Tag: Steel Interstate

crossposted from Voices on the Square

In the online support for the April, 2013 Scientific American article on Energy Return on Investment (EROI), Scientific American online interviewed Charles Hall, developer of the EROI concept, on whether Fossil Fuels will be able to maintain economic growth. In one of his answers, Charles Hall responds to the question:

What happens when the EROI gets too low? What’s achievable at different EROIs?

He says:

If you’ve got an EROI of 1.1:1, you can pump the oil out of the ground and look at it. If you’ve got 1.2:1, you can refine it and look at it. At 1.3:1, you can move it to where you want it and look at it. We looked at the minimum EROI you need to drive a truck, and you need at least 3:1 at the wellhead. Now, if you want to put anything in the truck, like grain, you need to have an EROI of 5:1. And that includes the depreciation for the truck. But if you want to include the depreciation for the truck driver and the oil worker and the farmer, then you’ve got to support the families. And then you need an EROI of 7:1. And if you want education, you need 8:1 or 9:1. And if you want health care, you need 10:1 or 11:1.

Civilization requires a substantial energy return on investment. You can’t do it on some kind of crummy fuel like corn-based ethanol [with an EROI of around 1:1].

A big problem we have facing the alternatives is they’re all so low EROI. We’d all like to go toward renewable fuels, but it’s not going to be easy at all. And it may be impossible. We may not be able to sustain our civilization on these alternative fuels. I hope we can, but we’ve got to deal with it realistically.

This is the year that the funding authorization for the Federal Rail Authority expires, and the Obama administration is answering with a bold new plan to invest in this critical piece of any long term sustainable transport system, as described earlier this month at the Transport Polititic:

Total funding for rail activity, both for operating funds and capital projects, would increase from about $1.8 billion in 2013 to more than $6.5 billion in fiscal year 2014. Over the course of five years, about $40 billion would be devoted to rail improvement across the country, a massive expansion paid for with funds “saved” from ending military operations overseas. This would be headlined by a $5 billion “jump-start” stimulus for rail, part of a $50 billion infrastructure package the Administration is hoping Congress will pay attention to.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

crossposted from Voices on the Square

The fundamental objectives of a national Steel Interstate project are two-fold:

• Reducing CO2 emissions; and
• Pursuing Energy Independence

The importance of reducing CO2 emissions as a step toward sustainability ought to require no elaboration. It has, of course, been elaborated on in previous Sunday Train essays, and likely will be again, but this Sunday, I will leave it as read. The importance of reducing grossly wasteful oil consumption in long haul freight transport follows directly from the position of the Transport sector as the number two emitter of CO2, and the opportunity presented by long haul electric freight rail to operate at about 20 times the energy efficiency per ton-mile as long haul truck freight.

The importance of Energy Independence for a sustainable economy may not be as widely understood, but it is as fundamental. For an economic system to be truly sustainable, it must be reproducible. That is, it must be sustainable even if adopted by all countries in the global community. That is why simply importing energy from others to cover the massive gap between our country’s biocapacity and our country’s ecological footprint is not, in fact, sustainable. It cannot be reproduced all around, because then there is no “somewhere else” to go get the energy.

Indeed, to be truly sustainable, a country such as ours, with twice the average biocapacity per person, ought to have the capacity be a net energy exporting country. So Sustainable Energy Independence is not even an ultimate target: it is the immediate goal to pursue, on the path to the ultimate target.

And with about a fifth of our petroleum consumption going for long haul truck freight, getting even half of our long haul truck freight onto Steel Interstates would cut our petroleum consumption by about a tenth. That is roughly 7% of our oil consumption and up to about 3% of our CO2 emissions (depending on the power source), so its a one-in-fifteen slice of oil independence and a larger than one-in-forty slice of carbon neutrality.

The topic for today is the flipside of the Steel Interstate proposal: the Electricity Superhighways, and how they offer the chance to substantially increase the size of the carbon neutrality slice.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

crossposted from Voices on the Square

Back in early June, in Putting Steel into the Amtrak Long Distance Backbone, I looked at the Amtrak “PRIIA Section 210” upgrade plans for the five Long Distance services with the lowest operating cost recovery, mandated for Fiscal Year 2010 by the PRIIA legislation.

I also looked at the side-effects of the freight-oriented Steel Interstate proposal, which would offer the opportunities for dramatic improvements in the performance of Long Distance sleeper trains ~ not simply the financial performance but also, and more importantly for addressing the Petroleum Addiction of our intercity transport system, dramatic improvement in the delivery of service to the customers.

This week I look at the “middle” five long distance routes that were reported on for Fiscal Year 2011:

• The Lake Shore Limited from Chicago to Boston and Chicago to New York City via the Cleveland/Buffalo Erie Lakeshore route
• The Crescent, from the “Crescent City” of New Orleans, Louisiana to New York City via Atlanta, and
• the “Silver Services” ~ the Silver Meteor from Miami to New York via Charleston, SC, the Silver Star from Miami to New York via Tampa, Columbia, SC and Raleigh, NC, and the Palmetta from Savannah, Georgia to New York via Charleston, SC.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

The last two weeks on the Sunday Train, I’ve been writing about the Steel Interstate. Steel Interstates & An America That Can Do Big Things (3 June) revisited the basic concept, and Putting Steel into the Amtrak Long Distance Backbone primarily discussed the first third of the Congressionally mandated reports on improving Amtrak’s long distance rail network, but also discussed a bit about the role of long distance trains in the context of the Steel Interstate proposal.

This week, the attention shifts from the Steel Interstate infrastructure to the substantial benefit to our existing legacy Asphalt Interstates if the United States elects to retain a viable national economy by implementing some form of Steel Interstate electric rapid freight rail system for long-haul freight.

Along the way, I spend a bit of time talking about misconceptions about the cost of our legacy system. Myth and misconception that are sufficiently widely help may be sufficient platform for gathering majority support for a system … but its not a sufficient platform for putting together a sustainable system, in either physical, ecological, economic, or financial senses of “sustainable”.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

Note: a reprint of a Daily Kos diary from Jan, 2007

There is a common trend in my part of the Great Lakes States (Ohio, Indiana, Michigan) for discussion of sustainable energy to focus on commercial exploitation of the Wind Resource of the Great Lakes.

And why the Great Lakes? Because that’s where the wind blows, as shown on the trimmed down version of the 2004 50m wind speed map for Ohio to the right. The pink, purple and red are the highest quality wind resources. (jpg) And this is just 50 metres … at 100 metres it gets better still.

So what does this have to do with driving? Well, sometimes the wind blows harder, and sometimes the wind blows softer … and on this point wind power and driving snuggle right together with a whole bunch of Energy Independence posts I have already made. How things link together … is after the fold.