The Center for American Progress: Experts aint what they used to be.

This article from the Center for American Progress caught my eye this morning. Its author, Daniel J. Weiss, is an “expert on climate strategy. He has gained this prestigious title mainly through his many years of experience as a PR hack for environmental groups. The article argues that we don’t need more exploration, focusing on offshore exploration, because we just wind up exporting all of it anyways,

More offshore drilling in the Gulf Coast region, however, may not do much to increase our energy security. A CAP analysis (.xls) of Energy Information Administration data found that a large portion of the oil produced in the Gulf Coast region is actually exported to other nations, and this undoubtedly includes some of the offshore oil produced there.

After looking into this, there are several problems with Weiss’s argument.

First, there is no data that directly states what oil drilled from what region is exported. Weiss admits this, but manages to weasel out of it.

But the main problem with his argument is that no clarification is given as to what exactly is being exported.

The “oil” we export is not in the form crude, but rather is composed of diesel and other heavy fractional petroleum distillates. When crude is refined into its final products, the ratio of what is produced out is fixed (for the most part). A barrel of oil is 42 gallons, out of which refiners can squeeze about 20 gallons of gasoline and about 10 gallons of diesel. Refiners have become pretty good at modifying their process to maximize the most marketable products, but the chemistry and thermodynamics of refining do have limits as to how much they can maximize the more profitable distillates. And since we use far more gasoline than diesel, refiners are always left with excess diesel.

Weiss’s data that he used for his “analysis” (if that’s what you’d call it) states quite clearly: Total Crude Oil and Petroleum Products. Had Weiss bothered to look at the footnotes in his link, he would have also found this:

Exports of distillate fuel oil categories for sulfur greater than 15 ppm to 500 ppm and sulfur greater than 500 ppm to 2000 ppm may include distillate fuel oil with sulfur content 15 ppm and under.

Had Weiss then done some more digging (I know, hard work for an “expert”) he would have come across this set of data, also from the Energy Information Administration, breaking down the subcategories for exports of “Total Crude Oil and Petroleum Products”.

Even more digging (once again, hard work for an “expert”) he would have seen that what little raw crude oil the US exports goes exclusively to Canada. To further put this into perspective, in 2009 we exported a whopping 15.9 million barrels to Canada, or 0.82% of total US domestic oil production.

This leaves us with three possible conclusion: Weiss isn’t the expert he claims to be because he dint know how to look deeper into the numbers or he deliberately mislead to make his case against additional oil production.

Either way, its just another reason not to take the Center for American Progress seriously. And, naturally, “climate expert” Joe Romm bought off on this POS as well.

Power in Venezuela

Recently, Venezuela’s socialist “man of the people” Hugo Chavez was giving a speech about the evils of capitalism when the lights went out, quite literally.



This is a appropriate metaphor for the oil rich country. Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution is destroying what should in all rights be prospering nation.

Chavez and his defenders (and he has many of them) blame the nation’s power problems on the El Nino drought that has nearly depleted the Guri reservoir, which supplies nearly 2/3rds of the nation’s electricity. They do have a point, the output of the Guri dam has been severely impacted by the drought, but that alone does not tell the whole story. Venezuela experienced similarly sever droughts in 1998 and had associated power blackouts, but nowhere near the extent of what is seen today.

Venezuela experienced 67 “significant power outages” during the drought of 1998, now they now experience that number every month.
Venezuela’s neighbor Colombia also generates about 2/3rds of its electricity from hydro and has been hit just a hard by El Nino but hasn’t faced similarly large power outages. Colombia has managed its power sector so well that they have even offered to sell Venezuela excess power.

Considering the record prices of oil the past ten years, one would assume that the Venezuelan government would have invested in non hydro power, like its Colombian neighbors. Well, you’d be mistaken.

In what is endemic of Venezuela’s crumbling power grid, Planta Centro a 2,000MW oil and gas fired plant is in such a state of disrepair that it is only operating at 273MW. For a country whose generating capacity is only 23,600MW, a 10% reduction in capacity is sorely missed at a time like this.

