Posts by David Haywood
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Che Tibby wrote:
... would you also consider it likely that new zealand could lead in the 'biofuels as a by-product of 'normal' agriculture' sciences?
I think that's already happening now (in a very small way), see:
Biodiesel from sewage
Bioethanol from waste woodAnd I certainly think that New Zealand has the potential to make a vast amount of money exporting other renewable energy technologies such as marine energy (c.f. Denmark and wind energy). It depends on how well government structures the future energy sector -- whether we become an innovator or a cargo-cult country that waits for technology to arrive from overseas.
Emma Hart wrote:
Framing a clear referendum question on this, which contained only one question, definite detail, and could be answered with a simple yes or no would be, well, 'interesting'.
Thanks for your comments, Emma -- and I take your point. But how about something that defines a very basic envelope for government policy, e.g.
"Should New Zealand become carbon neutral by 2040 (at the latest)".
I should emphasize at this point that I'm not a climatologist (and therefore don't have the scientific expertise to say whether carbon neutrality would be a good thing) but it seems like it would send an unequivocal message to future governments, and give them a clear mandate for action.
I'd like to see a public debate and clear mandate for any proposal on this sort of vast scale...
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Che Tibby wrote:
...what about countries that already grow foods that are bought up at higher prices by developed nations wanting ethanol for their cars?
As I said, the situation in other countries is problematic. That's why I was initially sceptical about biofuels in this country... but having seen some of the NZ-relevant research I have changed my mind. NZ's per capita energy resources are so entirely different from any other nation (we're much luckier in terms of renewables, for a start).
I've read all sorts of reports on intensive agriculture RE: biofuels in other countries -- but it's well outside my area of scientific expertise and I'd be loathe to comment on the topic. But I don't think many of these issues apply to NZ (except that regulations requiring sustainably-produced biofuels -- whether locally-produced or imported -- are obviously essential).
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Anna Barge wrote:
Please understand that NZ cannot, should not start using bio fuels... [they] are ethically, environmentally and economically a disaster
Thanks for your concerned message, Anna. I didn't have time to go into the details of biofuels in the post -- but I'll quickly do so here...
Yes, biofuels (which include biogas, bioethanol, biodiesel, and any other form of directly combustible biomass) in Europe and the U.S. are problematic -- and I know of at least one group in NZ who oppose biofuel introduction. But I should point out that biofuels would work entirely differently in NZ from Europe or the US.
Apart from anything else it wouldn't be economically sensible for us to grow crops of corn or rapeseed for biofuels. As an agricultural exporter we'd be far better off using the land for some other crop that could be sold at a much higher price. Agricultural countries who subsidize their agriculture don't tend to stay in business for very long.
To be economic, biofuels in NZ would *have* to come from waste products, e.g. tallow, sewage, waste straw, and waste wood. The only virgin crops that could sensibly be used for biofuels would be woody biomass grown on land unsuitable for cropping or grazing e.g. coppiced willow, etc.
See these links for more information on biomass in NZ:
Waste wood (and woody biomass grown on land unsuitable for cropping or grazing):
Note that NZ already gets about 9 per cent of its energy from biomass (firewood, etc).
Biofuels have been rightly criticized in Europe (by Mondibot and others) -- and obviously laws that require sustainably-produced biofuels are essential. But as far as I can see it's a completely different story in NZ.
Like you, I was also initially very sceptical of biofuels in this country -- but I think we can both relax!
Michael aux Pfraundorf wrote:
Don't write stuff like this anymore. It's too depressing. Nobody wants to hear that. Write funnier stories.
Your name and address sound somehow familiar, Michael -- but shouldn't that be 'aus' rather than 'aux'?
I know exactly what you mean about depressing everyone. I was tossing up the idea of a light-hearted story about a kitten or the whole carbon-neutral thing. Perhaps I should have gone with the kitten.
I'll write something more cheerful next time...
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Idiot Savant wrote:
...it's net CO2-equivalent emissions which matter, not carbon content... [CO2] is not the be all and end all, and focusing solely on it will not solve our emissions problem.
Couldn't agree more -- but I should point out that I was writing a critique of Helen Clark's proposal for a carbon-neutral NZ, not a CO2-equivalent-neutral NZ.
Idiot Savant wrote:
I think its also important to stress the long-term nature of the goal.
Couldn't agree more on that, too -- and that's why I kept harping on about how the proposal would need to take place over decades (sorry if that got boring after a while).
