Retro Energy Crisis Fixes

CBC put together a charming slide show of the Energy Crisis, circa 1972.

My favourite is #7, the underground home:

Look closely at the background. It's a map matte painting. I wonder why this concept didn't take off...

Normalized Crude Oil Prices

There has been much gnashing of teeth in the media lately regarding what appears to be an unprecedented run up in crude oil prices, in particular since the US Federal Reserve dropped their prime interest rate a couple of weeks ago.

Last time I bothered to look at oil prices was May 2006 where I postulated that peak oil phenomena originally manifested itself around January 2002 — a local low in oil prices. Since then, the price for oil has been trending upwards, more or less linearly. Since everyone seems so keen to blame futures traders for this, I thought I would look at the numbers and see just how far debased from this linear regression the price currently is. Is it a six sigma^TM event? Or merely likely?

I have since developed a correction to my model, which I now call McLeod's Omniscient Regression-fit for Oil-price Normalization (MORON). In this new model, I normalize the price of oil against the the Atlanta Fed's US dollar index, to account for the fact that that the US dollar has deflated (or devalued if you prefer) in value against the global bag of currencies by 20 % over the given time period of January 2002 – November 2007.

The model utilizes the EIA's world average price for crude, which is a fair bit lower than the list price we see on the evening news. The EIA's numbers are somewhat less volatile than the future's prices, and frankly more representative of the price of gasoline and other oil products. To normalize to the value of the US dollar, I use the basket published by the Atlanta Fed. Note that this basket is actually favourable to the US dollar, since it allows some pegged currencies into the mix. Compared to the Euro or Canadian dollar, the US dollar's drop has been more precipitous. Still, a 20% drop over 5 years is nothing to sneeze at.

Figure 1: Crude oil price, US dollar index, and normalized crude oil price for the period
from January 2002 to Novemember 2007 and least squares linear fits to data sets.

From Figure 1 we can see that while there are clearly a number of periodic signals in the price of oil (blue), there also appears to be a background that we can reasonably approximate with a linear regression (green line). Fortuitously we can also plot the US dollar index (red — abbreviated Index$) on the same axis, showing its gradual decline (magenta). If we multiply the dollar index by the crude oil price, we can arrive at a normalized crude oil price, (grey) compensating the influence of the declining US dollar, and its fit (black line). A close examination of the difference between the current oil price and its background suggests that it not a very significant event. It is clearly less significant than the peaks in 2005 and 2006.

In fact, if you look prior to 2002, it is quite remarkable that the US dollar index hit a peak just two months after the price of oil started to rise. Perhaps this has something to do with trade deficits or some such thing? Nonsense I'm sure, a giant oil pig like the USA couldn't possibly be driving the value of its fiat currency down by purchasing a constant volume of a resource that continuously increases in price.

Table 1: Linear Regression Fits to Crude Oil Price Indices

Data Set	Crude Initial Price ($/bbl)	Crude Final Price ($/bbl)	Crude Price Velocity ($/bbl·year)	Standard Deviation of Velocity (±$/bbl·year)	Correlation Coefficient (R2)
Jan2002-June2006	18.68	62.26	9.56	0.24	0.8707
Jan2002-Nov2007	18.68	81.27	9.36	0.18	0.8979
Normalized Jan2002-Nov2007	18.68	62.80	6.84	0.16	0.8657

The most interesting data from Figure 1 is encapsulated in Table 1. Namely, we get the slope of those nice curves, as well as the unpresented data from my 2006 post. The correlation is not wholly perfect, there is clearly some additional periodic signal in the result after subtracting away the linear fit.

So looking at the change in the price of oil over time (i.e. the price velocity), has it changed since I last looked at it in 2006? It's changed from 9.56 to 9.36 US$/bbl·year. So in fact it's still less than one sigma difference, which is roughly a 68 % confidence interval. For reference, two sigma is about a 95 % confidence interval.

