getting much, much more sophisticated. Large numbers of so-called “insurgents” are returning from Iraq having gained experience of targeting oil infrastructure like pipelines (easy to blow up but easy to repair) and more juicy targets like refineries (hard to attack, almost impossible to repair). They now seem to be plotting to destroy the Saudi oil infrastructure, achieving both their political goals in the Kingdom and also throwing the West into chaos.

If you aren’t reading this note from a cave in the jungle, this is something you should worry about a lot. Many people don’t seem to realise how close to the edge our oil supply is right now – whether this is a temporary phase like in the late nineties or (more likely) the onset of peak oil, doesn’t really matter. The point is the situation is fragile, and for the attackers to win, they need only succeed once. For us to win, we need to succeed every time.

Crashing airplanes into buildings got them into the news but – other than losing some civil liberties – didn’t hurt us much. They seem to have realised that, and are now going for the jugular. Get ready.

oil update

I haven’t posted on this topic for a while. Did I forget about it?

No. The worlds oil supply situation is still deeply disturbing, and I am still researching it actively – as well as continuing my work on a mitigation project that could prove useful in future.

So where are we now?

• The worlds major oil fields are starting to decline at a far faster rate than had been hoped for. Cantarell and the North Sea are both declining at rates greater than even the worst case estimates (over 10% in each caes). Burgan is also in decline. Kashagan has been hit by rapidly escalating costs and a series of delays that threaten the whole project.
• Whilst new discoveries have been made (like Jack 2), most are extremely complex and difficult to extract. This is not a simple matter of economics where increasing the budget of the project can magically make it happen. A big factor now is the lack of skilled engineers. Nobody has been going into oil engineering for many years, partly due to the general decline in engineering and partly because it’s now seen as dirty and polluting work. The long months away from home in foreign countries doesn’t help either. The skills situation is getting so severe that old engineers are being called out of retirement and projects are queuing up.
• Not all the new oil being discovered can be bought by us in the West. Increasingly the countries that own it want to use it for their own development instead of selling it to us. China has been using its vast reserves of dollars to buy exclusive access to new fields like Yadavaran.

But it’s not all bad news. Russia and a few other places like Angola will probably increase production for a while. I’d be surprised if they can do anything but offset the declines elsewhere, seeing as how world production has been flat since 2004. Still, it does buy time.

So what do I see in my crystal ball? Difficult to say. There are so many variables right now anything could happen. I think we’ll see increasing volatility in crude prices, with more and more swings between highs and lows. I think this summer we will break $70 again, maybe even $80 – demand usually peaks in summer anyway and in the same way that the Israel/Lebanon war put an upward pressure on prices, this summer US/Iranian tension will likely do the same. Bush says he won’t invade Iran but nobody believes him, and Iran is far more important as an oil producer than Israel and Lebanon are.

The chances of minor oil shocks are also increasing fast. One of the unfortunate things about the chaos in Iraq is that people are (apparently) learning how to blow up oil refineries. Refineries are extremely complex, and as a result they tend to be rare but high throughput. Disabling even 3 or 4 refineries simultaneously – especially if in the same geographic area – would immediately send petroleum prices in that region through the roof. Attempts at destroying refineries have already been made in Saudi Arabia and documentation for how to achieve it is now said to be circulating on the net.

That said, short of some major disaster or world event, I don’t think we’ll start seeing serious endemic supply problems until past 2010. 2008 and 2009 will probably be expensive but only a serious problem for people who are already financially stretched thing and are absolutely unable to reduce their gasoline consumption.

best youtube video ever

Is this the best YouTube video ever?. The power of the amateur is here to stay!