We also need to talk about energy, which is an important part of any national policy and has been a major factor in many wars. One of Hitler's objectives in WWII was to gain the oilfields of Rumania; Japan attacked the United States because it needed Indonesia's oil and it's a safe bet that if Iraq had nuclear weapons and North Korea had oil, the US would have invaded and occupied North Korea.
Canada has lots of energy but much of it is hard to get at. Aside from our coal and conventional oil we have the Athabaska tar sands which, as we all know, are second only to the oil reserves of Saudi Arabia. One thing we are not told quite so often is that much of the tar sands deposit is too deep to mine with present techniques. We also have oil shale in the Queen Charlotte Islands but, so far, it's too expensive to mine and process.
Most of the energy that most of us use is electric. Some is produced by burning coal, oil and natural gas, but our first major source of electric energy was Niagara Falls.
Water power is a good way to generate electricity but it's not perfect. One problem is that we don't have enough of it. Another is that it creates environmental problems.
If you dam rivers to generate hydro power you flood land and interfere with the migration of fish. Dams also stop the spring floods that have been a part of the ecology for millions of years, and some of the downstream effects are hard to foresee.
Who could have guessed that Quebec's James Bay power development would be a factor in the destruction of Newfoundland's codfish? It's not the only factor, of course, but until the rivers were dammed spring floods scoured the bottom of James and Hudson Bays and flushed enormous quantities of nutrients out to Davis Strait, where the young codfish live. Now that no longer happens.
Even when you take water from a natural waterfall to generate power you change the ecology, because when water goes over a fall it is aerated. Water that goes through a power plant is not, and the lack of aeration changes the downstream ecology. This is not to say that we should not use water power -- it's just a reminder that everything has a cost.
Most of our power is generated by heat engines, and the first big heat engines burned coal. This was the fuel that powered the industrial revolution, still powers much of the world and is going to power much of the world for at least the next hundred years or so.
But if it's burned in obsolete plants, coal can be dirty. When he was running for election in the late summer of 2003 Ontario premiere Dalton McGuinty promised that within five years he would shut down a coal-fired generating plant that powers much of Toronto. That was not likely because even if the replacement -- possibly natural-gas-fueled -- plants had been approved and designed when he made the promise, they could probably not have been built within five years.
The promise also committed the government to a specific course of action without considering alternatives. That's a common error -- once you get started on something it's much easier to stay on that track than to consider other possibilities -- but it's one that we can't afford to make. McGuinty had to renege on the promise, of course, and he did that in June of 2005.
We can look for cleaner and more-efficient ways to use coal but, at the same time, we also need to look at alternative fuels. Some people think that means solar and wind power but solar power is expensive and it will probably never become a primary source of power for many of us. Wind power has more potential, but it is still not likely to displace power produced by heat engines.
The most obvious alternative fuels -- already in use in several parts of the world -- are municipal garbage and worn-out tires. There are efficient and clean burners available for both.
Tires are made mostly of oil and carbon black, both of which burn well, and worn-out tires make an excellent fuel. There is a minor problem that if you can't chop them up you need a special burner to burn them cleanly, but choppers and burners are available.
Burning used tires is also one of the few ways to recycle fuel oil.
"We can't recycle oil after we burn it," one tire industry executive told me, "so we make it into tires and recycle it before we burn it."
Garbage is not a good fuel but it's cheaper than free, because if you don't burn it you have to do something else with it. Some ecologists don't like this idea but it works in other parts of the world, including some that are more genuinely concerned about pollution than we are. We might even wonder if pressure groups that don't want us to burn tires or garbage might be encouraged and/or supported by oil, gas and coal interests, whose sales would suffer if we burned either used tires or garbage to generate power.
Garbage can also be used to produce methane, but that takes a long time and a lot of space. If garbage is already buried it may be cost effective to collect the methane it produces, but it would be more cost-effective to not bury it in the first place. We can also produce methane and other fuels from plant waste, farm animals and even human sewage, and we need to research this.
It's already under development in the USA, where a test plant at Carthage, Missouri processes about 200 tons/day of waste from a turkey processing plant into gasoline, diesel oil and industrial chemicals.[1] This is going to be a big business some day, and a responsible government would make sure that Canada has a share in it.
We can also recover methane from a strange material called a clathrate, or gas hydrate. Under some conditions methane gas becomes locked in a lattice of water molecules to produce a material that looks and feels like ice. Some scientists believe there is about ten times as much gas hydrate in the world as there is natural gas in other forms.
One of the theories about strange events in the Bermuda Triangle, in fact, is based on the fact that there is a huge field of clathrates off the eastern coast of the USA. These clathrates are generally stable but sometimes a relatively minor event -- such as a minor earth tremor or an undersea landslide -- can shock some of them into breaking down and releasing methane gas.
Huge volumes of gas released under the sea bubble up and, because water full of bubbles is not heavy enough to float on, ships sink without warning. Methane is lighter than air so it rises, and if an airplane were to fly into a cloud of methane it would be destroyed when sparks ignited methane that mixed with air inside the plane. Such explosions would be relatively small, because if the plane is completely within the cloud of methane the only air available would be within the plane, but the plane would be destroyed without warning and without trace.
We have huge deposits of clathrates in and around Canada but we don't know how to convert them into gas at a controlled rate. When and if we find a safe and efficient conversion process, clathrates will be a valuable source of power.
