Carbon-negative energy, machine that converts biomass into carbon-negative energy.

Tom Price, the director of strategic initiatives at All Power Labs, demonstrates the company's PowerPallet, a machine that converts biomass into carbon-negative energy.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

BERKELEY, Calif. -- In 2007, officials from this famously liberal city shut off the electricity to an artists space known as the Shipyard. That action, which forced the artists there to seek a new way to power their flamethrowers, is the origin story of a company that now produces what it says is the world's only carbon-negative power source.

Located in one of the grittiest areas of town, where train tracks, garbage, and broken downcars are far more prevalent than the hippies Berkeley is famous for, All Power Labs has set up shop inside the Shipyard. Run by CEO Jim Mason -- who owns the space -- the 5-year-old startup now produces technology used to transform dense biomass like corn husks or wood chips into clean, sustainable, and cheap energy.

The world's only carbon-negative power source (pictures)

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All Power Labs makes machines that use an ancient process called gasification to turn out not only carbon-neutral energy, but also a carbon-rich charcoal by-product that just happens to be a fertilizer so efficient that Tom Price, the company's director of strategic initiatives, calls it "plant crack."

Gasification, in which dense biomass smoldering -- but not combusting -- in a low-oxygen environment is converted to hydrogen gas, is nothing new. Price said that ancient cultures used it to enrich their soils, and during World War II, a million vehicles utilized the technology. But after the war, it more or less vanished from the planet, for reasons unknown. Until Mason needed a way to power his flamethrowers, that is.

All Power Labs has taken gasification and combined it with two of the Bay Area's most valuable commodities -- a rich maker culture, and cutting-edge programming skills -- to produce what are called PowerPallets. Feed a bunch of walnut shells or wood chips into these $27,000 machines and you get fully clean energy at less than $2 a watt, a fraction of what other green power sources can cost.

Please read full and follow at:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57608281-76/carbon-negative-energy-a-reality-at-last-and-cheap-too/

U.S. debt jumps a record $328 billion — tops $17 trillion for first time - @washtimes

U.S. debt jumped a record $328 billion on Thursday, the first day the federal government was able to borrow money under the deal President Obama and Congress sealed this week.

The debt now equals $17.075 trillion, according to figures the Treasury Department posted online on Friday.

The $328 billion increase shattered the previous high of $238 billion set two years ago.

The giant jump comes because the government was replenishing its stock of "extraordinary measures" — the federal funds it borrowed from over the last five months as it tried to avoid bumping into the debt ceiling.

Under the law, that replenishing happens as soon as there is new debt space.

Enlarge Photo

(Treasury Department) more >

In this case, the Treasury Department borrowed $400 billion from other funds beginning in May, awaiting a final deal from Congress and Mr. Obama.

Usually Congress sets a borrowing limit, or debt ceiling, that caps the total amount the government can be in the red.

But under the terms of this week's deal, Congress set a deadline instead of a dollar cap. That means debt will rise by as much as the government spends between now and the Feb. 7 deadline.

Follow: @washtimes on Twitter

Please read full and follow at:

http://p.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/oct/18/us-debt-jumps-400-billion-tops-17-trillion-first-t/

US Should Cancel Plutonium Plant, Say Scientists

"Rachel Oswald reports that the Union of Concerned Scientists, an independent science advocacy organization, says that the United States should cancel plans to build a multi-billion dollar plutonium research facility in New Mexico and criticizes Obama administration plans for nuclear facilities and weapons. They argue that the plans to build new fissile-material handling plants are unnecessarily ambitious given the expected future downward trajectory of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The proposed Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement plant (CMRR) building at Los Alamos would replace a Cold War-era site at a cost of $6 billion. It is intended to assist in ensuring new and existing plutonium pits are in working order absent a return by the country to nuclear-weapons testing. The 81-page UCS report, 'Making Smart Security Choices,' (PDF) says if the U.S. carries out limited reductions of its nuclear arsenal over the next-quarter century — as President Obama has said he would like to do — current facilities at Los Alamos can produce sufficient plutonium cores to maintain the warhead stockpile. The CMRR complex is designed to have the capacity to produce between 50 and 80 plutonium pits annually even though no more than 50 cores are needed yearly and Los Alamos currently has that production capability, says report co-author Lisbeth Gronlund. 'The idea that you would need to produce up to 80 [cores] is not warranted,' says Gronlund. 'We think it's time just to cancel the whole thing.'"

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A Looming #Energy Crisis Lies At The Heart Of The #Shutdown - via @gailtheactuary

As the US heads toward debt default .... the underlying reason for the predicament is generally not clear to the American people or the world. The story that the press has generally been feeding us places the problem as basically a temporary one, caused by conflicts between the Democrats and Republicans.

It seems to me that the problem is much deeper. In this post, I summarize the two views, and provide reasons why the Predominant View is very far off the mark. We may be headed for a financial collapse that the Predominant View misses completely.

Predominant View of our Current Economic and Energy Predicament...

With the Predominant View, economic growth can continue indefinitely, without slowing down or stopping. In fact, the pursuit of economic growth becomes almost a national religion, with Ben Bernanke (probably succeeded by Janet Yellen) as its high priest. With unlimited economic growth, it is easy to have our current monetary system, since debt, and the repayment of debt, "works" well indefinitely. In fact, we can have pension plans, Social Security, and the many wonders that our financial system can deliver. We also can have more and better technological innovations, because there is always an abundance or the resources needed to make these innovations.