The expected price for crude from the linear curve is 69.95 ± 5.33 US$/bbl in unadjusted dollars and 56.78 ± 4.55 Index$/bbl in normalized dollars. The stated error in this case is the root mean square (RMS) standard error. Compared to the actual final prices given in Table 1, then we're at +11.32 US$/bbl but only +6.02 Index$/bbl. On the US dollar scale, the jump up in oil prices looks possibly significant, but there's nothing at all of interest from the crude price normalized by the dollar index.

Another issue that one might be interested in is the spread between what the world actually pays, and the stock ticker for West Texas at Cushing, OK. Perhaps the traders are pushing that number up? Mean WTI spot crude price for the week of January 7th, 2002 was US$20.54/bbl, whereas for the the week of October 26th, 2007 it was US$89.23/bbl. The spread, then was $1.86/bbl (+9.96 %) back then and $7.96/bbl (+9.8 %) now. The proportional surcharge for that convenient oil appears to be remarkable stable. One's dollars still buy an equivalent number of barrels of WTI crude compared to the world average as they did back in 2002.

Now, the data that I've used is a couple of weeks old, but there's no getting around that. If you want to use the up to the minute spot prices for a commodity, rather than what people actually end up paying, you'll quite possibly come away with the wrong impression. Overall though, it seems clear, this run up in price is not really different in any functional sense. The drop in the US dollar is a nasty little self-reinforcing cycle thanks to the fact that a very large portion of the US trade deficit is due to importing roughly 15 million barrels of oil every day. If anything, I am undercompensating for the deflation of the US dollar. If people aren't willing to purchase US debt to offset that money flow, well, the results are pretty obvious. Therein lies the fallout from the US mortgage crisis, in that the world's gone on a mortgage debt diet. Whether or not we will see any large shifts in crude oil prices due to the mortgage business remains to be seen. Thus far, my fairly simple analysis suggests we haven't seen any significant shifts.

Alberta Natural Gas Situation, 2002 - 2007

Since I've been bleating on about the production of natural gas in Alberta for awhile, it's probably time to put up some data, pretty pictures, and make some predictions. I retrieved some data from the Alberta Energy and Utilities Board, both for natural gas production and also drilling rates.

Figure 1: Annual Alberta natural gas production
(extrapolated for 2007).

Alberta has been producing roughly 168,000 million m³ of natural gas per annum over the last five years as shown in Figure 1. Looks nice and stable with natural gas prices in North America being also rather low. No problems seen thus far.

Figure 2: 'Capable' and 'Operating' wells in Alberta.

If we look at the actual number of wells in the province, as shown in Figure 2, it has grown greatly over the past five years, even as production has not. There are two discontinuities in the data, the origin of which are not clear. I presume it is due to some accounting methodology change. The number of operating wells has grown from roughly 61,000 wells in January 2002 to 101,000 wells in June 2007.

Given the flat production figures, and 65 % growth in the number of operating wells over 4.5 years, the rate of decline for production per well is 11.2 %/annum. That's assuming production has been flat. If you take into account the observed decline from 170,828 million m³ in 2002 to the projected 166,795 million m³ in 2007, the rate of decline for production per well is 11.7 %/annum.

On the positive side, the difference between the number of available wells and those actually producing gas appears relatively stable. If this gap started to tighten up, it would suggest there is no more surplus capacity in the infrastructure. The natural result would be a rise in North American natural gas prices, notwithstanding the influence of LNG.

As an aside, the first coal-bed methane wells began to appear in December 2004. There are 7850 operating coal-bed methane wells as of August 2007, forming 7.6 % of the total wells at that time.

Figure 3: Drilling rates for new development (production)
and exploration of natural gas wells. End-points of moving
averages not considered statistically accurate.

So we have clearly established that for Alberta to maintain its natural gas production, it will need to drill more and more holes in order to offset the decline in existing fields. Unfortunately, the drilling data suggest that isn't going to happen. Rather, drilling rates for new production holes has dropped off from about 950 holes per month in 2005 to 650 holes per month now, a decline of about 30 %. Exploration of new sites is also dropping off at a similar proportion.

