Don’t Feel Bad about (All) White Elephants

Don’t Feel Bad about (All) White Elephants


I rashly referred to a synfuels plant in North Dakota as one of Jimmy Carter’s white elephants. I say rashly because I said this to a member of Carter’s political party who immediately had to defend Jimmy (not James Earl) Carter against the perceived attack. It was impossible to get a word in saying that I actually liked that particular white elephant.

The plant in question, in Beulah, North Dakota was called a big white elephant after petroleum and natural gas prices started declining instead rising to astronomical levels, which had been expected after the twin oil shocks of the Arab oil boycott in 1973 and the fall of the shah of Iran.

But then, the price of oil collapsed, taking natural gas down with it. The government had less and less interest. Eventually, the plant was sold off to a private company and forgotten. But quietly, there were innovations.

Canadian petroleum operations wanted to increase their extraction efficiency. They knew that carbon dioxide helps oil flow better, and so it increases yields. The synfuel plant makes carbon dioxide (CO2) as a waste product. A deal was struck, and CO2 has been flowing to Saskatchewan since 2003. The theoretical concept of CO2 capture and storage has been happening for years now. It might be practice for the future, and a newsletter URL is below.

http://www.dakotagas.com/News_Center/News_Releases/CO2_delivery_milestone_achieve.html

Likewise, coal-to-liquid fuel might really happen big time. Beulah could be a practice site for that. See below.

http://www.bismarcktribune.com/news/opinion/editorial/article_de51acad-6dc9-5018-9eb9-a6b7fab33c66.html

Finally, a working plant shows how it might be done in … Indiana? See below.

Possible similar plants in Indiana. Again, see below

http://www.purdue.edu/discoverypark/energy/pdfs/cctr/researchReports/SynfuelPark-RevJun08.pdf

All in all, white elephants do come through now and then. Considering that the world energy expenses are more than a trillion dollars a year, a few billion-dollar white elephants were good investments.

Now, the bad news, the profitable baby elephants from the North Dakota plant still won’t come for more than 30 years since the plant was built. Big energy changes come slow.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Look to the Weeds in Saving the World before Breakfast

  For thousands of years, farmers have wailed on weeds with hoes and plucked bugs off their plants.   They have fought back much more powerfully in the 1900s and 2000s with power weeders, pesticides, and herbicides. But, the pests and weeds need not be problems.   Sometimes, they can be part of the solution in developing a more efficient food-producing system.   That better food production is something humanity will need to feed a bigger population coming and for doing that despite serious global warming that might also be coming.   Hello, I’m Roger Carlson. I wrote the books, Saving the World Before Breakfast: A Better Green New Deal , and Saving the World Before Breakfast: The Earth Alone Can Save Us.   A key theme in those books is transforming problems into parts of the solution.   Let’s start with the so-called weeds and pests that become contributors when associated with one particular tiny fern, azolla. For centuries, East Asian farmers have raised fish along with ric
Read more

Every Little Energy Bit Helps

Every Little Energy Bit Helps…And Every Eccentric Bit…and Every Bottom-Line Bit Every little bit helps! Every little bit helps! That was a line from a new group in the 1970s—the environmentalists. They had big ideas about cleaning all the smoke stacks of America. They also had little ideas. One of the little ideas was a brick in the toilette tank. One brick saved about one quart per flush with the resulting savings in water and water purification chemicals. AND if all the toilettes in America had a brick…. Let’s start with a serious concern about energy. Petroleum geologist M. King Hubbert said that petroleum production is like a bell-shaped curve. Production of oil for our cars goes steeply up to a peak.…. Then, it goes steeply down. In 1956, Hubbert said that oil production in the lower forty-eight states would peak about 1970. People laughed…until 1970 when it happened. Now, other geologists are saying there is a similar curve for world oil production. And that peak might be roughly
Read more

2023 Climate Skeptics Conference: "We’re Winning!" No, They’re Not—But How they Could Win

  2023 Climate Skeptics Conference: "We’re Winning!"   No, They’re Not—But How they Could Win In February, I attended the 2023 Heartland Institute 15th International Conference on Climate Change discussing hardcore skepticism about global warming.   Most of the press and public consider global warming (which they now call climate change) a possible end-of-the-world threat.   Heartland is the foremost exception.   Heartland began in 1984, “… to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems.”   They soon zeroed in on predictions of catastrophic global warming and have been fiercely skeptical of it ever since.   This year’s 2023 conference continued the tradition.   The conference included high caliber climate scientists, economists, and energy experts, many whom are retired or otherwise insulated from possible loss of government funding. At every Heartland conference, the presentations target fallacies in the theory of a massive
Read more