So who remembers the coal shortages of 2005?

[NNadir]

The beginning of the great capacity crunch may be pinpointed rather precisely, at 11:15 p.m. on Saturday, May 14, 2005, when a BNSF coal train derailed 15 cars north of Bill, Wyo., on the Southern Powder Basin Joint Line. A little over six hours later, UP derailed 28 cars not far away from the BNSF derailment. The world's most densely-trafficked heavy haul railroad was in big trouble.

Determining that 45 days of "unprecedented rain and snow" had dangerously destabilized roadbeds where coal dust had accumulated, the railroads took extraordinary measures. A force majeure--which relieves a carrier of its contractual obligations--went into effect immediately and remained in force until late fall, when wintry weather halted "an extended season of maintenance." From July 6, when work on an enhanced maintenance program began, through Friday, Dec. 2, BNSF, which maintains and dispatches the Joint Line, completed 64.55 miles of ballast undercutting, rehabilitated 60 turnouts and nine bridges, and installed 30,835 concrete ties and 175,279 feet of rail. With one of three tracks out at any given time, about 80% to 85% of contracted trainloads moved.

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1215/is_2_207/ai_n16133290

Note that those who dread the implications of our rail system's reliability are not limited to coal fired utilities.

Ethanol producers worry about ethanol accidents on rail lines, and, particularly as the ethanol industry is so dependent on coal shortages of coal that may effect their industry:

Demand on U.S. transportation systems hit an all-time high in 2006 while more pipeline-challenged ethanol moved by road and rail than ever before. Increased ethanol volumes alone didn’t prompt the rail industry to invest billions in infrastructure upgrades and expansions, but each new tanker car on the rails laden with the renewable fuel helped reaffirm rail companies’ decisions to do so...

...Although the extra business is good overall for rail and truck businesses, increased traffic on railways and roads could boost the probability of accidents involving ethanol. In October, Norfolk Southern, a Norfolk, Va.-based railroad, reported that one of its trains hauling ethanol derailed near New Brighton, Pa. “Conditions at the site continue to preclude access for repair to the two mainlines and bridge damaged by the derailment,” warned a Norfolk Southern service alert immediately following the derailment. The railway claimed force majeure shortly after the accident, meaning Norfolk Southern couldn’t be held responsible for late shipments of ethanol because events causing the mishap were beyond its control. The Oil Price and Information Service (OPIS) reported that 86 ethanol cars were traveling from Chicago to the East Coast when the wreck took place...

...
Between the Iowa towns of Blairstown and Nevada, Union Pacific spent $6.1 million on track improvements. The heavyweight transporter reported that 31,200 ties were removed and replaced, 9,300 tons of rock ballast had been laid, 27 road crossings were resurfaced, and 53,400 feet of curved rail were swapped out—all in a distance one could drive in less than two hours. The improvements were necessary as Iowa currently produces more than 2 billion gallons of ethanol from more than 20 plants—with several more under construction.


The transport of the coal used to power some of those plants, including the new Lincolnway Energy LLC ethanol refinery that recently opened in Nevada, Iowa, contributed to rail system wear and tear. As coal use continues to rise, untold tons of it will be riding the rails. Union Pacific and Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) are jointly spending $200 million to build 75 new miles of track, to accommodate the increasing coal capacity leaving Wyoming’s Powder River Basin—the largest open-pit, low-sulfur coal reserves in North America...

http://ethanolproducer.com/article.jsp?article_id=2547

So what are these trains running on? Let me guess...biodiesel.

I favor an phase out of coal - as immediate as possible - by the way.

[youngdem]

1. A COAL FIRED ETHANOL PLANT

Nice.

:banghead:


That sure does seem to cancel out ANY potential benefit, does it not?


UGH! Ethanol is such a scam anyway. Just a ruse to buy Midwestern farm votes while pretending to do something for the environment, while driving food prices up and up.