Now, obviously, this data has a lot of noise to it. One particular feature of interest is the drop-off in drilling in April that happens every year. Since April is the end of the financial year in Canada, my best guess is that numbers are being shifted for tax purposes. Still, I think the 12 month moving averages are stable enough to draw the inference that drilling activity in Alberta has dropped substantially from the peak of the 'boom'.

In conclusion, the general treads are clear. Alberta had a boom in natural gas production with activity peaking in 2005. However, that peak in drilling is over, and existing reserves are depleting rapidly. The shortfall will be shored up by coal-bed methane, but that method of natural gas production inherently has smaller production volumes per hole, and requires more extensive drilling. The data from the US Energy Information Admission on Canada's natural gas reserves suggests that this decline is being driven by geological considerations (i.e. we're running out of conventional natural gas) rather than the purely historical 'boom-bust' cycle of Alberta's economy.

The future of the natural gas industry in Alberta will, in my opinion, be largely determined by the degree to which liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports penetrate the North American market. If LNG can be delivered economically, Alberta natural gas will remain uncompetitive and this could be a real historical peak. On the other hand, if supplies tighten, prices will rise in much the same fashion as crude oil is now and we should see another boom period until the coal-bed reserves are fully covered.

Premier Ed Stelmach is to deliver a speech tonight regarding his decision on fossil fuel royalties in Alberta. I think that he has little choice but to raise royalties on bitumen producers, since otherwise he will face budget deficits in the future as the revenue from natural gas production declines.

Alberta Natural Gas Production to Decline by 15 % by 2009

According to Claudia Cattaneo of the Financial Post, "Gas Output to Plummet" weaves us a story of how conventional natural gas production is posed to decline 7 % per annum over the next couple of years.

No shit.

Quote of the day:

"Drilling for natural gas is in a deep recession unique to Western Canada because of high costs, the high Canadian currency and less-productive wells as the basin matures."

Point number two is a red herring, the Canadian dollar was much lower when this decline in drilling rates started. It's certainly an issue now, as a subset of point one, but it wasn't the proximate cause. The real issue is point three, that the resource is in decline, which in turn means that the cheapest gas is gone. The North American price for natural gas remains rather low, so expect a squeeze, especially if LNG isn't deployed fast enough to cover the shortfall. As we saw in 2005/6, natural gas prices are considerably more volatile than oil, due to the less fungible nature of gas compared to oil.

Those bitumen sands upgrading operations that are relying on natural gas to add hydrogen to their asphalt better pay attention. If it comes down to a question of heating homes or running refineries, you're going to lose your supply.

Sodium-ion Batteries

In a new issue of the journal Nature Materials, there is an article about a new formulation of the lithium-iron-phosphate chemistry, but with sodium substituted for lithium. This is potentially advantageous from a cost perspective, especially as concerns have been raised as to whether or not their are sufficient proven reserves of lithium metal to convert the entire world's vehicle fleet to lithium-ion batteries. Sodium is vastly more abundant.

The citation is, B.L. Ellis et al., "A multifunctional 3.5 V iron-based phosphate cathode for rechargeable batteries," Nature Mat. 6:749 - 753 (2007). Nature only provides the first paragraph to the public, so I will try to provide a synopsis.

The basic formulation of the cathode for this battery is A₂FePO₄F, where A is either Li, Na or some mixture thereof (with a standard carbon anode). Most lithium-ion battery aficionados are aware that the phosphate chemistry is perhaps looked upon more favourably at the moment than nickel or maganese based ones. The substitution of the fluoride from a hydroxide (OH) is another innovation that results in a novel crystal structure.

