Baltic Dry Index. 1197 +08 Brent Crude 49.25
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For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
H. L. Mencken.
Approval granted for project to heat homes using green hydrogen
Paul Ridden December 02, 2020
UK gas distributor SGN has been given approval to supply hydrogen produced using renewables to around 300 Scottish homes. Participating households should be able to start heating their homes and cooking their meals with the gas from the end of 2022.
For the H100 Fife demonstration project at Levenmouth, Fife, hydrogen will be produced by an electrolysis plant, with a local offshore wind turbine providing the electricity needed to split the gas from water.
"When
powered by renewable energy, the generation and burning of hydrogen produces no
carbon, making it the most effective, scalable way of providing heating while
fighting climate change," states the project page.
The production plant will include on-site storage facilities to make sure that
there's no disruption in supply, even in adverse weather conditions.
The project is reported to be the first of its kind to produce the gas for domestic heating using a "clean power supply," and for Levenmouth residents who opt into the trial, the hydrogen will be fed into their homes through existing pipes and there will be no need to replace such things as radiators or plumbing.
The connection, replacement appliances (such as boilers and cookers) and system maintenance will be free for the duration of the trial, and SGN says that participants will pay the same for their hydrogen usage as they would for natural gas. The project is expected to be operational until March 2027.
As well as giving the H100 Fife project the green light, energy regular Ofgem will also award up to £18 million (about US$24 million) from its annual Network Innovation Competition to support the development, while the Scottish government has added another £6.9 million to the funding pot.
The demonstration project is being viewed as an important first step on the road to the UK government's goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050 – the Scottish government is aiming to get there by 2045. There is also talk of having the first "Hydrogen Town" up and running in the UK by 2030, and ramping up hydrogen production to 5 GW.
Construction of the production, storage and demonstration facilities are due to being by the end of this year. The video below provides an overview of the project.
The Truth about Hydrogen [From Real Engineering]
Tesla's Battery Supply Problem [From Real Engineering]
Mines, Minerals, and "Green" Energy: A Reality Check
Mark P. Mills July 9, 2020
Executive Summary
As policymakers have shifted focus from pandemic challenges to economic recovery, infrastructure plans are once more being actively discussed, including those relating to energy. Green energy advocates are doubling down on pressure to continue, or even increase, the use of wind, solar power, and electric cars. Left out of the discussion is any serious consideration of the broad environmental and supply-chain implications of renewable energy.
As I explored in a previous paper, “The New Energy Economy: An Exercise in Magical Thinking,”[1] many enthusiasts believe things that are not possible when it comes to the physics of fueling society, not least the magical belief that “clean-tech” energy can echo the velocity of the progress of digital technologies. It cannot.
This paper turns to a different reality: all energy-producing machinery must be fabricated from materials extracted from the earth. No energy system, in short, is actually “renewable,” since all machines require the continual mining and processing of millions of tons of primary materials and the disposal of hardware that inevitably wears out. Compared with hydrocarbons, green machines entail, on average, a 10-fold increase in the quantities of materials extracted and processed to produce the same amount of energy.
This means that any significant expansion of today’s modest level of green energy—currently less than 4% of the country’s total consumption (versus 56% from oil and gas)—will create an unprecedented increase in global mining for needed minerals, radically exacerbate existing environmental and labor challenges in emerging markets (where many mines are located), and dramatically increase U.S. imports and the vulnerability of America’s energy supply chain.
As recently as 1990, the U.S. was the world’s number-one producer of minerals. Today, it is in seventh place. Even though the nation has vast mineral reserves worth trillions of dollars, America is now 100% dependent on imports for some 17 key minerals, and, for another 29, over half of domestic needs are imported.
Among the material realities of green energy:
- Building wind turbines and solar panels to generate electricity, as well as batteries to fuel electric vehicles, requires, on average, more than 10 times the quantity of materials, compared with building machines using hydrocarbons to deliver the same amount of energy to society.
- A single electric car contains more cobalt than 1,000 smartphone batteries; the blades on a single wind turbine have more plastic than 5 million smartphones; and a solar array that can power one data center uses more glass than 50 million phones.
- Replacing hydrocarbons with green machines under current plans—never mind aspirations for far greater expansion—will vastly increase the mining of various critical minerals around the world. For example, a single electric car battery weighing 1,000 pounds requires extracting and processing some 500,000 pounds of materials. Averaged over a battery’s life, each mile of driving an electric car “consumes” five pounds of earth. Using an internal combustion engine consumes about 0.2 pounds of liquids per mile.
- Oil, natural gas, and coal are needed to produce the concrete, steel, plastics, and purified minerals used to build green machines. The energy equivalent of 100 barrels of oil is used in the processes to fabricate a single battery that can store the equivalent of one barrel of oil.
- By 2050, with current plans, the quantity of worn-out solar panels—much of it nonrecyclable—will constitute double the tonnage of all today’s global plastic waste, along with over 3 million tons per year of unrecyclable plastics from worn-out wind turbine blades.
- By 2030, more than 10 million tons per year of batteries will become garbage.
https://www.manhattan-institute.org/mines-minerals-and-green-energy-reality-check
Someone, tell Boris, Biden, Pierre and faded star Greta, about the reality of batteries and “green” hydrogen.