And if you think that this mismanagement and corruption only applies to Venezuela’s power sector, Stratfor has an interesting analysis on PDVSA’s production discrepancies:

that if the government’s assertion that Venezuela is producing 3.3 million bpd is truthful, oil exports should be averaging at least 2.8 million bpd after netting out some 500,000 bpd of internal consumption. Based on an official average export price of $39.33 per barrel during first quarter 2005, this means Venezuela’s oil export earnings during the first quarter should have totaled slightly more than $9.9 billion.

However, Energy and Mines Minister Rafael Ramirez, PDVSA’s president, recently said PDVSA deposited only $6.43 billion at the central bank. This leaves $2.39 billion in oil export earnings unaccounted for — if the government’s official production figures are truthful.

Whether its graft or mismanagement, Venezuela’s leadership is putting itself into a hole that it wont soon climb out of and is killing its golden goose in the process.

Obama and Energy

Our Dear Leader’s views on energy are, to be blunt, just a little fucked up. They show many of the hallmarks of anti-growth ideology mixed with incompetence. For example, his FERC (a little known but massively influential federal regulatory agency) nominee Jon Wellinghoff demonstrated this by not understanding a concept as simple as baseload power supply.

Our Dear Leader campaigned on creating "good jobs" especially for the beleaguered blue collar job markets. In order to win swingstate Ohio, Obama promised to secure loan guarantees for a retooling project at the Piketon enrichment plant. A loan guarantee would be a win-win on so many levels: provide good blue and white collar technical jobs, maintain the nation's nuclear capacity and not cost the government a dime if the project worked out (as it was most likely going to).

So what happened to Obama's promise:

The Obama administration's rejection is a turnaround from the stance of candidate Barack Obama, who pledged while campaigning in southern Ohio in August to "work with the Department of Energy to help make loan guarantees available for this (the Piketon enrichment plant) and other advanced-energy programs that reduce carbon emissions and break the tie to high-cost, foreign energy sources."

Overall, the project would have employed 5,700 directly or indirectly in eight states, the company says. In Piketon, more than 600 already are working. A fully operating plant, which USEC wanted to begin operating in 2011, would employ about 400 for years to come.

I know, $2billion is a lot of money but the administration rolled up it sleevs, sharpened its pencils and made an unexpected move to provide $2billion in loan guarantees for offshore oil production .. in fucking Brazil.

The U.S. is going to lend billions of dollars to Brazil's state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to finance exploration of the huge offshore discovery in Brazil's Tupi oil field in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro. Brazil's planning minister confirmed that White House National Security Adviser James Jones met this month with Brazilian officials to talk about the loan.

After all, Petrobras has shown itself capability to pull off large scale offshore energy projects in the past haven’t they?

Why is it so expensive to build a nuclear plant?

That’s not really a fair statement. It was expensive to build a nuclear plant and the costs thrown around are based on historical figures.

But its like those guys on TV say, past performance is no guarantee on future returns.

In order to understand what went wrong in the US nuclear industry, you really have to take a look at the past to see how some of the conditions that made them as expensive to build as they were no longer exist.

Back in the day, every utility in the country functioned as a regulated monopoly. The utility had every major decision ran past a regulatory body that would either approve or reject the decision as well as tell the utility how much more it could charge for its power. While this meant that reliable power was available to nearly everyone who needed it or wanted it, it removed any kinds of incentives for efficiency or risk management on the utilities end because every capital infrastructure request made by a utility was approved and the regulators gave the utility permission to increase their prices to cover the construction costs, including cost overruns. This increase also included the utilities predetermined profit rate. Even if they made a mistake, they still profited off of it.

Management did not have a good understanding of what they were getting themselves into when thy initially went seeking approval for the plants. They were basing their budgetary estimates off of a scope of work that was 20-25% defined because they were rushing themselves to get these projects up and running and did not fully appreciate the risks involved in this kind of heavily regulated work.