Idiot Savant wrote:
... and what other tricks we can pull (for example, using Peter Read's suggestion for biosequestration, which is actually rather cool).
Dr Read's suggestions RE: biosequestration are interesting, although his proposal rather unfortunately circumvents one of the great advantages of fuels like bioethanol, i.e. suitability for use in mobile applications. But perhaps in a decade or so that won't be such a problem.
Idiot Savant wrote:
I'm actually rather optimistic about policy ATM
I'm glad you feel optimistic -- I wish I did. But I do fully admit to being a rather gloomy eeyore-ish type.
What do you think can be done to prevent the energy/emissions issue from being used as a political football (as has happened over the past few decades)? Does anyone think a referendum on the subject might have merit in terms of sending a clear message (and giving a clear mandate) to whichever future government is in power?
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To follow up on my earlier reply to Idiot Savant's comment:
the vast majority of man-made atmospheric carbon emissions are due to farmers
My rough calculations from the report that Idiot Savant cites (Table 2.2.1) would put carbon dioxide at around 96 per cent of NZ's atmospheric carbon emissions. The report doesn't seem to break down CO2 emissions by ultimate source use (or, if it does, I couldn't find it), but I see no reason to disbelieve the Ministry of Environment's figures that 90 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions are due to energy use.
That would mean that around 86 per cent of NZ's man-made atmospheric carbon emissions are due to energy use. I think most people would call that the "vast majority".
If Helen Clark meant 'CO2-equivalent neutral' rather then 'carbon neutral' (which I'm sure she didn't) then she should have said 'CO2-equivalent neutral'...
Neil Morrison wrote:
[The] Geothermal Institute at The University of Auckland... advanced NZ's geothermal expertise... I wonder why the Government pulled the plug on it a couple of years ago.
Don't depress me even more! I could name dozens of similarly counterproductive actions by government bodies in the energy sector. Talking to people from the big electricity companies would make your hair stand on end. Their job is to make money (mostly for the government) which they do very well -- however this means that they very often do things that aren't in the best interests of NZ's long-term energy infrastructure.
Isaac Freeman wrote:
If the plan is big enough, you actually go ahead with it, and it doesn't fail spectacularly in the early stages, you can put your opposition in a position where the stakes are too high for them to close the whole thing down.
The thing that worries me about a plan on this scale is that it is comprised of so many sub-components. A particular government may encourage work on a given energy sub-component (e.g. a large geothermal station), and this will be completed by their successors -- but it's all too easy for the successor government to discontinue any further work on the overall plan.
I would not be so sure that nothing will come of the present initiatives... the Federated Farmers leaderships recent statements on global warming would make me very worried about the future if I were a farmer.
I really hope that you (and Isaac Freeman) are right. The fact that this issue could become so obviously economic gives me hope that successive governments will follow through. Perhaps the current misdirection in much of the energy sector makes me overly pessimistic. It's just a shame that we don't have some form of long-term planning that wouldn't be so affected by political expediency.
By the way, you're a great man for a metaphor, Don. Loved that bit about "the [energy] sector seems oblivious to the twitching of trap door levers...". Yes, they certainly are.
Juha Saarinen wrote:
could look into nuclear power as well.
I think we should keep an open mind on the nuclear energy option. That said, it has a lot of problems associated with it (I could write a very boring essay on this subject). It makes far more economic sense to exploit our renewable resources first.
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Idiot Savant wrote:
Um, no. if you go to the effort of checking the latest, you'll see that the vast majority of man-made atmospheric carbon emissions are due to farmers.
It would be tempting to reply: "Um, no, if you go to the effort to read it properly you'll notice that you've confused the terms carbon and CO2-equivalent"... oh, just kidding...
But I'll politely point out that you've confused carbon with CO2-equivalent. Given that methane has a GWP-100 (Global Warming Potential over 100 years) that is 23 times higher than CO2, then this means that its single carbon atom gets counted 23 times as much in terms of CO2-equivalent. But, of course, it does not have 23 times as much actual carbon.
If you'd followed the link from the words "vast majority" in my original post, you'd have come across this statement from IPENZ:
In New Zealand about 90% of all man-made carbon dioxide emissions come from energy use and in particular, from the burning of fossil fuels, the other 10% (approximately) come from industrial processes.
IPENZ source this information to the Ministry for the Environment (see graphs at the top of p.3 of the document).