The late economist John Attarian describes this secular religion under the name "Economism" (Attarian 2005). According to him, under Economism, one's life purpose is to attain affluence, so as to maximize access to consumer goods. With this belief, affluence is the universal solution to problems and grievances. Give people enough money, jobs, goods and services, and they will be happy and peaceable.

With this view, the big problem in the future in pollution, and in particular climate change caused by carbon dioxide and other gasses affecting the climate. Coal is viewed as particularly bad in this regard, oil is somewhat less bad, and natural gas better yet. Nuclear is a concern for a variety of reasons, including lack of a place for spent fuel.

To prevent/mitigate climate change, the view is that we must take steps to reduce fossil fuel usage over the next forty years. The view is that improved technology is likely to be helpful in this regard, because new technology will allow us to become increasingly efficient in our use of fossil fuels. "Renewables" can perhaps be ramped up greatly.

Birth rates can likely be reduced, through increased education of women. If there is a problem with a declining amount of resources per person, this problem can be mitigated by sharing what we have more equally. Perhaps job sharing can become more common, with each worker having part of a job.

Sustainable solutions are viewed as ones that use less fossil fuels. The "plan" is to have ever-increasing GDP per unit of energy consumption. The economy will become ever more service-oriented. People will learn to be happy with more services and fewer goods. We can move forward to a sustainable future.

With this view of the future, the economy is fundamentally fine. It will return to stronger growth in the near future, perhaps using less energy. The huge amount of stimulus currently being put into the economy through ultra low-interest rates and Quantitative Easing can be dropped back, without adverse results. With the Federal Reserve in charge, and with similar groups in charge in other countries, there is nothing to worry about.

Problems with government debt in the US, many parts of Europe, and Japan will somehow take care of themselves, if the various political parties would learn to get along better, and perhaps wait a bit for economic growth to resume on its own.

An Alternate View of our Economic and Energy Predicament

This story is very different from the Predominant View. Energy is critical to the growth of human civilization, because all types of goods and services require energy for their production. Once built infrastructure has been added, energy needs to be of the specific type used by this infrastructure.

In the world today, oil is the single largest source of energy. It is also the most versatile, and because of this, it is the most highly valued energy source. Extraction of oil has become problematic in the last decade, for two reasons: the quantity is not growing very rapidly, and the cost of extraction keeps rising. This rise in cost occurs because we extracted the easy-to-extract oil first. Now we have to move on to the more difficult (and expensive) to extract oil.

I have referred to the rising cost of oil extraction as an Investment Sinkhole Problem. We invest more and more dollars (and quantities of resources of various types), but the amount extracted barely increases world-wide. Economists would call the problem declining marginal returns on investment. When oil could be extracted cheaply, there was a huge gap between the cost of extraction and the value provided to society by this oil. Now, as the cost of extraction has risen, the difference between these two amounts becomes much smaller. If we were depending on this difference to help fuel economic growth, we are losing this benefit.

Read more from A Looming Energy Crisis Lies At The Heart Of The Government Shutdown - Business Insider | shared via feedly mobile

RECOVERY? 4 in 5 in USA face near-poverty, no work

WASHINGTON (AP) — Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.

Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend.

The findings come as President Obama tries to renew his administration's emphasis on the economy, saying in recent speeches that his highest priority is to "rebuild ladders of opportunity" and reverse income inequality.

As nonwhites approach a numerical majority in the U.S., one question is how public programs to lift the disadvantaged should be best focused — on the affirmative action that historically has tried to eliminate the racial barriers seen as the major impediment to economic equality, or simply on improving socioeconomic status for all, regardless of race.

Please read full from 4 in 5 in USA face near-poverty, no work | shared via feedly 

$32 million fishery business collapses after fleet fails to catch a single fish

A $32-million commercial fishery has inexplicably and completely collapsed this year on the B.C. coast.

The sardine seine fleet has gone home after failing to catch a single fish. And the commercial disappearance of the small schooling fish is having repercussions all the way up the food chain to threatened humpback whales.

Jim Darling, a Tofino-based whale biologist with the Pacific Wildlife Foundation, said in an interview Monday that humpbacks typically number in the hundreds near the west coast of Vancouver Island in summer. They were observed only sporadically this year, including by the commercial whalewatching industry.

"Humpbacks are telling us that something has changed," he said. "Ocean systems are so complex, it's really hard to know what it means. For one year, I don't think there's any reason to be alarmed, but there is certainly reason to be curious."

Humpbacks instead were observed farther offshore, possibly feeding on alternative food sources such as herring, sandlance, anchovies, or krill, but not in the numbers observed near shore in recent years.

Please continue reading at: Vancouver Sun

Thank the EPA that Gas Prices Could Dip Below $3 by Year-End

According to David Lutz of Stifel, Nicolaus & Company, consumers are going to get a big boost to their wallets before the end of the year — and the source could surprise you. According to Lutz, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is about to make some long-overdue adjustments to the federal ethanol mandate that's been acting as a stealth tax on American drivers for years. The result could push the national average price for a gallon of gas lower than anything we've seen since the depths of the Great Recession.