Think about that for a moment …. only 20-25% of the project could be categorized as a “known”. That means any contractor bidding on it knows with certainty only ¼ of his scope, and he is then expected to provide a fixed price bid for the entire project .. doesn’t work like that.

And since only 25% of the scope was defined that meant only 25% of the engineering was complete, so all permitting for the plant had to be done on an incomplete design, and regulators at the NRC didn’t care for that either.

On a project like this you perform detailed engineering, seek permits, take bids, procure, construct and operate. When the big nuclear projects of the 70’s were in full swing, utilities were half assing this creed of good project management, hoping that things would just work themselves out but also not caring too much if they didn’t because there was no real financial risk.

So when work began on the plants and engineering tried to catch up, the NRC would invariably reject part of the design (because naturally it would make too much God damn sense to have a standardized pre-approved design instead of reinventing the wheel every project). The design would then have to go back to engineering; subcontractors would have to stop what they were working on, idling hundreds of tradesmen or worse reworking what they had done. Delays would ensue, schedules would slip and the project’s margin sheet would begin to bleed like a stuck pig.

Do this 70 or 100 times during the course of a project and its no wonder why costs spiral out of control and 4 years projects turn into 20 year projects.

Sure, the ever changing NRC rules and the Ralph Nader’s and Jane Fonda’s of the world certainly didn’t help, but all the missteps the utilities were making made them more vulnerable in the courts and with the regulators.

So what is different now?

Well, for one, manufacturers (Westinghouse and GE-Hitachi for example) are pushing for standardized packages that once given NRC approval would take the permitting issue out of the equation.

Utilities now have to go onto the market and get funds the old fashioned way and private investors have to weigh the ability of the utilities to control costs, meaning you damn well have better know what you are doing before we lend you billions of dollars.

Material and labor costs are at the lowest they have been in over a decade. High material and labor costs was actually a reason that asshole extraordinaire Joe Romm said that nuclear was doomed for a comeback:

In fact, from 2000 through October 2007, nuclear power plant construction costs -- mainly materials, labor and engineering -- have gone up 185 percent! That means a nuclear power plant that would have cost $4 billion to build in 2000 would have cost more than $11 billion to build last October.

Looks like his ability to predict the future isn’t quite as good as he would like the rest of us to believe it is.

Most importantly though public sentiment is now behind nuclear power.

If the utilities and their subcontractors can demonstrate the ability to manage a project well, nuclear will see a revival.

Joe Romm is a fucking coward

After reading another half assed posting from Joe Romm at ClimateProgress, I figured I would post a comment. It was quickly removed.

It's Romm's prerogative to be sure, but it really does speak volumes on what a complete and total fucking coward he is.

I have posted the comment below.

[JR]Everybody knows that wind and solar have a 30 to 40 percent capacity factor. It is no big secret as this paragraph seems to imply, assuming anyone can figure out what the authors actually meant. It has no impact on their carbon dioxide reduction.

Your hero Jon Wellinghoff, the new head of FERC hasn’t figured that out. He just said that the installed cost of a KW of solar and wind was less than nuclear. That would have been true if you didn’t include capacity factors into that number. When included into that figure, Nuclear is still cheaper than solar or wind when spinning reserve construction is taken into account.

[JR]The fact is that countries have integrated into their grids a fraction of wind that is 10 times what we have today.

Interesting that you neglected to mention that renewable heavy nations like Denmark and Spain rely on Nuclear heavy nations like France to provide all the spinning reserve they need when the wind slows down. Who are we supposed to rely on … Canada and Mexico?

[JR]And the fact is that this country is already reducing the fraction of all electricity produced by coal, thanks part to renewable.

Ehhh .. wrong again Joe. The fraction of all electricity produced by coal has dropped only in relative terms and only by a fraction of a %. And the part played by renewables is insignificant … the largest generation growth has come from natural gas. While the year to year % increase of wind is big, its still a pittance when compared to the actual year to year increases in gas, or even coal.