Covid-19 Corner
This section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
Ivermectin, the solution to Covid-19? Someone, tell Dr. Fauci and the UK lockdown ghouls about Ivermectin. It’s not just for horses and sheep.
Review of the Emerging Evidence Demonstrating the Efficacy of Ivermectin in the Prophylaxis and Treatment of COVID-19
Authors
· Pierre Kory, G. Meduri Jose Iglesias, DO, Joseph Varon, MD, Keith Berkowitz, MD,
· Howard Kornfeld, MD, Eivind Vinjevoll, Mitchell Scott, Fred Wagshul, MD
· Paul E. Marik, MD
Abstract
In March 2020, an expert panel called the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) was created and led by Professor Paul E. Marik, with the goal of continuously reviewing the rapidly emerging basic science, translational, and clinical data in order to gain insight into and to develop a treatment protocol for COVID-19.
At the same time, many centers and groups employed a multitude of novel therapeutic agents empirically, and within clinical trials, often during inappropriate time points during this now well-described multi-phase disease. Either as a result of these frequent trial design failures, or due to the lack of their insufficient anti-viral or anti-inflammatory properties, nearly all trialed agents have proven ineffective in treating COVID-19 as of November 11, 2020.
Based on a recent series of negative published therapeutic study results, in particular the SOLIDARITY trial, they now virtually eliminate any treatment role for remdesivir, hydroxychloroquine, lopinavir/ritonavir, interferon, convalescent plasma, tocilizumab, and monoclonal antibody therapy.
Despite this growing list of failed therapeutics in COVID-19, the FLCCC recently discovered that ivermectin, an anti-parasitic medicine, has highly potent real-world, anti-viral, and anti-inflammatory properties against SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19.
This conclusion is based on the increasing numbers of study results reporting effectiveness, not only within vitro and animal models, but also in numerous randomized and observational controlled clinical trials. Repeated, large magnitude improvements in clinical outcomes have now been recorded when ivermectin is used not only as a prophylactic agent but also in mild, moderate, and even severe disease states.
The review that follows of the existing evidence for ivermectin relies on “emerging” data in that, although compelling, only a minority of studies have been published in peer-reviewed publications with the majority of results compiled from manuscripts uploaded to medicine pre-print servers or posted on clinicaltrials.gov.
More
Third of Spaniards ready to take COVID-19 vaccine immediately, survey shows
December 4, 2020 11:07 AM
MADRID (Reuters) - About a third of the Spanish population is ready to take the COVID-19 vaccine immediately, while 55.2% of them would rather wait for the effects to be known, a survey carried out by CIS pollster showed on Friday.
Only 8.4% of Spaniards would refuse to take any sort of vaccine, showed the survey that was carried out on Nov. 23-26. Spain’s population is around 47 million people.
Next, some very useful vaccine links kindly sent along from a LIR reader in Canada. The links come from a most informative update from Stanford Hospital in California.
World Health Organization - Landscape of COVID-19 candidate vaccines. https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/draft-landscape-of-covid-19-candidate-vaccines
NY Times Coronavirus Vaccine Tracker. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirus-vaccine-tracker.html
Stanford Website. https://racetoacure.stanford.edu/clinical-trials/132
FDA information. https://www.fda.gov/media/139638/download
Regulatory Focus COVID-19 vaccine tracker. https://www.raps.org/news-and-articles/news-articles/2020/3/covid-19-vaccine-tracker
Some more useful Covid links.
Johns Hopkins Coronavirus resource centre
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
Rt Covid-19
Covid19info.live
The Spectator Covid-19 data tracker (UK)
https://data.spectator.co.uk/city/national
Winter Watch.
The Arctic winter sea-ice expansion and northern hemisphere snow cover. From around mid-October, the northern hemisphere snow cover usually rapidly expands, while the Arctic ice gradually expands back towards its winter maximum.
Over simplified, a rapid expansion of both, especially if early, can be a sign of a harsher than normal arriving northern hemisphere winter. Perhaps more so in 2020-2021 as we’re in the low of the ending sunspot cycle, which possibly also influenced this year’s record Atlantic hurricane season.
Update: we seem to have started new sunspot cycle 25 this month, though it’s unlikely to affect 2020-2021s coming winter.
Northern Eur-Asia turned snowy fast in mid-October. The Arctic sea ice expansion was slow, and from a very low level at the end of September, but with the vastly expanded snow cover, sea ice formation sped up.
With the Laptev sea ice virtually back to normal, at the end of November I’m starting to think that it will likely be a normal to slightly warmer winter ahead for western Europe.
The failure of the Kara Sea ice to return to normal, leads me to bet on a warmer western European winter ahead.
US National Ice Center.
https://www.natice.noaa.gov/pub/ims/ims_gif/DATA/cursnow_asiaeurope.gif
Technology Update.
With events happening fast in the development of solar power and graphene, I’ve added this section. Updates as they get reported. Is converting sunlight to usable cheap AC or DC energy mankind’s future from the 21st century onwards.
No update this weekend given the opening section.
This weekend’s musical diversion. The French “Vivaldi?”
J.-M. LECLAIR: Violin Concerto in F major Op. 7/4, Les Muffatti
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8k2eW0-k7I
This weekend’s great chess game.
Top 6 Chess Traps
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYOnym3ZINU
It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.
H. L. Mencken
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