I guess the carbon-neutral question depends a little on your definition of carbon and your definition of man-made. With methane you get into some tricky questions about the original world-wide population of ruminants and how many there would be if humankind didn't exist -- and the relative merits of swamps and pastureland. Given that man-made carbon dioxide emissions are the ones we can most easily do something about at this point in time (and the ones that are raising the concerns in terms of food miles) then this is what I (and probably most other energy engineers) would consider when we are discussing the concept of carbon neutrality. I don't know what Helen Clark's definition might be
Idiot Savant wrote:
I've always understood this to mean carbon neutral stationary energy... This goal isn't insurmountable...
Yes, I agree that it would be comparatively easy to make our stationary electricity generation carbon-neutral. But I'm sure that's not what Helen Clark meant. If she did, then why did she talk about the issue of food miles -- which is mainly related to the fossil fuels used for transportation purposes.
But thanks for contributing to the discussion, Mr Savant -- always interesting to see different takes on an issue...
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Graham Reid wrote:
And sorry, I don't get the Carlaw option. The Stanley St motorway entrances are a racetrack and bloody complicated. There are few ways into that entrance to Carlaw (down Parnell Rd!!?? You gotta be kidding!) Access and egress look impossible there. How do you get to Carlaw from coming down the northwestern motorway?
The Carlaw stadium proposal uses the old tunnel under Albert park to connect the stadium (via a travelator) to the city. As I recall, the plan involves only 10,000 car parks under the stadium. So I guess the idea is that many people would park their cars elsewhere in Auckland (or, dare I suggest, take public transport!), and then shamble along the travelator to the stadium.
You'll have traffic problems wherever you site a stadium in Auckland (God knows I've been stuck in enough traffic jams at Eden park). So it's probably a sensible approach to disperse the parking and traffic over a wide area, which is what the Carlaw proposal aims to do via the travelator.
I'd hope the engineers will have already looked at the entry/exit problem. It looks like an elevated off-ramp from Stanley street (that crosses over the main road) would be the easiest thing to do -- and then you'd have very easy access from the Southern & Northwestern motorways.
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Some interesting news from today's meeting of the Auckland City Council's Transport and Urban Linkages Committee. Apparently quite a commotion ensued when the committee were played Michael Tritt's Auckland, City of Cars: Episode 1 and Auckland, City of Cars: Episode 2 documentaries.
Doug Armstrong and Toni Millar from Citizens & Ratepayers Now actually went so far as to leave the room -- and only returned when the documentaries had finished playing. Perhaps they had an urgent and simultaneous urge to micturate, but you'd think they'd be interested to hear what eminent international town-planning experts thought of the job Citizens & Ratepayers have been doing over the past few decades.
I've had a few interesting private messages from Public Address readers RE: this post. One person even went so far as to compare the dubious and far-reaching behaviour of Auckland's road lobby group with that of the NRA in the US.
I suspect that there's a very interesting story to be told here. Anyone know what Nicky Hager is up to these days?
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Juha Saarinen wrote:
[A] Tuuli-class attack missile hovercraft with twin 8,000 hp gas turbines would provide coastal supremacy in Greater Auckland... I really want one actually.
Wow, I want one too! We should buy one each and then we can race them.
You may have a point about the fuel consumption. Those turbines are pretty thirsty -- we had a very small (only 60 kW) Rover gas turbine at my last job, and it drank like a Scotsman. Made a nice noise, though.
I do wonder why a rail link from the airport to Puhinui station (straight down Puhinui road) would be so expensive...
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Incidentally, when talking to Alan Caughley he made what seemed to be a very interesting suggestion. He proposed a hovercraft link between the airport and downtown Auckland.
This would only require the construction of a smooth(-ish) causeway between the Manukau harbour and the end of the Tamaki river. The hovercraft could easily navigate the Manukau mudflats, and then travel over the causeway to the Tamaki river, and down the river to the Waitemata harbour. It could travel across the shallow regions of the Waitemata harbour (thus avoiding other shipping) directly to downtown Auckland.
A hovercraft can travel even faster than a jet catamaran. The British SR-N4 car & passenger-carrying hovercraft can travel at speeds up to 154 km/h (83 knots). This would surely make for a much quicker journey than the current bus link -- nearly an hour last time I used it (and an extortionate $25 ticket price).
To my (quite uninformed) mind this seems like it might be the cheapest of all possible options: perhaps just the construction of a section of causeway and some judicious widening of the Tamaki river (does anyone know if there are low bridges?).
It would be an equally spectacular 'gateway experience' to Auckland as the proposed ferry link. And, of course, we build hovercraft here in NZ as well:
Thoughts anyone?