Smaller, faster, lighter, denser, cheaper (Robert Bryce)

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/08/business/energy-environment/review-ofsmaller-faster-lighter-denser-cheaper.html?_r=0 Excerpts from The New York Times. For full article, see link above.

Wind? Biofuels? Get Real, a Contrarian Says

Review of Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper Off the Shelf

By FRED ANDREWS JUNE 7, 2014

Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper By Robert Bryce, 371 pages, PublicAffairs

Every so often we need someone to put in a kind word for the devil, if only to remind us of unpleasant facts. On energy policy, we need someone willing to declare flat out that “if oil didn’t exist, we would have to invent it. No other substance comes close to oil when it comes to energy density, ease of handling, and flexibility.”

page 1

We need someone who says: Don’t kid yourself, coal will be around for a long, long time, as a cheap source of electricity across the globe. Someone who scoffs that anyone who believes in wind power and biofuels as a solution to the soaring demand for energy also believes in the Easter Bunny. And someone willing to argue that the most sensible long-term answer to the world’s unquenchable thirst for electricity is a revival of nuclear power, a reality that he says thinking environmentalists are coming to accept.

Robert Bryce, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research group, fills that role with zest. The author of four books on oil and energy, Mr. Bryce has written a new book well worth reading, though it will not sit well with those who applauded when Al Gore received the Nobel Peace Prize. The title of his breezy book — “Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper” — captures the headlong rush of Western culture’s endless drive for ever better technology. It is an extraordinary impulse that has created a world in which more people live longer and more comfortably than ever before.

The book amounts to Mr. Bryce’s emphatic, against-the-grain views on energy policy coupled to a once-over-lightly history of Western technology. .. .. .. ..

Mr. Bryce’s policy prescriptions will be more welcome in Houston than in the White House. He contends that the pantheon of environmentalists like Mr. Gore, Bill McKibben, Amory Lovins and Greenpeace — he calls them “the catastrophists” — are wildly optimistic, if not daft, in their extravagant hopes for wind power, solar cells and biofuels. .. .. ..

From studies of wind farms he calculates that the average power density for wind energy is about one watt per square meter. A wind farm large enough to power just one data center for Facebook would require nearly 11 square miles of land, he says. On a far larger scale, the United States has about 300 billion watts of coalfired generation capacity. So to replace it by wind power would sop up 300,000 square kilometers of land, about the area of Italy. Here he is tilting at windmills — no one has ever proposed shuttering the nation’s coal mines and relying on wind — but the comparison serves his contention that in the big picture, wind power will always be a minor player.

Biofuels have a power density even smaller, only a third of wind’s, and thus they hog even more land, he writes. Mr. Bryce considers it a scandal and a gross page 2

misuse of government subsidies that 40 percent of the nation’s corn harvest already goes into producing corn-based ethanol, pushing food prices much higher as collateral damage. .. .. .. .. ..

Mr. Bryce’s solution is “N2N,” a reliance on natural gas on the way to a more nuclear world. He is not the first to note that natural gas is relatively clean and available in extraordinary abundance. It generates electricity; it is the coming thing in propelling vehicles. Its use is already cutting CO2emissions in the United States.

Mr. Bryce makes a case that nuclear power is clean and green and far superior to any other fuel in power density. His enthusiastic embrace of nuclear will astonish most readers, however, with his contention that the Fukushima Daiichi disaster in Japan should be seen as a boon to the revival of nuclear power, rather than an obstacle.

At Fukushima, three reactors melted down with a substantial release of radiation, forcing as many as 300,000 people from their homes, and leaving still unresolved problems of cleaning up massive amounts of radioactive water. And yet, Mr. Bryce writes, even though the plant was wrecked by one of the most powerful earthquakes ever to rock the planet, the World Health Organization has concluded that radiation exposure due to Fukushima was low. No lives were lost to radiation — at least none so far.

Mr. Bryce is decidedly bullish on America, not least because of what’s happening in the oil patch. America enjoys the cheapest power in the industrial world, at 12 cents a kilowatt hour versus 26 cents in Europe and 24 cents in Japan. It leads the world in natural gas production, nuclear production and refined oil output.

Thanks to the oil shale, it could soon eclipse Saudi Arabia and Russia in crude oil.

“The best way to protect the environment is to get richer,” he asserts. “Wealthy countries can afford to protect the environment. Poor ones generally can’t.” .. .. .. ..

page 3