The material seems to form favourably shaped porous crystallites with a very high surface area to volume ratio, as shown by scanning electron microscopy in the publication. The crystallites are about 200 nm across, which by my standards is still quite large (i.e. they have plenty of room to decrease it). The cells were producing ~ 3.6 V over a rather flat discharge curve, and maintained a capacity of 115 mA·hr g^-1 after 50 cycles. That would correspond to a storage capacity of roughly 400 W·hr kg^-1 for the battery bereft of any packaging.

Aside from the potential for replacing lithium, the authors also found little volume change when Na was lost from the NaFePO₄F crystal. This implies there's not a lot of stress on the crystal during reduction-oxidation (i.e. cycling), and hence, it may imply a high degree of reversibility (i.e. a battery fabricated from the material may be able to handle many cycles without damage). The volume change was found to be 3.7 %, compared to 6.7 % for conventional Li₂FePO₄OH chemistry.

Right now they appear to be suffering from a carbon coating on their material that appears to be a result of their fabrication method. This is having a negative effect on the conductivity of the material, which would impact battery efficiency.

Overall, an interesting development that points to plenty of room left for chemistry advances in the area of battery technology. There is also a lot of room for this material in terms of its material science, being brand new and hardly optimized for performance.

Alberta Bitumen Royalties, Sidestepping Carbon Checks, et al.

The biggest news to come out in awhile from the Alberta bitumen development was a committee report detailing how the province has been short-changed to the tune of 4 billion dollars by not changing the royalty structure since the price of oil took off in 2002. According to one newspaper article the report has been downloaded over 200,000 times. The article quotes Jay O'Neill, spokesman for Alberta Finance, inferring that many of the hits are from out of province — presumably investors. I don't know if this is backed up by actual hit tracking or not.

This puts the newish Premier Ed Stelmach in a bit of a tight spot. For one, he was the minister in charge of royalties for the period this report covered. Hence, if he admits to the royalties being mismanaged, it occurred on his watch. The big meme that appeared in the Alberta newspaper's was the royalty on bitumen sales (or lack thereof). The report recommended a royalty of 33 % after recovery of capital costs. The Premier's office gave him a month to craft a reply, which is rather extended for a politician who is already developing a reputation for doing nothing. The opposition Liberals have previously proposed a similar royalty rate at 25 %, which puts the Premier in a tough spot, since they are ahead of the news and he is not. If he accepts the committee's numbers, he'll come off as less business friendly than the opposition and irritate many of his doners. If he takes a month to arrive at the same figure, he'll just be reinforcing the 'Mr. Dithers' (or Harry Strom) stereotype. If he low balls the royalty, he'll be accused of being in the oil corporations' pocketbooks.

Toronto Dominion bank economist Don Drummond thinks that Alberta's not headed for the inevitable 'bust' following the 'boom', which I half agree with. Oil isn't likely to head into a price collapse given global production woes, but he seems to making the common error in underestimating the role of natural gas production in the province's prosperity. New drilling is down since 2003-4. The oil sands (bitumen) boom has also been fueling a real-estate bubble that has more or less doubled the price of homes in the prairie province the last couple of years. However, immigration is slowing slightly. Edmonton is too flat (literally) to support a real-estate bubble for an extended period. Trying to sell a 50-year old wood frame dwelling for 300x the cost of monthly rent is not rational in a city with an effectively unlimited quantity of land to start new construction on. This applies especially so in the face of rising interest rates and a US housing recession.

The other big news is that Prime Minister Harper has decided against any significant restrictions on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions. There's some effort to disguise this as a different plan from the flawed Kyoto model, but it's hot air. The fact of the matter is that he has refused to set a price on carbon dioxide emissions, and that's all that really matters. It's been pretty obvious that he was going to take this path for awhile now. See my post, "EcoAction: Real or Greenwashing?" under the heading Airborne Pollution. I gave him an incomplete but that's clearly an 'F' now. In related news, the federal government had a $14.2 billion surplus this fiscal year. As it happens, that surplus has to be plowed into the national debt by law, but it's worth considering that it would pay $20/ton for the average 20 tons of CO₂ emitted by all of 33 million Canadians. A carbon tax that is offset by a drop in income tax shouldn't cost nearly that much.