First, a word on how we got here. As Lutz explained last summer, the 2005 Clean Air Act mandated that refiners blend ever rising amounts of ethanol into gasoline. As long as U.S. gas consumption was rising, meeting the ethanol blend requirement was arguably misguided but no more so than other economic policies with unintended consequences.

What neither the EPA nor anyone else saw coming was the drop in demand for gas. Were the U.S. Energy Information Administration's website not down as part of the government shutdown, this linkwould show that gas demand hasn't been this low in over a decade.

The vast majority — around 90% — of American cars don't work with an ethanol blend over 10%. When the ethanol requirements continued to rise while demand for end product fell, the refiners were reduced to buying and selling Renewable Identification Numbers (RINs), which are, in effect, credits that allow refiners to meet the terms of the 2005 Clean Air Act without producing fuel that is unsuitable for most cars.

Read full from Gas Prices Could Dip Below $3 by Year-End: Lutz | Breakout - Yahoo Finance | shared via feedly mobile

No Battery Required for This Wireless Device : uses TV and Wi-Fi signals for free energy

Sending texts after a phone's battery dies sounds impossible, right? Soon it might not, thanks to a new technology that not only uses TV and Wi-Fi signals for device communication, it taps those signals as a power source. No batteries required.

Developed by researchers from the University of Washington, the technology is known as "ambient backscatter" and could potentially create networks of devices and sensors that can transmit information by reflecting existing signals to exchange information, without the need for internal batteries.

"We can repurpose wireless signals that are already around us into both a source of power and a communication medium," lead researcher Shyam Gollakota, a UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering, said in a press release. "It's hopefully going to have applications in a number of areas including wearable computing, smart homes and self-sustaining sensor networks."

Researchers built small, credit card-sized devices equipped with antennas that detect, harness and reflect those signals to similar devices. The team tested the prototypes in various locations around the Seattle area, including a street corner, inside an apartment building and on top of a parking garage. Locations ranged from less than a half a mile away from a TV tower to about 6.5. miles away.

Read full from No Battery Required for This Wireless Device : Discovery News | shared via feedly mobile

What is the monetary value of the ocean ? [feedly]

Professor Robert Diaz of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science is a co-editor of "Valuing the Ocean" a major new study by an international team of scientists and economists that attempts to measure the ocean's monetary value and to tally the costs and savings associated with human decisions affecting ocean health.

The study estimates that if human impacts on the ocean continue unabated, declines in ocean health and services will cost the global economy $428 billion per year by 2050, and $1.979 trillion per year by 2100. Alternatively, steps to reduce these impacts could save more than a trillion dollars per year by 2100, reducing the cost of human impacts to $612 billion.

The world economy in todays dollars (without inflation) should be at least $200 trillion in 2050 and $400 trillion in 2100.

The $428 billion in 2050 would be about 0.2% of GDP in 2050 and 0.5% of GDP in 2100.

He notes that the study is unique in stressing the interactions between and among multiple threats, which include acidification, low-oxygen "dead zones," overfishing, pollution, sea-level rise, and warming.

So this includes global warming, pollution and overfishing.

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Poor children are now the majority in American public schools in South, West

Washington Post - A majority of students in public schools throughout the American South and West are low-income for the first time in at least four decades, according to a new study that details a demographic shift with broad implications for the country. 

The analysis by the Southern Education Foundation, the nation's oldest education philanthropy, is based on the number of students from preschool through 12th grade who were eligible for the federal free and reduced-price meals program in the 2010-11 school year. 

Low-income students made up at least half the public school student population in 17 states in 2011, a marked increase from 2000, when four states topped 50 percent.

Children from those low-income families dominated classrooms in 13 states in the South and the four Western states with the largest populations in 2011, researchers found. A decade earlier, just four states reported poor children as a majority of the student population in their public schools. 

But by 2011, almost half of the nation's 50 million public-school students — 48 percent — qualified for free or reduced-price meals. In some states, such as Mississippi, that proportion rose as high as 71 percent. 

I"This is incredible," said Michael A. Rebell, the executive director of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Columbia University, who was struck by the rapid spike in poverty. He said the change helps explain why the United States is lagging in comparison with other countries in international tests.

"When you break down the various test scores, you find the high-income kids, high-achievers are holding their own and more," Rebell said. "It's when you start getting down to schools with a majority of low-income kids that you get astoundingly low scores. Our real problem regarding educational outcomes is not the U.S. overall, it's the growing low-income population."

Read full from Study: Poor children are now the majority in American public schools in South, West - The Washington Post | shared via feedly mobile

Air pollution world leading cause of cancer - U.N. agency WHO

(Reuters)  By Kate Kelland and Stephanie Nebehay - The air we breathe is laced with cancer-causing substances and is being officially classified as carcinogenic to humans, the World Health Organization's cancer agency said on Thursday.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) cited data indicating that in 2010, 223,000 deaths from lung cancer worldwide resulted from air pollution, and said there was also convincing evidence it increases the risk of bladder cancer.

Depending on the level of exposure in different parts of the world, the risk was found to be similar to that of breathing in second-hand tobacco smoke, Kurt Straif, head of the agency's section that ranks carcinogens, told reporters in Geneva.

"Our task was to evaluate the air everyone breathes rather than focus on specific air pollutants," deputy head Dana Loomis said in a statement. "The results from the reviewed studies point in the same direction: the risk of developing lung cancer is significantly increased in people exposed to air pollution."