[JR]The authors and the Post also seem to be unaware that the fossil fuel power most often paired with renewables to firm up the power — natural gas power — has substantially lower greenhouse gas emissions per kiloWatt-hour than the gird as a whole. So a wind-gas or solar-gas hybrid still represents a very sharp reductions in carbon emissions.

And at only 5 times the cost and with 75% of the reliability .. that’s one hell of a tradeoff.

Welcome to the reality based community.

In short Joseph Romm is a fucking retard and a coward to boot. Oh, sure, he got his fancy PhD degree in physics, making him a self professed "physicist and climate expert", but he doesn’t have a fucking clue when it comes to channeling electrons in useful work and the technical and managerial challenges that go along with that let alone a thick enough hide to handle some dissenting views at his website.

Man Bites Dog at the Times

Did the Times, or John Tierney more specificaly, just rain on Hopey McChange's top science pick?

Does being spectacularly wrong about a major issue in your field of expertise hurt your chances of becoming the presidential science advisor? Apparently not, judging by reports from DotEarth and ScienceInsider that Barack Obama will name John P. Holdren as his science advisor on Saturday.

Dr. Holdren, now a physicist at Harvard, was one of the experts in natural resources whom Paul Ehrlich enlisted in his famous bet against the economist Julian Simon during the “energy crisis” of the 1980s. Dr. Simon, who disagreed with environmentalists’ predictions of a new “age of scarcity” of natural resources, offered to bet that any natural resource would be cheaper at any date in the future. Dr. Ehrlich accepted the challenge and asked Dr. Holdren, then the co-director of the graduate program in energy and resources at the University of California, Berkeley, and another Berkeley professor, John Harte, for help in choosing which resources would become scarce.

Build me this house.

Ever build a home or know how the home building process works? Imagine you and your happy family wants to build a home. It’s a pretty simple process, fairly straightforward to navigate

Well I would like to pose a thought experiment to illiterate another point.

Try building a home when the government has the right the change your design standards after they have been submitted, approved and then inspected. For example a 2X4 stud wall that was approved at 16” on center gets changed to 12” on center after your conduit plumbing and drywall work are done. Even though you followed all the relevant desgn guidelines and have included significantly large safety margins, the reason for this change can be as arbitrary as the inspector saying “do it because we say so”.

Try building a home where the government’s regulation of your building material supplier has been so burdensome that you cannot go to Lowes or Home Depot for your lumber wire and roofing shingles (they have all been driven out of business); you now have to buy all of it from France and Japan.

Try getting a loan for this house when there is no guarantee that even if you jump through ever single hurdle presented above there is no guarantee that you will receive your occupancy permit.

During every step of the way your worst enemies petition the government to stop you, have courts grant injunctions against the building, and have the government change what your house looks like.

Now imagine that through all of this you having to pay for lawyers to fight your enemies and pay for all of the tradesmen when they either cant work or have to rework what they have done.

A home that would normally cost $250,000 and take 5 months to build would cost $2,000,000 and take 5 years to build.

How many houses would be built if the process was like this? Not too many.

Welcome to the state of the US nuclear industry,

The Bush administration gave nuclear a big boost early on, but lost the political capital to push ahead, although the US Indian Nuclear agreement was just the shot in the arm that the US nuclear industry needed.

When just another Illinois politician Obama was supportive of Exelon, if not necessarily of the nuclear industry as a whole. During the campaign, The Dear Leader played the good fence sitting politician by saying “we should explore nuclear power as part of the mix" but considering the opposition to nuclear power only a strong commitment on the part of the government will get things going again.

The next times some dickhead starts whining about the “republican war on science", ask him about nuclear power.