Lastly, Exxon and Murphy Oil are trying to sue the government of Newfoundland and Labrador over a clause in their contract that requires them to invest more of their development costs in the provinces themselves. They are trying to claim this under NAFTA. Good luck with that... Resources belong to the province; the federal government doesn't have a lot of say in their management. Also, Harper will not do anything since it would set a president that could be applied to Alberta at a later date. Furthermore, it's not like someone held a gun to the head of the oil companies' head negotiator here. They signed the contract, now they can honour it or walk away from their investment.

Update: A good editorial by Fabrice Taylor in the Globe. He puts some numbers on the natural gas situation in Alberta: 60 % of all royalties come from natural gas, and not oil; existing natural gas wells are declining at a rate of 20-30 % a year, being propped up by what were previously considered stranded pockets and coal-bed methane. At current extraction rates, the conventional natural gas reserves should be gone by 2012, leaving mostly new exploration and coal-bed methane to make up the gap.

Reality Check on the Condo Craze

While the US mortgage market seems to be undergoing a reality check on the excessive quantity of soft loans (see American Home Mortgage Corp), we have a similar sort of speculative bubble slowly deflating in Alberta. A popular trends has emerged of taking existing apartment complexes, subdividing them into condos, renovating them, and then liquidating the individual units for mucho profits.

This is, of course, squeezing the existing rental supply and causing price increases. I'm watching this with interest because the trend is making it more and more difficult to rent on a fixed stipend. I've already been booted out of one apartment last October and I'll have to move again in May 2008.

Alberta is currently in the midst of a labour crunch. The bitumen and gas boom is fueling the rest of the economy, and past provincal government's failure to fund public infrastructure through the 1980s has led to a surge in government spending on public works. There are a number of new condos in my immediate vicinity that have sat, uncompleted, exposed to the elements for over a year now. Needless to rising construction costs lead directly to a higher sticker price for new condos.

This does of course beg the question as to who is buying expensive 50 - 70 m² (500 - 700 sq. ft) apartments in buildings that are 20-50 years old? The units in my past condo sold for $80,000 - $120,000 for single bedroom units which is frankly, insane for flat, flat Edmonton. Unsurprisingly it seems people aren't buying them to live in but rather as an investment to try and flip them. This is further inflationary as not only does the original owner have to pay the subcontractors for the reno and then make a profit, but the flippers also need to make a profit unless they want to eat a big serving of crow.

The number of lawn signs indicating a newly renoed condo up for sale has been rapidly proliferating. The willingness of individuals to participate in this sort of speculation game is clearly dictated by their confidence in the market. The general failure of sub-prime loans in the USA is going to have an unpleasant knock-on effect in the Canadian marketplace after the standard lag period. The major Canadian banks are, I'm sure, quite exposed to this. They claim otherwise, but they also claimed to be unexposed to the Enron fallout and ended up losing billions. Rising interest rates make the cost of holding onto these condos an expensive proposition -- in Canada fixed-rate mortgages are uncommon. All these factors seem to be posed to make dodgy 'flipping' seem a whole lot more dangerous to the average Joe. If people stop believing that the gravy train is going to continue it stands to reason that the driving force behind the condo speculation game is gone.

As an anecdote, take the building I moved out of. There are now some five 'For Sale' signs in front of the 24-unit complex, with two more in front of an 8-unit structure across the road. There's also a brand spanking new (but unfinished for over a year) 16-unit building right across the road. The rest of the neighbourhood also has a lot of signage that never seems to move. The hard reality is that no one who can afford these units actually wants to live in them. The condo frenzy was driven by false premises and now anyone who got into the game late is going to get pwned.