We also have some nuclear power in Ontario and, even though the provincial power utility has proved that it can not be trusted to run it safely, we will have to get more. Like it or not, and regardless of the problems of waste disposal, we will have more nuclear power.
But there is a question of what kind. For a while the Canadian CANDU type reactor was one of the best in the world and it still has the advantage that it does not require enriched uranium, but one design can not lead forever. That's a problem because people who work with one design tend to get wedded to it, and may be reluctant to change.
Still -- if Atomic Energy Canada Ltd. (the Crown corporation that builds nuclear reactors) does not want to change, that does not mean that the government has to listen to it. A responsible government would keep in touch with the latest developments in nuclear power around the world.
One interesting design, proposed by American physicist Farrington Daniels in the 1930s and first built by Germany in 1985, is called a "pebble bed reactor." In this design the fuel is sealed inside ceramic balls. The size of the balls and the amount of fuel in each one are such that a pile of balls will produce heat, but can not reach critical mass. It's a simple and elegant arrangement.
The German prototype suffered a minor problem soon after the Chernobyl disaster in which a Russian reactor poisoned the land around it and, even though the German breakdown did little or no harm, the reactor was shut down.
But the idea was solid and both South Africa and China have developed the German design. China now has a small (10 megawatt) pebble bed reactor in operation, and plans to build about 30 big ones by 2020.[2]
Nuclear reactors can produce the power we need, but distribution is another matter. The question here is whether we're better off with a few big power plants or with a lot of little ones. Big plants look good to big business and to bureaucrats because they are built and run by big corporations with big bureaucracies but they are not very efficient because transmission lines are expensive, because power is lost in transmission and because transmission lines can and do fail.
We saw that happen in January of 1998, when an ice storm broke Quebec Hydro's high tension lines and the city of Montreal lost power for nearly two weeks. Some areas lost power for more than three weeks.[3]
Conventional wisdom tells us the ice storm of 1998 was unusual but the unfortunate fact is that it was just part of a pattern we have seen in the weather of the past couple of years. It happened again, in Nova Scotia, when a storm in the fall of 2004 broke high tension lines and more than 100,000 people lost power for several days. With the changes we know are happening in the world's climate, we can expect more such events.
And power grids can fail without storms. Back in 1965 a technical fault caused a massive power failure that blacked out about a quarter of North America, and we had another major failure in the summer of 2003.
But the 2003 failure did not shut off all power. I live in downtown Toronto and in the 2003 power failure I noticed that dozens of buildings still had lights. We also had some lights and elevator service in our building because, like most big modern buildings, we have a back-up generator that starts automatically if city power fails. It can't power the whole building, but it can help.
In the power shortages of the late 1940s some Toronto factories installed generators that were not big enough to run the whole factory but that could produce enough power in 24 hours to run the factory for the four hours that the city was "browned out." By agreement these factories ran their generators 24 hours a day, and were not browned out with the rest of the city.
This suggests the possibility of a distributed power system in which big buildings would generate their own power and feed their surplus into a web that would supply other buildings. Such a distributed power system would require no public investment and would be more efficient and more dependable than the present grid.
Small engines may not be as efficient as big power plants but they offer some advantages to compensate. One is that because the small engines are on-site, very little power is lost in transmission and the overall efficiency could well be better than big plants. Another is that because the small engines are on site the waste heat -- which is usually about 30% of the total energy -- can be used to heat a building or wash water, or for an industrial process.
Another consideration is that if there is a large market for them, we can expect to see the development of more-efficient stationary engines. Some diesels are already 50% efficient -- compared with about 40% for a typical large power plant -- and logical developments like double or triple-expansion diesel or natural gas engines could increase that.[4]
With small power plants distributed everywhere we would have less need for a high-tension distribution network. The power utility might still maintain some big plants, but at most times they could run on reduced power.
It would take a while to get such a network set up but we could start by asking buildings to start their emergency plants before, rather than after, an overload on the system causes a failure. It costs the buildings money to start their systems, of course, but if they could avoid a power failure which would force them to start their systems anyway, I would expect them to cooperate. If they could sell the electricity they produce for a profit, to their tenants or to the provincial grid, it would be no surprise if many buildings choose to install bigger and more-efficient power plants.
THE PRICE OF POWER
We all like cheap energy and on one level it would be political suicide for a government to promote higher prices but, on the other hand, a cheap energy policy amounts to suicide for the whole human race.
Like it or not, coal is the most abundant fuel we have for now and we need to develop cleaner and more efficient ways to burn it. We also need to learn to build clean-burning furnaces that will burn garbage, used tires and other waste material.
We also need to consider alternatives such as clathrates as well as the more-conventional wind and solar power, and perhaps we should look at "pebble bed" reactors.
We also need to consider a distributed power system, in which large buildings would generate their own power and sell their surplus to the network.
And above all, we need to learn to conserve. For tens of thousands of years there were few humans in the world and it didn't matter much what we did, because we couldn't do much of anything. We know that, in some areas, our ancestors learned to set brush fires just to drive game.
But now we number in the billions, and a single human consumes more of the world's resources than an elephant. Many individuals consume more than a herd of elephants, and that is obviously not sustainable. I know that we can't actually destroy the world but we can make it unable to support us, and that's just what we are doing.
We have to stop somewhere and, if we are rational, we can stop before it's too late. Conventional wisdom tells us that the more energy we consume the better we live, but reason tells us that if we can't learn to conserve we may be wiped out.
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