Global Warming

Back in the early part of my career and even to a limited extent today I utilized a tool known as computational fluid dynamics, or CFD. CFD and modeling software packages in general are great. You can use that fancy schmancy Sun workstation your boss plunked $50K down for (now it is an off the shelf PC, my how times change) to make a computer model of a physical system. Without ever having to step inside the shop, you can build a component or an entire engineered item and see how it performs. It’s like a having an army of mathematicians solving tens of thousands of simultaneous equations in three dimensions. Better yet, you can even overlay other interdependent models like a chemical kinetic models to map out changes in system chemistry or a finite element model to give you material stresses.

The biggest advantage of using CFD is that I don’t have to make a prototype in order to test a design and I can refine my design to a level that I just couldn’t with a pen and paper or statistical/empirical based calculations. I can make all the little tweaks and refinements I like, and then go make a prototype. Its not a magic bullet, to be sure, but it cuts the amount of time it takes to analyze and develop something.

After a model was constructed and everyone got the opportunity to shit all over it through a review process. As part of this review process, all of the assumptions I made were scrutinized. The software lets me “ignore” for lack of a better term phenomenon that doesn’t apply to my model, or should I say phenomenon that I think have a negligible impact on the results. The software also allows me to set the resolution of the model. I could, for example, include every physical, chemical, and thermal phenomenon into my model, but in my opinion the ones I chose to ignore are of tertiary importance and including them will waste manhours and make the model to complicate to run on my puny machine.

Couple this with the fact that I have years of experimental and empirical data to validate my initial methodology. For example, Dr Smith from the University of Complicadia figured out in 1967 that the exothermic reaction of a minor chemical intermediary in my process only contributes .001% to the overall energy balance and therefore I can safely say BFD.

In addition to all this, the one thing I don’t have to worry about is the soundness of the tool I am using. The makers of it have put it through a rigorous verification and validation procedure (like ISO/IEC 90003:2004 or something), and this procedure conforms to some recognized international standard.

At the end of my review process changes were made until everyone was happy and a prototype was built. That prototype was then tested and discrepancies between the real world results and the model were explained as either within the margin of error, poor assumption in the model or whatever. These real world results were then taken into consideration the next time a model was constructed, and were also good to give to management to waylay their fears as they are naturally skeptical of all that oogah-boogah black box magic, and don’t want to spend $40 million just to find out that the computer was wrong.

This CFD tool that I used on boilers, pumps, solid fuel injection and all that good stuff is being used to model the global climate. There are statistical based models as well, but I know very little about them and my comments will only touch on general circulation models which use a methodology similar to the CFD models I worked with.

A lot of big claims are being made about where the global climate is going. The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) says that they are 90% certain that global temperatures could rise from 1.8°C to 4.0°C. My goodness, 90% certainly sounds pretty freaking sure, and after all, they have all those global warming models to back these claims up, but now the question becomes how reliable are the models.

Now these climate modelers are smart guys to be sure, they know their shit and I would never accuse them of intentionally passing off what they knew to be bad date. This said, they seem to be a rather insular group of people who are a little to thin skinned, clannish and not open to criticisms of their work. Many of them have never had to work in the private sector where good verifiable results are a must and poor performance is severely punished. If they want to satisfy people like me, they should allow their work to be checked by people with no connection or conflict of interests.

They claim that they have validated their models using historic data, but there are some gaping holes in that explanation.

The explanation goes like this: we have validated the models by setting them up to reflect the conditions of the year 1900 and when advanced to 2008, they show a good match between what happened with the climate, or at least they did after we tweaked them.

And by tweaking they mean that they modified the code and all those constants whose values they came through via assumptions, to get the models results to match the historical data. And that’s OK, isn’t it? Isn’t that what I do when performing my modeling work?

Not exactly. As I mentioned before, I actually get to build what I modeled and see if it works as I predicted it would, they don’t have that luxury so they should be extra specially careful, that and there are significant problems with the methodology they use for their fancy curve fit.