For me personally, I don't think I'll see much benefit aside from a great helping of schaudenfraud. While vacancy rates will probably slowly increase, the open apartments are still going to be more expensive as a result of all the inflationary pressures. The lag in rental rates to vacancy rates will probably mean that I will finish my doctorate around when rents see some real decline.

Update: Some of the European banks are starting to fess up that they are exposed to the bad mortgages in the States. I would like my readers to take note of the talking point of 'liquidity'. Clearly, some people are terrified of any sort of comparisons with the 1930s Austrian bank failures. I am distinctly reminded of Jerome a Paris' discussion of the herd mentality of bankers, and why they hold themselves on the wrong path for so long. As long as they all make the same mistakes, everything is good, especially when the state can be relied on to bail them out.

Update 2: The Bank of Canada channels Kevin Bacon in Animal House:

Bank of Canada issues statement on provision of liquidity to support the stability and efficient function of financial markets

OTTAWA – In light of current market conditions, the Bank of Canada would like to assure financial market participants and the public that it will provide liquidity to support the stability of the Canadian financial system and the continued functioning of financial markets.

These activities are part of the Bank's normal operational duties relating to the stability and efficient function of Canada's financial system. The Bank is closely monitoring developments, and will deal with issues as they arise.

Quick print more money!

Electricity Price Watch

Coal-fired electricity in Alberta is now up to C$0.09806 /kWh. My wind renewable energy credits are an additional C$0.02 / kWh. Of course, this is merely the incremental cost. In reality, my electrical bill is about 85 % administration and transmission fees. If I factor in the overhead, my actual price of electricity is about C$0.66 /kWh. The premium of paying for wind increases my actual electricity cost by 3 %.

It is my understanding that the deregulation of the Alberta power industry was supposed to reduce the cost to consumers.

The Strawman Massacre

Prof. Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University apparently felt the need to lash out at renewable energy sources in a editorial titled "Renewable and nuclear heresies" in the journal International Journal of Nuclear Governance, Economy and Ecology (hat tip to FuturePundit). This is such an egregious piece of work that I felt a simple comment would not provide a sufficient debunking.

I cannot view the article myself as the journal is evidently not old/relevant enough for the University of Alberta to subscribe to but a press release and an older presentation (.pdf) provide some fairly outrageous strawman arguments.

First the abstract:

Renewables are not green. To reach the scale at which they would contribute importantly to meeting global energy demand, renewable sources of energy, such as wind, water and biomass, cause serious environmental harm. Measuring renewables in watts per square metre that each source could produce smashes these environmental idols. Nuclear energy is green. However, in order to grow, the nuclear industry must extend out of its niche in baseload electric power generation, form alliances with the methane industry to introduce more hydrogen into energy markets, and start making hydrogen itself. Technologies succeed when economies of scale form part of their conditions of evolution. Like computers, to grow larger, the energy system must now shrink in size and cost. Considered in watts per square metre, nuclear has astronomical advantages over its competitors.

Ah yes, hydrogen, the system whereby energy demands increase by a factor of three (.pdf) As the man says, "to grow larger, the energy system must now shrink in size and cost."

First strawman, hydroelectric power:

Hypothetically flooding the entire province of Ontario, Canada, about 900,000 square km, with its entire 680,000 billion liters of rainfall, and storing it behind a 60 meter dam would only generate 80% of the total power output of Canada's 25 nuclear power stations, he explains. Put another way, each square kilometer of dammed land would provide the electricity for just 12 Canadians.

Hmmm, but Canada already produces 58 % of its electricity from hydro and only 15 % from nuclear (source). Given that Ontario is about 10 % of the total land mass of Canada, apparently 40 % of Canada is one big lake totally devoted to hydroelectric generation. Of course, in reality, we don't build dams with only a 60 m drop. Rather one uses the natural terrain to one's advantage to channel the rainfall into a deep reservoir where it can then fall several hundred meters. If he stuck to complaining about habitat destruction, his argument would be much stronger.