Air pollution, mostly caused by transport, power generation, industrial or agricultural emissions and residential heating and cooking, is already known to raise risks for a wide range of illnesses including respiratory and heart diseases.

Research suggests that exposure levels have risen significantly in some parts of the world, particularly countries with large populations going through rapid industrialization, such as China.

..."Our conclusion is that this is a leading environmental cause of cancer deaths," Dr. Christopher Wild, director of IARC, told the news briefing in Geneva.

...Asked why it had taken so long to reach the conclusion, he said that one problem was the time lag between exposure to polluted air and the onset of cancer.

"Often we're looking at two, three or four decades once an exposure is introduced before there is sufficient impact on the burden of cancer in the population to be able to study this type of question," he said.

Please read full at: http://in.reuters.com/article/2013/10/17/us-cancer-pollution-idINBRE99G0BB20131017

(Editing by Alison Williams)

Air pollution still harming health across Europe

Air pollution still harming health across Europe
Source: European Environment Agency

Around 90 % of city dwellers in the European Union (EU) are exposed to one of the most damaging air pollutants at levels deemed harmful to health by the World Health Organisation (WHO). This result comes from the latest assessment of air quality in Europe, published by the European Environment Agency (EEA).

The report, 'Air quality in Europe – 2013 report', is an EEA contribution to the European Commission's review of air quality policy and the EU 'Year of Air'.

Vehicles, industry, agriculture and homes are contributing to air pollution in Europe. Despite falling emission levels and reductions of some air pollutant concentrations in recent decades, the report demonstrates that Europe's air pollution problem is far from solved. Two specific pollutants, particulate matter and ground-level ozone, continue to be a source breathing problems, cardiovascular disease and shortened lives. New scientific findings show that human health can be harmed by lower concentrations of air pollution than previously thought.

The Last Post of The Oil Drum (TOD) an internet energy phenomenon

The Last Post

The Oil Drum (TOD) was an internet energy phenomenon that ran for over eight years from April 2005 to September 2013. The site was founded by Prof. Goose (also known as of Colorado State University) and Heading Out (also known as Professor Dave Summers formerly of the Missouri University of Science and Technology).

The site took off with the advent of Hurricane Rita in September 2005 and resulted in the first 200+ comment event, indicating that there was demand for a site where concerned citizens could gather round a camp fire to discuss events impacting their energy supplies and ultimately, their well being. In eight years, >960,000 comments have been posted. Two other energy linked disasters, the Deepwater Horizon blowout and the Fukushima Daiichi reactor melt downs would see readership soar to >75,000 unique visits per day.

These pages have hosted over 7,500 articles covering every aspect of the global energy system. It was not unusual for a post to attract over 600 comments, many of which were well informed and contained charts and links to other internet sources. The site would become known for a uniquely high level of discourse where armchair analysts of all stripes added their knowledge to threads in a courteous, and ultimately pro-social way that energy experts at hedge funds, corporations or universities might not have the freedom to do. It is this emergent property of smart people sharing knowledge on a critical topic to humanity's future that will be missed.

The site was built on twin backbones that would often pull the readership in opposite directions. Drumbeats, edited by Leanan (who remains anonymous to this day) provided daily energy news digest and a forum for debate. And articles, written by a legion of volunteer writers, that strove to provide a more quantitative analysis of global energy supplies and the political, social and economic events that lay behind them. All the content would not have been possible without the tireless efforts of Super G, our site engineer, who maintained and updated software and hardware as the site grew and evolved for over eight years on a voluntary basis.

In the course of 2013, a decision was made to archive The Oil Drum and the main purpose of this Last Post is to provide some direction to new and future readers of the vast content it contains. The main contributors are listed below along with links to where their writings can be now be found. If you are looking for content there are two main options. The first is to look for author specific content where clicking on the live hyper linked name of the contributor will take you to a page giving access to all the content produced by that author. The second option is to use the Advanced Search facility at the top left of this page. Simply enter a few key words and this will return a page of the most relevant articles.

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Editorial board

Arthur Berman () Arthur E. Berman is a petroleum geologist with 35 years of oil and gas industry experience. He worked 20 years for Amoco (now BP) and 15 years as consulting geologist. He gives keynote addresses for energy conferences, boards of directors and professional societies. He has been interviewed about oil and gas topics on CBS, CNBC, CNN, Platt's Energy Week, BNN, Bloomberg, Platt's, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone and The New York Times.

He was a managing editor and frequent contributor of theoildrum.com, and an associate editor of the AAPG Bulletin. He is a Director of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, and has served on the boards of directors of The Houston Geological Society and The Society of Independent Professional Earth Scientists. He has published more than 100 articles on petroleum geology. He has done expert witness and research work on several oil and gas trial and utility commission hearings.

He has an M.S. (Geology) from the Colorado School of Mines and a B.A. (History) from Amherst College.

is a well-known speaker on the big picture related to the global macroeconomy. Nate's presentations address opportunities and constraints we face in the transition away from growth based economies as fossil fuels become more costly. On the supply side, Nate focuses on biophysical economics (net energy) and the interrelationship between money and natural resources. On the demand side, Nate addresses the behavioral underpinnings to conspicuous consumption and offers suggestions on how individuals and society might better adapt to the end of growth. He will be writing at themonkeytrap.us.