First, how reliable are temperature readings that are 150 or even 100 years old? Was the instrumentation properly calibrated? How accurate were these instruments? It might sound like a trivial point, but instrumentation reliability has killed more than one experiment. Remember we are talking about differences of a just a couple of degrees C, was instrumentation resolution and accuracy in 1905 at a high enough level to make the data gathered useful?

Secondly, what happens when the models appear to work fine at describing some phenomenon like the global average mean temperature from 1850 to 2000, but work very poorly at describing related phenomenon:

global weather models predict that as carbon dioxide increases, it should affect the temperatures of higher elevations more than it does at ground level. Douglass’s analysis suggests that while the models do roughly match ground temperatures as carbon dioxide increased over the last 20 years, the mid- to high-tropospheric levels of the atmosphere actually cooled.

“The models are relatively accurate at predicting the temperatures at the Earth’s surface, “says Douglass, “but when you go a few miles up, they diverge dramatically. The models are really challenged to explain these results.”

The standard response to this is that the modelers will incorporate this data into their next revision, and that will make the models even more accurate, except the climate models continually predict the same warming trend regardless of how many revision have been made to them:

A detailed analysis of black carbon -- the residue of burned organic matter -- in computer climate models suggests that those models may be overestimating global warming predictions.

I have had conversation with people about this issue in the past and they have responded to me with two answers: you can’t predict the future and there is no cost in being wrong about this, it’s a win win.

Its not about predicting the future here, its about verifying that the methodology you used to construct your climate model is sound and has been rigorously examined by people who have no personal or professional interest in its failure or success.

There is a cost for being wrong. If legislation to halt global warming is enacted it could very well result in the greatest transfer of wealth from the first to the third world and could also result in the greatest voluntary surrender of individual freedom.

Don’t believe me? The developing world will be written out of any treaty on CO2 emissions. Industry will move there and make them wealthy. Legislation here will determine in no small part what we eat, where we live, how large our homes are, how we go places, how many children we can have, where we work, what temperature the thermostat is set for, where we vacation etcetera.

I don’t know they are wrong, but they have yet to demonstrate that they are right. I know, sounds like a cop out, but its not. They have not demonstrated to any accepted global standard that they tools they use are reliable and they have not demonstrated to any accepted global standard that their methodology is reliable.

Make your case before you legislate way my freedom in the name of saving the Earth. If the science is truly settled, conform to the same burden of proof I would have to.

Show me the money.

The Pickens’ Plan

I am sure that most of you have read or at least heard about the Pickens’ plan. Oil tycoon T Boone Pickens has a plan in which the United States uses wind energy to generate electricity which will replace natural gas derived electricity which will allow all that natural gas to be used to fuel vehicles, thereby displacing oil.

Sounds good, but will it work? The short answer is no, there are a lot of holes in the fundamentals (not just the details) of the plan that have not been addressed.

The long(ish) answer is that there are many reasons why both the Pickens’ plan is impractical.

There are two types of electrical generating sources in the US: baseload and peak.

Baseload plants, just like the name would imply, provide for the base electrical demand on the grid. These are big units like nuclear and coal plants. They are baseloading units because they have the lowest $/kW operating costs (fuel prices) and the highest reliabilities and capacity factors.

Peaker capacity is almost entirely comprised of stationary natural gas powered turbines and supplemental natural gas firing into boilers. This is because natural gas is expensive but cheap to build.

As a commodity, electricity is special in that it cannot be easily stored in large quantities and it has to be generated as needed: to much of it and you crash your grid, too little of it and you crash your grid. Determining how much electricity needs to be put up on the grid at any given moment is a very complex process. Any shortcomings in your baseload capability has to be made up for with your peaker capacity. Natural gas turbines make for good peaker sources because if you need X number of MW of additional electricity, you know with a high level of certainty that you can generate what you need, and gas fired sources can come on line within minutes, which is nice if you lose a baseload generating source for some reason (happens all the time).