Next strawman, photovoltaics:

photovoltaic solar cell plant would require painting black about than 150 square kilometers plus land for storage and retrieval to equal a 1000 MWe nuclear plant. Moreover, every form of renewable energy involves vast infrastructure, such as concrete, steel, and access roads. "As a Green, one of my credos is 'no new structures' but renewables all involve ten times or more stuff per kilowatt as natural gas or nuclear," Ausubel says.

Let's see, solar insolation is about 1000 W/m² and has a capacity factor of about 0.2. Solar cells are, on average, about 12.5 % efficient for polycrystalline Silicon. That means we get about 25 W/m² of continuous power for PV. If we assume a 0.8 capacity factor for the reactor, I arrive at 32 km². Prof. Ausubel's numbers seem somewhat inflated. I've previously estimated that we would need 3.5 - 7.0 m² of panels per person to supply all of our energy needs via solar. Much of this can be done on existing (i.e. that's not 'new') urban environments.

And the wind strawman:

"Turning to wind Ausubel points out that while wind farms are between three to ten times more compact than a biomass farm, a 770 square kilometer area is needed to produce as much energy as one 1000 Megawatt electric (MWe) nuclear plant. To meet 2005 US electricity demand and assuming round-the-clock wind at the right speed, an area the size of Texas, approximately 780,000 square kilometers, would need to be covered with structures to extract, store, and transport the energy."

And again, we have the same issue as with the hydroelectric strawman. The area a wind farm occupies can be used for other purposes. These numbers are not really fact-checkable. The actual area occupied by the turbine base is nowhere near 770 km², which is what we should compare by this silly 'power per square meter of infrastructure' metric that the entire area is somehow tainted. Frankly, this seems to be something from the Not In My BackYard (NIMBY) school of environmental thought rather than 'how can we improve our health and restore sustainability to the biosphere' school of environmentalism. I.e. get that wind turbine out of my million dollar view.

He also knocks down a biomass strawman, although in this case, I happen to agree with the conclusion. Probably the worst assertion however is that renewables cannot benefit from economies of scale:

"Nuclear energy is green," he claims, "Considered in Watts per square meter, nuclear has astronomical advantages over its competitors." On this basis, he argues that technologies succeed when economies of scale form part of their evolution. No economies of scale benefit renewables. More renewable kilowatts require more land in a constant or even worsening ratio, because land good for wind, hydropower, biomass, or solar power may get used first.

The argument can be made that there's only so much good hydropower and to a lesser extent wind, but this really does not apply in the case of solar. However the assertion that, "no economies of scale benefit renewables," is quite untrue. Renewables are, by in large, made up of small incremental additions to capacity. This allows them to be produced in an assembly-line fashion. While more modern nuclear designs are often 'modular', they are still essentially one-off builds. As a result, the learning rates for solar and wind are much higher (about 20 % per doubling in capacity) compared to about 6 % for nuclear. I refer to McDonald and Schrattenholzer, "Learning rates for energy technologies", Energy Policy 29(4): 255-261. Nuclear is not going to fall in price as safety controls become more and more sophisticated folks. As I've explained previously, the big ticket item nature of nuclear puts it at a huge disadvantage compared to its smaller and nimbler competition, in terms of design cycle, capital investment, etc.

In conclusion, Prof. Ausubel seems to have developed his very own metric for greenness (square meters of stuff devoted to the production of energy), applied it in a haphazard fashion, and is now drawing some questionable conclusions from it. While I favour nuclear over coal, I really can't see nuclear competing economically with either fossil fuels or renewables. Moreover, if he feels that we already cover too much of the Earth's surface with stuff, shouldn't he preach on the demand side rather than suggesting we build more supply?

War on Pasta

Corn is not a product I consume regularly, except indirectly through tasty meat products. Corn flakes? Grits/polenta? Please. But the expanding use in Canada of durum wheat for the production of ethanol goes too far. This is an affront to pasta connoisseurs everywhere, and demands government action to protect our starchy goodness.