Nate has appeared on PBS, BBC, ABC, NPR, and has lectured around the world. He holds a Masters Degree in Finance from the University of Chicago and a PhD in Natural Resources from the University of Vermont. Previously Nate was President of Sanctuary Asset Management and a Vice President at the investment firms Salomon Brothers and Lehman Brothers. Nate is the former President of the Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future (non-profit publisher of The Oil Drum), is current US Director of the Institute for Integrated Economic Research, and serves on the Board of the Post Carbon Institute. Nate also served as the lead editor of the Oil Drum for several years.

has since 2010 been a Research Associate at the Swiss Institute for Integrated Economic Research (IIER), where he works on modelling of costs of resource and energy flows. Since June 2012 he combines this with a PhD research position at Imperial College London, to contribute to a spatial simulation of the resource flows of an economy at a micro-level using agent-based approaches. He joined the Oil Drum in 2006 first as a contributor and later as an editor, triggering by his concern in oil depletion. An interest that also led him to establish and become President of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas Netherlands from 2006 to 2010. He is author of the book "De Permanente Oliecrisis" discussing the end of cheap oil and its consequences (Dutch language, Nieuw Amsterdam publishers, 2008). Rembrandt holds a BSc and MSc in economics from Wageningen University, the Netherlands.

In 2009 I was appointed as Honorary Research Fellow at The University of Aberdeen and teach occasional courses there. For the last 7 years, writing and editing articles for The Oil Drum has consumed a fair portion of my time, but I have in return learned a huge amount. I also continue to work as a consultant for the oil industry. The focus of my interest is the importance of energy to society, society's response to the infrastructure and secondary impacts of energy provision and the political response. I plan to continue writing about Energy, Environment and Policy at Energy Matters.

New post, 8th October: UK North Sea Oil Production Decline
New post, 12th October: Electricity supply and demand for beginners

was born in the UK, and did a Ph.D. in chemistry at Cambridge. Since first coming to Canada on a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Western Ontario in 1973, he has worked at the University of Toronto and in the Canadian Federal Government in Ottawa. Most of his work since the mid 1970s has been on the supply and use of energy in one form or another. His interest in the limitations to oil supply dates back to about 1962, when he was at school watching a promotional film from an oil company. The subject of the film was oil exploration, and this caused him to wonder about the dependence of our society on oil and the limits to supply. Other interests are canoeing, kayaking, skiing, hiking, camping, keeping planted aquaria and learning Mandarin Chinese. Sadly, Paul Sears passed away on September 13, 2012. You can read an obituary here.

Dave Summers who writes under the pen name, , comes from a family that for at least nine generations has been coal miners, and he started his working life, as an Indentured Apprentice, in 1961 shoveling coal on one of the last hand-won coal faces in the UK at Seghill, after a few weeks supplying that face with the help of a pit pony. With bachelor's and doctoral degrees from Leeds University in the UK he moved to Rolla, Missouri and Missouri University of Science and Technology (then UMR) in 1968. He was named Curators' Professor of Mining Engineering in 1980 and for many years directed the Rock Mechanics and Explosives Research Center at MS&T. His main work has been in the developing use of high-pressure water for cutting, cleaning and demilitarization. As one of the quiet revolutions that has crept into industry during his career, his research group worked in nuclear cleanup, rocket motors, and surgical applications as well as developing tools to cut, drill and mine more mundane rock, coal and metals. The team carved the half-scale Stonehenge out of Georgia granite, using only water, and later cut Edwina Sandy's Millennium Arch from Missouri granite, both of which are on the MS&T campus. They also used the technique in a demonstration excavation that resulted in creating the OmniMax theater under the Gateway Arch in St Louis.

He retired from the University, and was named Emeritus in 2010, and lives quietly with his wife Barbara, with occasional commutes to visit their children, located on the two coasts very far from rural America.

In 2004 he began to write a blog, and in 2005 teamed with Kyle Saunders to jointly found The Oil Drum, a site for "discussions on energy and our future." He now writes on energy, the applications of waterjets, a little on the use of the 3D modeling program Poser, and occasionally on climate matters. His blog, where the Tech Talks continue, can be found at Bit Tooth Energy. He again thanks all those who have contributed to The Oil Drum over the years and wishes them joy and prosperity in their futures!

Dr. David Archibold Summers has written numerous articles, a textbook, Waterjetting Technology, and jointly holds several patents, the last two of which have been licensed and deal a) with the use of waterjets to remove skin cancer and b) for high speed drilling of small holes through the earth.

Gail Tverberg became interested in resource limits and how these affect insurance companies and the economy more generally in 2005. She began writing about this issue while working as a property-casualty actuarial consultant at Towers Watson. In 2007, she took early retirement to work specifically on the issue of oil limits.

Between 2007 and its suspension in 2013, Gail worked as a contributor and editor at TheOilDrum.com. She also started her own blog, OurFiniteWorld.com, where she continues to write on a regular basis. Her writings include Oil Supply Limits and the Continuing Financial Crisis, published in the peer-reviewed journal Energy in January 2012. She has spoken at at many conferences on subjects related to oil limits, including both academic and actuarial conferences. She now plans to write a book, tentatively called "Discontinuity Ahead: How Oil Limits Affect the Economy."