[NNadir]

2. Very clearly the ethanol industry depends on vast transport resources as well.

If the fossil fuel industry disappeared I suspect the ethanol industry would collapse as well.

[Captain Angry]

4. I always get the "conspiracy nut" looks...

when I suggest that we don't need alternative fuel, we need to get off of fuel.

C'est la vie.

[juno jones]

3. Bio-methane,

Biomass, forgotten lo these 30 years. Can be made from organic waste, animal poop and low-maitenece renewables such as hemp. Clean burning because the carbon is consumed before atmospheric release. I researched this 30 years ago for a debate team, I probably will never have the time to go back, but there it is...the best way to power our country. Check it out, you alternative energy kids.... Also prevents these high-carbon emissions (like animal gas) from getting into the atmosphere....

[eppur_se_muova]

5. Another argument for "more maximally local" production and use.

American industry seems to be so stuck on the idea of centralized production and distribution that it has taken on aspects of dogmatic religion. It is true that there are many processes that benefit from "economy of scale" -- that is, producing twice as much product does not cost twice as much, so the UNIT cost goes down -- but this only works when the cost of distributing the product over longer distances does not offset the advantages in production costs. As long as coal, and later oil, was cheap, the transportation costs were seldom the deciding factor, and concentration of production in a few, or even one, center for the whole country/continent made economic (if not ecologic) sense. This inevitably led to domination by one or a few ultra-large corporations, as EOS gave them an advantage over their smaller rivals, and growth carried mostly benefits and few disadvantages.

As distribution costs rise with increasing scarcity of cheap fuel, there will have to be an adaptation to smaller, more localized production, as the advantages of EOS no longer trump the costs of long-distance distribution. Smaller, more local industries should find that the giants no longer have all the advantages on their side. (Maybe we are seeing some of this already.) Maybe then we won't be shipping coal across the contintent to produce ethanol, which is then shipped back across the continent, or shipping poisoned wheat across the Pacific to manufacture pet food in Kansas.

-----------------

Freeman Dyson, a Princeton physicist, made the point (IIRC, in "Disturbing the Universe") that the problem he saw with many power plants was a "false economy of scale", i.e. such blind faith in the bigger-is-cheaper approach that planners kept pushing for ever larger plants, with timelines for breakeven of 10, 15, even 20 years. By the time the plants were financed and constructed, the market for electricity had shifted, so that the plants were now unexpectedly far from the centers of demand, and now in decidely non-optimum locations due to population/industry growth and shifts. Thus distribution was more costly than expected, and breakeven harder to achieve. A less centralized approach, with more modestly-size plants, would seem more appropriate to the challenge. {NOTE: It's been a while since I read this book, so I can't remember all the details. Dyson may have been referring to all recent US power plants, or just nuclear ones; I suspect the former. If he directed his cricism mostly at the nuclear industry, it was because he saw it making more mistakes, not because he was opposed to nuclear power. Dyson himself played quite a role in the development of nuclear science, from at least the Manhattan Project, through the development of the TRIGA reactor and the ill-fated Orion project. If he talks mostly about nuclear power, it is fair to say that, at least in part, this is because he knows a lot about it.}

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edit for spelling.

[NNadir]

6. In this case, nuclear is exceptional.

I often argue that the same criteria applied to nuclear - talk about "waste" for instance - should be applied to other forms of energy on a level playing field.

However problems with fuel shipments are trivial in the nuclear case, since one can produce more than 1000 MWe for periods approaching two years with a single shipment of 100 metric tons.

In the case of nuclear energy, I feel that larger is in fact better, especially in the case where one chooses to electrically power cities as opposed to suburbs.

I personally feel that distributed energy is a potential for real disaster, since one of the things that will be distributed is point source pollution generators. The largest example of distributed energy production is the automobile, which is without question the single largest environmental disaster of all time.

Everybody acts like magical solar cells, for instance, are eternal. This is not the case. With time they degrade and probably become next to useless. Then they become just more electronic junk, as difficult to throw away as a computer or computer monitor.