How much generating capability a utility builds and keeps on line is determined by how much electricity they need divided by the capacity factor of the source they are installing. A coal fired plant has an average maximum capacity factor of about 85%, so in order to meet 100MW of electricity demand with coal you would have to build a plant that had a nameplate capacity of 117MW (100/.85).

So what does this have to do with the Pickens’ plan and why it won’t work?

The crux of Picken’s plan is that we replace natural gas derived electricity and replace it with wind powered electricity. Wind power is variable, just like the wind, so you cannot rely on it to provide exactly as much power at the precise time you need it to. To compensate for this you either have to use a backup power supply to compensate for all those times that the wind isn’t blowing right, like natural gas. Since wind only has a capacity factor of around 33% you have to install 3 times as much. In reality a combination of both would be needed, but the Pickens’ plan does not take any of this into account. He prices the replacement of natural gas with wind on a watt per watt replacement cost.

In addition to the cost of the implementing the plan to provide a reasonable degree of reliability to avoid rolling blackouts, controlling a system that would be prone to such wild and dramatic swings in load would be a significant engineering challenge (lots more money).

There is also the question of whether or not this even provides us all that much energy security.

The US uses about 39.8QBTU’s of oil, imports 58% of that and uses 70% for transportation meaning we import 16.2QBTU’s of oil for transportation alone. Out of that 16.2QBTU, we use about 55% for cars or 8.91QBTU, the res is for commercial trucks, planes, trains and boats. The US uses about 23.5QBTU’s of natural gas, imports 20% of that and uses 30%, or 7.1QBTU’s for power production. This means that we will still have to nearly 2.0 QBTU’s of natural gas to make up for this differential. Doesn’t sound like a lot, true, but our production of natural gas in the US has been nearly flat for the past decade. So instead of importing oil from volatile areas of the world whose inhabitants and governments despise us, we now have to import natural gas from volatile areas of the word whose inhabitants and governments despise us.

In short, the Pickens’ plan will cost more that is estimated, by an order of magnitude once everything is factored in and will not significantly reduce our reliance on foreign energy.

Unfortunately when the press and pundits weigh in on this, they do a terrible job of addressing any of these issues. An example of the 4th estate’s failure to clarify these issues is Obamabot Anthony Cefali’s ill-informed and gushing piece about Obama’s willingness to implement the Pickens’ plan:

Why is Pickens’ Plan important? Simply because it’s main goal is to divert all of our oil and natural gas to the transportation sector. Factories will no longer use natural gas because they will be powered either on site or through an electric grid powered by wind and solar. The plan stresses efficiency and centrality. It could also potentially save the US $300 billion in oil expenditures. Citing Obama’s plan to end dependency on foreign oil in the next ten years, Pickens expects that the first step will be implementing major parts of his plan.

The major parts of the plan involve the US specially equipping larger vehicles (buses, trucks, etc.) to run on natural gas. This would take a huge load off of our dependence on oil, in turn causing prices to drop because factories and businesses will have no need for it. Demand for oil would come solely from consumers, as would carbon dioxide emissions (the nitrogen oxide emissions will come from the natural gas burning buses).

The author’s lack of even the most fundamental understanding of how the nations electrical grid works (he is a biology and English lit major at UW Madison) is only compounded by the certainty he has that this plan, under the ever watchful eyes of the Dear Leader naturally, will work. Industry uses natural gas primarily for process heating applications, and electricity makes a poor and very expensive substitute for this (trust me, I recently priced out a 10MMBTU electrical heater and it was about $850,000 dollars, the 10MMBTU natural gas heater was $50,000.)

Pickens plan might work if we were willing to spend the money for it and the money for the additional transmission and distribution infrastructure needed, and the additional money to make 20% of our grid reliant on a variable output source, and additional money to develop offshore gas production and transportation infrastructure for Alaskan natural gas (good luck with the last 2).

I am all for reducing our dependency on foreign oil, that why we need to reduce what we use, drill here at home, develop the trillion plus barrels we have in shale deposits and build lots more nuclear plants not blindly buy into a woefully underpriced plan.