Gail worked for CNA Insurance prior to joining Tillinghast (which eventually became part of Towers Watson) in 1981. She has a BA in Mathematics from St. Olaf College and an MS in Mathematics from the University of Illinois, Chicago. She is a fellow of the Casualty Actuarial Society and a member of the American Academy of Actuaries.

Her Twitter feed is @gailtheactuary.

originally graduated with a masters degree in computational physics before working for ten years in the field of mobile telecoms specialising in radio network architecture and off-grid power systems in emerging markets. He subsequently returned to university to take an MSc in Earth system science and a PhD in glaciology focusing on the mass balance of the Greenland ice sheet. Chris is a trustee at the Centre for Sustainable Energy, works for the UK Met Office and maintains a personal web page.

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Selected contributors

studied Engineering at the University of Western Australia in Perth. Since then he has travelled widely and worked in the oil and gas, power generation, defence, technology and banking industries. He has been blogging about peak oil for almost 3 years at Peak Energy (Australia) and is probably the most prolific example of a techno-optimist in the peak oil world. He may be alone in thinking that peak oil represents a great opportunity to switch to a clean energy based world economy, rather than the trigger for the end of industrial civilisation.

is currently a Farm Manager in Corvallis, OR and a Managing Partner for a sustainable farmland fund, Farmland LP. Most of his writing for The Oil Drum occurred while he lived in Willits, CA, where he was instrumental in the founding of Willits Economic Localization, hosted a radio program called "The Reality Report," and was a board member of the local Renewable Energy Development Institute. He also founded and ran a small farm at a local elementary school with a lot of community support and the backing of The Post Carbon Institute, where he is currently a board member. His brief but enjoyable academic career began at Washington University in St. Louis and the Missouri Botanical Garden (MBG), where he taught courses in Ecology and from which he received a doctorate in Evolution and Population Biology in 2000. After graduation he was hired by the Center for Conservation and Sustainable Development at MBG, and between 2001 and 2004 secured grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society for multi-disciplinary research on issues related to species extinction and ecosystem function. His "aha moment" came during this research period where the connections between environmental decline, resource consumption, economic growth, belief systems and institutional inertia led to a dramatic change in the course of his life's work.

He continues to blog at Farmland LP.

is an Assistant Professor in the Geography Department and an Associate of the Institute for the Study of the Environment, Sustainability, and Energy, both at Northern Illinois University. He serves also as an Environmental Policy Analyst for the Environmental Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory. Dr. Murphy's research focuses on the intersection of energy, economics, and the environment. Recently, his work has focused on estimating how the extraction of natural gas in the Marcellus Shale has impacted the provision of ecosystem services from the local environment. In addition, he researches how the energy return on investment from oil is related to oil price and economic growth. Dr. Murphy's work for Argonne National Laboratory addresses the environmental impacts associated with energy development.

He tweets: @djmurphy04

works in the energy industry and writes and speaks about issues involving energy and the environment. He is Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President at Merica International, a forestry and renewable energy company involved in a variety of projects around the world. Robert has 20 years of international engineering experience in the chemicals, oil and gas, and renewable energy industries, and holds several patents related to his work. He has worked in the areas of oil refining, natural gas production, synthetic fuels, ethanol production, butanol production, and various biomass to energy projects. Robert is the author of Power Plays: Energy Options in the Age of Peak Oil. He is also the author of the R-Squared Energy Column at Energy Trends Insider. His articles on energy and sustainability have appeared in numerous media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, The Economist, and Forbes.

Jeff Vail () is an energy intelligence analyst and former US Air Force intelligence officer. He has a B.S. in engineering and history from the US Air Force Academy and a Juris Doctor from the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. His interests are in global energy geopolitics and the the "rhizome" theory of social and economic organization. He is the author of the political anthropology book A Theory of Power and maintains a blog at http://www.jeffvail.net.

is an investment banker in Paris, specialised in structured finance for energy projects, in particular in the wind power sector. After graduating from the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, he wrote his Ph.D. in economics in 1995 on the independence of Ukraine, with a strong focus on the gas relationship between Ukraine and Russia, and he worked on financings for the Russian oil & gas industry for several years after that. He is the editor of the European Tribune, a community website on European politics and energy issues. He has written extensively about energy issues, usually from an economic or geopolitical angle for the European Tribune and for DailyKos where he led a collective effort to draft an energy policy for the USA, Energize America.

After Rune's first time seeing The Oil Drum (TOD and Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future; ISEOF), in 2005 he created an account as nrgyman2000 and later got an invitation to become part of the staff of volunteer writers at what was then TOD Europe. In 2008 he started to post under his real name.

He is a Norwegian presently living in Norway and holding a masters degree from what is now the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. For more than two decades he was employed in various positions by major international oil companies, primarily Statoil, working with operations, field/area developments (in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea) and implementation (primarily logistics) of Troll Gas Sales Agreement (TGSA) which is about natural gas deliveries to European customers. This was followed by a period as an independent energy (oil/gas fields assessments, cash flow analysis, portfolio analysis etc.) consultant and as VP for an energy hedge fund in New York. In recent years he had a sabbatical to do more in depth research, reading and participating in discussions about energy, biology (what makes human {brains} what they are and why), and not least financial and economic subjects in several global forums as well as some advisory work.

Presently he is looking for gainful employment/engagements.

He also posts on his blog Fractional Flow
(primarily in Norwegian, but some future posts are planned for in English).

studied Materials Engineering at Monash University in Melbourne before spending five years with Shell UK Exploration and Production, based in Aberdeen, Scotland. He worked on two new North Sea oil and gas field development projects followed by a stint with the Brent field maintenance team as a corrosion engineer. In late 2006, Phil returned to Melbourne and was for a while an active member of the Australian Association for the Study of Peak Oil. He provided many briefings to government, business and community audiences and is still available for presentations around Melbourne and Victoria. Phil now works primarily in the water industry but consults as required for The Institute for Sensible Transport as well. He is also a keen astronomer and night sky photographer: www.philhart.com.

Luís Alexandre Duque Moreira de Sousa () is a researcher at the Public Research Institute Henri Tudor in Luxembourg and a Ph.D. student in Informatics Engineering at the Technical University of Lisbon. Luís created the first Portuguese language website dedicated to Peak Oil in 2005 (PicoDoPetroleo.net); in 2006 he would be one of the founders of ASPO-Portugal and later that year integrated the team that started the European branch of The Oil Drum. Since then he has continuously written about Energy and its interplay with Politics and Economics, both in English and Portuguese. Luís is a regular presence at the collective blog European Tribune and writes on the broader issues of life on his personal blog AtTheEdgeOfTime.

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North Dakota Farmer Stumbles on Massive Oil Leak, size of seven football fields.

A farming harvesting his fields in North Dakota has come across a massive oil spill, undetected long enough to become the size of seven football fields.

 

Local media reports cite farmer Steve Jensen as saying the crude appeared to becoming from a rupture in an underground pipeline operated by Tesoro Corp.

The farmer noted that he had smelled the crude for days but it wasn't until he began harvesting his wheat fields that he discovered the source of the smell, as his combine got caught up in crude spewing up to six inches above the ground.

 

The spill, discovered on 29 September and since contained, is one of the largest ever in the history of North Dakota. A total of 20,600 barrels of crude was leaked into the field, spreading over 7.3 acres. To put this into perspective, this leak is four times larger than a leak in Arkansas in late March that prompted the evacuation of 20 residences.

It took state authorities 12 days to report the spill after the farmer alerted them.

According to Tesoro Corp., no water sources were contaminated during the spill, but the fact that it went undetected long enough to spread so far, coupled with the 12-day reporting delay by officials, has raised more questions about leak detection policies.

"There are many questions to be answered on how it occurred and how it was detected and if there was anything that could have been done that could have made a difference," state Governor Jack Dalrymple told reporters.

"Initially, it was felt that the spill was not overly large," Dalrymple said. "When they realized it was a fairly sizable spill, they began to contact more people about it."

Read on published on Zero Hedge // visit site

World Oceans Are in Worse Condition than Previously Thought, Analysis Finds

The world's oceans are deteriorating more rapidly than scientists had thought due to rising carbon dioxide levels and associated warming, according to a new analysis by European scientists. By many indicators, ocean conditions are even worse than outlined last

month by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's assessment report on the physical effects of global warming, the researchers say. Sinking oxygen levels, which could decline by 1 to 7 percent by 2100, increasing ocean acidification, and overfishing of more than 70 percent of marine fish populations are among the biggest threats to ocean ecosystems, the scientists report in Marine Pollution Bulletin. Mollusks and other sensitive marine organisms are increasingly being found with corroded shells, a result of rising dissolved CO2 concentrations; within 20 to 40 years ocean acidity levels may reach the point where coral reefs are eroded faster than they can regenerate, the review said. Also alarming is the potential release of the powerful greenhouse gas methane from seabed sediments — something the latest U.N. report did not account for, the scientists note.

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Algae in Lake Erie, fed by farm runoff, threaten drinking water for 11 million people [feedly]

Toxins from blobs of algae on western Lake Erie are threatening the drinking water for 11 million people, and cities and towns are dishing out large sums of cash to combat the toxins, which are worsened by phosphorus from farm fertilizer and other sources that run off into the lake, John Seewer reports for The Associated Press. Toledo will spend an extra $1 million this year—in addition to the $3 million it already spends on water treatment—to combat the toxins. Ottawa County is considering a fee increase next year to cover the added expenses of testing and treating the water, and last month Carroll Township, west of Toledo, ordered its 2,000 residents not to use or drink tap water. (AP photo by D'Arcy Egan: White foam is created by a release of chemicals from dying algae blooms) 

"Algae blooms during the summer and early fall have turned the water into a pea-soup color in recent years," Seewer writes. "The unsightly surface has scared away tourists, and toxins produced by the algae have contributed to oxygen-deprived dead zones where fish can't survive. The algae growth is fed by phosphorous from farm fertilizer runoff and other sources, leaving behind toxins that can kill animals and sicken humans. What makes combating these toxins a challenge for operators of water treatment plants is that there are no standards on how to handle the problem or federal guidelines on what is a safe amount in drinking water." (Read more)

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Sign of change: Biomass plant will replace some power lost from closing of coal-fired plant

Here's an emblematic sign of change in the Central Appalachian coalfield: A coal-fired power plant is closing and its owner will replace part of the electric generating capacity by purchasing more expensive power from a biomass plant in the coalfield, founded by the son of one of the region's most prominent coal operators. (NPR photo by Noah Adams: Big Sandy plant)

The Kentucky Public Service Commission last week approved a 20-year contract allowing Kentucky Power Co. to close its Big Sandy plant near Louisa and buy electricity generated by a biomass plant to be built by ecoPower, the Kentucky Press News Service reports. This change could lead to an increase in monthly bills for 173,000 customers and hurt a school system that receives nearly half a million dollars per year on tax revenue from the power plant, WYMT-TV in Hazard reports.

Kentucky law generally promotes lower-cost electricity, but a law passed by the state legislature this year allows utilities to include in their rates the cost of power from biomass plants. The chairman of ecoPower is Richard A, Sturgill, son of William B. Sturgill, a former state energy secretary who was a powerful, influential and sometimes controversial coal operator, largely due to his strip mines.

The agreement between the two power companies "promotes the inducement of an innovative energy-related business located in Kentucky that would advance the public purposes of achieving energy independence, creating new jobs and new investment and creating new sources of tax revenues," the PSC said in its order.

Kentucky Power said construction of the plant will employ 230 people for two years, and the plant will employ 30 people and create an additional 225 jobs for loggers and truckers. "The utility also argued that the ecoPower contract will spur economic development in its service territory and diversify its generation portfolio, which now relies largely on coal," the PSC said.

Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway, who wants to run for governor in 2015, said he is considering legal action. His spokesperson told WYMT that "Kentucky Power did not thoroughly evaluate other options available to it, such as purchasing the power on the market from other electric utilities. Additionally the company did not conduct an economic feasibility study as the law." (Read more)

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An unbiased economic scorecard shows that global warming provides a net 1.3% GDP gain so far

...It will come as a big surprise that climate change from 1900 to 2025 has mostly been a net benefit, rising to increase welfare about 1.5% of GDP per year. Why? Because global warming has mixed effects and for moderate warming, the benefits prevail. The increased level of CO₂ has boosted agriculture because it works as a fertilizer and makes up the biggest positive impact at 0.8% of GDP. Likewise, moderate warming avoids more cold deaths than it incurs extra heat deaths. It also reduces the demand for heating more than increases the costs of cooling, totaling about 0.4%. On the other hand, warming increases water stress at about 0.2% and negatively impact ecosystems like wetlands at about 0.1%. Storm impacts are very small, as the total storm damages (including naturally caused storms) are about 0.2%.

The climate change assessment paper is here

..But what about areas like biodiversity, global warming and air pollution?

The net impact on biodiversity has been declining over the 20th century, but will likely improve slightly in the 21st. Losses in the 20th century were on the order of 1% of GDP, whereas from 2000-2050 there will be a small 0.25% GDP benefit, because of reduced conversion of forests and better usage of agriculture.

Air pollution is not what you think. It is by far the biggest environmental problem in the world. And its impact has been declining for past 110 years. This is because most air pollution deaths are caused by indoor pollution from cooking and heating with dirty fuels. Over the 20th century, 260 million died from indoor air pollution in the Third World – about twice the toll in all the century's wars. 

Overall, in 1900, air pollution cost 23% of global GDP. Today it has fallen to 6% and by 2050, mainly because of much less indoor pollution, it will reach 4% by 2050.

The overall score is hard to deny. The realist assessment is that the optimists have it.

Please read full and follow at:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/10/an-unbiased-economic-scorecard-shows.html#more

What China Thinks of the Shutdown | the Chinese words for “opportunity” and “crisis” are the same

"The life of the average American has not been greatly affected by it and the economy has continued to grow. This reflects the clear limits between America's government and the market. Our country should likewise move forward and decouple the government from the economy." Similarly, the newspaper Nanfang Dushi Bao commended the strength of American society for being able to function without the government. Interestingly, while the American public sees the shutdown as a government failure, some Chinese are seeing it as a sign of efficiency. The common belief that the Chinese words for "opportunity" and "crisis" are the same, though wildly untrue, seems applicable in this case.

Read on from What China Thinks of the Shutdown | China Power | The Diplomat | shared via feedly mobile

U.S. Adds Two Times More Debt than Economic Output in Last 2 Years

The Republican side of the Senate Budget Committee has put together this chart to show that U.S. has added two times more debt than economic output in the last two years:

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Arizona solar plant continues power six hours after sun goes down via thermal #energy.

PhysOrg: Abengoa's Solana plant in the desert near Gila Bend, Arizona, passed commercial testing this week The 280-megawatt Solana solar thermal power plant producing electricity without direct sunlight made the announcement on Wednesday. Abengoa said Wednesday that the facility, about 70 miles southwest of Phoenix, can store the sun's power for six hours via thermal energy. The three -square-mile facility near Gila Bend uses concentrated solar power (CSP) technology to collect the sun's heat. Thermal energy storage is Solana's distinctive feature. At 280 megawatts, Solana is one of the largest plants using parabolic mirrors. Its 2,700 parabolic trough mirrors follow the sun to focus heat on a pipe containing a heat transfer fluid, which is a synthetic oil. The heat transfer fluid flows to steam boilers, where it heats water to create steam. The steam drives 140-megawatt turbines to produce electricity.

Solana is one of the largest power plants of its kind in the world. Beyond size, what makes Solana special as a solar power plant is the ability to store the heat from the sun for electrical production at night, using substantial thermal storage to keep the juice flowing for hours after sundown.

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